Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
From our UK edition
MPs are getting involved in the row over Justin Welby’s position as Archbishop of Canterbury, with Conservative MP Nick Timothy requesting an urgent question in the Commons today. Pressure for Welby to resign has been building from various quarters within the Church of England’s General Synod and the wider church. As in politics, some are
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Justin Welby has said he considered resigning as Archbishop of Canterbury over the findings of the Makin Review into the serial abuser John Smyth. That report, which emerged this week, found the Church of England had, from 2013, missed opportunities to bring Smyth to justice: from that point onwards, Welby and other senior figures knew
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What difference has Kemi Badenoch’s victory made to the way the party talks about education? Badenoch doesn’t want to make policy straight away, having stood on a platform promising a fundamental rethink of what the Conservatives stand for. Today’s Education Questions in the Commons suggested that in the meantime, she wants her frontbenchers to put
From our UK edition
12 min listen
Kemi Badenoch is the new leader of the opposition, and we have an early indication of who will make up her shadow cabinet. She has already chosen her chief whip in loyalist Rebecca Harris; Nigel Huddleston and Dominic Johnson will be party chairman; Laura Trott will be shadow education secretary; Neil O’Brien will be shadow
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Rishi Sunak’s final act in the Commons as leader of the opposition was one he clearly enjoyed. The outgoing Conservative leader had what is normally the unenviable task of responding to the Budget just minutes after it had been delivered, before the small print reveals the real story. Rachel Reeves had helped him quite a
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All the political framing of the past three months has been around Rachel Reeves’ first Budget. Black holes have been ‘discovered’, public services have been found to be in a worse state than expected, and Liz Truss has been exhumed at every opportunity (or at least, when she hasn’t been inserting herself into the political
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When Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister, he and Keir Starmer had some of the most repetitive and uninformative sessions at Prime Minister’s Questions. Today was his final stint as leader of the opposition in this forum, and the session was charming. It covered the coast-to-coast route, which travels through his Richmond constituency, the importance of
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The gardening world is a gentle, friendly place. Rows are rare, with disagreements creeping in softly like moss, not blowing up the way they do in politics. Everyone is quite nice to one another, almost to a fault. Which is why the row over Tom Massey’s AI garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is quite
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14 min listen
Wes Streeting has been out on the airwaves this morning, giving us a better idea of what will be in the Budget when it comes to the NHS. In an attempt to resuscitate a ‘broken but not beaten’ NHS, he has announced a cash injection reported to be up to £7 billion – including £1.57
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Is the Speaker being a bit precious with his complaint about pre-Budget announcements? Lindsay Hoyle made a statement in the Commons this afternoon in which he issued a stinging rebuke to Rachel Reeves and other ministers for going ‘around the world telling everybody’ about significant Budget policies, rather than making the announcements to MPs first.
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Keir Starmer has given up trying to define what a ‘working person’ is after last week’s debacle, announcing at the start of his pre-Budget speech today that working people know who they are. The Prime Minister said: ‘I know some people want to have a debate about this, and I know there will always be
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Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden shared a tender moment today at Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions as they bade farewell to each other. This will be the last time the pair face each other across the House because the Tories are – finally – about to pick their new leader who will bring in their own
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Other than being fired out of a cannon to raise funds for the NHS, what could Wes Streeting possibly learn from a ‘national conversation’ about the NHS that he hasn’t already picked up from his time studying his own brief? At the launch event for that consultation, the Health Secretary explained that public buy-in was
From our UK edition
13 min listen
This morning, Health Secretary Wes Streeting launched the ‘biggest consultation in NHS history’ in a bid to get public input into how to save the UK’s flailing health service. The British public and clinicians are being asked to share their experiences and ideas to help ‘fix our NHS’. After years of discussion and reviews, how
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The Health Secretary is making a big fanfare about a cash boost in the Budget and a new plan to reform the NHS so that it becomes a more community-based, prevention-focused service. But at the moment, his plan for the health service is very much in nascent form: the government is nowhere near close to
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13 min listen
Starmer and Sunak debated Labour’s position on China at today’s PMQs, with Starmer denying going soft on the Asian superpower. Did Sunak draw inspiration from Katy Balls’s cover article in last week’s Spectator? Katy and Isabel Hardman speak to Oscar Edmondson about the party dynamics behind the debate; how much pressure is each party under from
From our UK edition
Prime Minister’s Questions today asked the same question that Katy raised in her magazine cover piece last week: what is the new government’s stance towards China? Oddly, the man asking that question never really answered it himself. Rishi Sunak spent much of his premiership in a semantic quandary over what kind of challenge or threat
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Keir Starmer’s reset isn’t going very well. He turned up at Prime Minister’s Questions today clearly hoping to talk about the vision he had for the country, but ended up doing something he always complained about others doing when he was in opposition: dodging the question. A planted question from a Labour backbencher allowed Starmer
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How long are the Tories going to campaign on the winter fuel payment? It was their main line of attack on Monday at Work and Pensions questions in the House of Commons, with a number of Conservative MPs asking ministers to say how many pensioners were going to die this winter because of the restrictions
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Keir Starmer took a different tone on Israel today. That change of tone is to a certain extent to be expected, given the Prime Minister was marking the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks. He reflected in the Commons this afternoon that there were still nearly 100 hostages unaccounted for, and families across Israel