Isabel Hardman

How could the subpostmaster scandal, in which hundreds of small business owners had their lives ruined after being wrongly accused of taking money from the Post Office, have gone on for so long?  The subpostmasters were sucked into a nightmare when the Post Office installed a new accounting system called Horizon to replace old manual accounting practices. They found that their tills just weren't balancing. Some tried to top up the difference from their own money, but the discrepancies mounted until some stretched into tens of thousands of pounds.  When they asked for help from the Post Office, they were told they were the only people having trouble. They weren't alone, and neither were they in any way responsible for the huge shortfalls in their tills.

Downing Street has hit back in its war with Dominic Cummings, after the former aide published an explosive blog post about leaks and ‘possibly illegal’ plans to renovate the Prime Minister’s flat using donations. A No. 10 spokesperson this evening said: ‘This government is entirely focused on fighting coronavirus, delivering vaccines and building back better.’ And then on the allegations Cummings made about the renovation of the flat: The kindest interpretation is that this is the Prime Minister’s preferred way of working ‘At all times, the Government and Ministers have acted in accordance with the appropriate codes of conduct and electoral law.

Michael Gove's trip to Israel to study the country's 'green pass' system isn't diminishing the impression among Conservative MPs that the UK government has already made up its mind on vaccine passports. A number who I have spoken to are taking the lack of communication from their party whips as a sign that the policy will be going ahead, as there is no point in canvassing opinion on a matter if the Prime Minister is going ahead with it regardless of the feedback he gets. Some MPs who are opposed to the domestic use of what ministers are currently calling 'vaccine certification' are concerned that the way No. 10 plans to get the vote through the Commons is by making it about both international and UK use.

When David Cameron started contemplating life after Downing Street, he settled quite quickly on a model of what it should look like. He would stay on the backbenches, providing advice and wisdom to whoever came after him, earn a little bit of extra money while still working as an MP, and continue in public service with charities and others. In 2016, he outlined his approach to me as we sat in a cafe in Witney, and I wrote it up in my book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians: He mourned the number of former ministers who had departed at the 2015 election, and suggested that you could do other things alongside being an MP if you did fancy a little bit more income to make up the ministerial salary you had lost.

Keir Starmer obviously regrets visiting Jesus House last week because of the furore it has caused in his own party. But he will likely come to regret his reaction even more. The Labour leader posted a full apology for the Pentecostal church visit, saying: ‘I completely disagree with Jesus House’s beliefs on LGBT+ rights, which I was not aware of before my visit. I apologise for the hurt my visit caused and have taken down the video. It was a mistake and I accept that.’ The whole thing is, as Brendan O’Neill points out, rather awkward, given Starmer chose to visit this church during a key Christian festival and given non-mainstream views on homosexuality are a feature not just of many churches but many other religious groups.

Has the pandemic really been good for the way the NHS treats mental health? That’s the rather startling claim I report on today in my i paper column. Ministers have started to talk — equally surprisingly, it has to be said — about the possibility that they are close to reaching parity of esteem between the treatment of mental and physical health, and that the chaos of Covid is partly responsible. Covid has certainly made it harder for the government to just offer talk and no cash on mental health Now, it slightly depends on what your definition of ‘parity of esteem’ is.

There is little to celebrate in today’s first anniversary since Britain went into lockdown, but Boris Johnson did try his best to mark it with a positive message about what was to come. The Prime Minister held a press conference in Downing Street this evening where he told the public that he wanted to ‘to thank everybody for their courage, your courage, discipline and patience’, and promised that the government was on track to meet its vaccination targets. He closed by saying: ‘And cautiously but irreversibly, step by step, jab by jab, this country is on the path to reclaiming our freedoms.