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.
After counter-terror police confirmed that two people who had collapsed in Amesbury, Wiltshire over the weekend had been poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, Home Secretary Sajid Javid has announced that he will chair a meeting of the government’s emergency committee, Cobr. In a statement released a few minutes ago, Javid said: ‘The Amesbury investigation
Has Theresa May finally cracked the customs arrangements problem? The Prime Minister needs to get sign-off from her Cabinet on Britain’s future relationship with Europe at this week’s Chequers summit, and it was briefed overnight that there was now a third option on the table, separate to the customs partnership or the maximum facilitation plan.
The government’s cash boost for the NHS isn’t going to solve its problems. That’s the verdict of pretty much every independent spending scrutiniser, including the National Audit Office’s Comptroller, Amyas Morse. He’s said today that the £20bn founding increase announced by Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt will maintain current standards, but won’t enable the health
Remember when, as a child, you were astonished to discover that not only did your teacher not retreat to the resources cupboard to charge overnight, but that they had a life outside work and even a family? Some adults still seem not to have grasped this about MPs. Last night, Labour MP Luciana Berger posted
Given the way her Cabinet ministers are behaving at the moment, Theresa May is really rather used to dealing with fragile egos. This will come in handy over the next month when the Prime Minister has to go from what promises to be an extremely tricky Nato summit straight into Donald Trump’s visit to the
Are ministerial resignations even interesting any more? There are more of them in Theresa May’s government than there are solid policy announcements or indeed any sort of decision at all. Today it was the turn of Greg Hands, who announced that he was stepping down as a junior trade minister in order to vote against
One of the laws of Brexit is that every Commons division and Cabinet meeting billed as being a ‘crunch vote’ or ‘crunch talks’ ends up postponing the crunching again, and again and again. This afternoon, Dominic Grieve announced that he would ‘accept the government’s difficulty’ on the matter of a meaningful vote and ‘support it’.
Who is taking all the big, difficult decisions in government at the moment? Not Theresa May, who seems to be caught up in a particularly bad bout of prevarication. Sajid Javid’s announcement today that there will be a review into the use of medicinal cannabis came just 24 hours after his boss said there was
This time a week ago, Theresa May and her whips were trying to avert a looming Commons defeat on Brexit. As if the lengthy farce of the government trying to negotiate its way out of the European Union wasn’t surreal enough, the Prime Minister now seems trapped in one of those repetitive Hades-style punishments in
So the Tories have, as The Spectator predicted last month, announced an extra £384 million a week for the National Health Service – something Theresa May was perfectly happy to sell this morning as being the ‘Brexit dividend’ that Boris Johnson had been pressuring her for. This is an odd choice, given it is impossible
How embarrassing for Tory MPs: one of their own has managed to block the unblockable: a bill creating a new criminal offence of ‘upskirting’. Plenty of Conservatives have turned on the culprit, Christopher Chope, both in WhatsApp groups and in public, to show that they do not have the same views as him. To be
How did the government manage to engineer a ‘compromise’ amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill that’s left it in greater danger of a defeat? On Tuesday, Theresa May gave the pro-Remain rebels assurances that there would be an amendment that they could support in order to avoid defeat on that day, but the amendment published
The government has finally climbed down on visa restrictions for foreign doctors and nurses, scrapping the cap on numbers who can be employed using the tier 2 visa route. This was costing NHS trusts shocking amounts of money in processing applications from overseas medical professionals which were in large part turned down by the Home
Given this morning’s ministerial resignation, all looked set fair for an afternoon of high drama in the Commons over the EU Withdrawal Bill. In the end, though, the drama was rather quieter, with the government managing to persuade the Remainer rebels to stand down – temporarily – on the matter of a ‘meaningful vote’. Chief
Phillip Lee struck a sorrowful tone when he spoke in the Commons this afternoon, explaining why he had felt it was necessary to resign over Brexit. The Bracknell MP was congratulated for his “courage” as he spoke by his two vocally pro-Remain colleagues, Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston. He also received some applause as he
Tomorrow marks a year since Theresa May sat her dejected parliamentary party down and promised that ‘I got us into this mess and I’ll get us out of it’. She was speaking amid the chaos of the snap election that she’d called, and it wasn’t clear whether the Prime Minister was going to be able
The glasshouses at Kew Gardens are so popular that they can be quite unbearably busy at weekends. And why shouldn’t they be? They’re beautiful structures and the plants they shelter are so marvellous that they deserve the attention they get, whether from botany nerds, schoolchildren, or millennials dressed for Instagram and posing for selfies in
MPs are frantically deleting casework emails after being mistakenly advised that new regulations mean they have to clear the data that they hold on constituents. The General Data Protection Regulation comes into effect on 25 May, and is the reason your own inbox will be flooded by companies who’ve been sending you unsolicited emails for
Turkey’s President Erdogan is in London this week, having tea with the Queen and praising Britain as a ‘real friend’. As Robert Ellis says in his Coffee House piece about the way the Turkish regime is becoming increasingly brutal and censorious, a clear benefit for Britain in this friendship is post-Brexit trade with the Turks.
Tory backbenchers have been briefed today by the Prime Minister on the different options for Britain’s customs arrangements with the EU after Brexit. There was a presentation on the two different plans, and a summary which one MP who attended described as ‘everything is just going terribly well’. The expression on this MP’s face suggested