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.
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
What does Tim Farron think about gay sex? Like Ken Livingstone’s repeated reluctance to discuss Hitler, the former Lib Dem leader has never really offered his views on the subject. This time a year ago, for instance, he was so busy talking about all the things his party was putting into its general election manifesto
Given the deep Cabinet splits over Theresa May’s plans for Britain’s customs arrangements with the EU after Brexit, there was a very clear line of attack for Jeremy Corbyn to lead with at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. The Labour leader doesn’t always take the most obvious line, but he did today, first asking May about
From the dreaming spires of Oxford this afternoon comes a potent combination of student censorship and fake news. A group of geographers had claimed victory on Twitter in a campaign to remove the portrait of Theresa May from the School of Geography and the Environment. May is an alumnus of that school, but the Not
Boris Johnson’s rather bold move on the customs partnership hasn’t yet landed him in trouble, even though it has enraged some of his pro-Remain colleagues. At the Number 10 lobby briefing today, the Prime Minister’s spokesman avoided giving the Foreign Secretary a slap down when asked whether Theresa May was happy that he had told
If you want to know how last night was for the Labour Party, you need to look no further than the statement that Jeremy Corbyn has just released on the results. It is not a celebratory comment on Labour’s spectacular night, but a defensive one, describing the local elections as a ‘solid set of results’.
Lucky Penny Mordaunt. She’s the latest minister to find themselves the holder of the women and equalities brief in the great pass-the-parcel of this role. It was created for Harriet Harman under the Labour government, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do with it. Since then, though the Tories have never quite understood
James Brokenshire is back in government after his illness. He is the new housing secretary, which marks quite a change from Sajid Javid. Brokenshire is one of those ministers May trusts deeply: he worked with her in the Home Office where she found him to be a quietly loyal colleague. What does this mean for
When the Windrush scandal broke, it was largely seen as Theresa May’s fault, given the Prime Minister had introduced the hostile environment policy when she was Home Secretary. But this week, the focus has shifted to Amber Rudd, and whether she knew what was going on once she took over the role. This afternoon the
Amber Rudd must, privately, be hopping mad about the Windrush row. Not only is she having to defend policies that her predecessor and now boss introduced when she was Home Secretary, she is also having to try to resolve the mess that was exacerbated by Number 10 in initially refusing a meeting with Commonwealth leaders
Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions saw the Maybot reactivated. Jeremy Corbyn decided to lead the session on the fallout from the Windrush row, widening out his questions to the flaws in the hostile environment policy on illegal immigration, and on who was to blame for these flaws being apparent but not fixed for so long. The
The government has got at least two colossal messes to deal with, and yet Theresa May managed to survive today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. This was all the more surprising given the topic of PMQs was on a mess created as a result of one of May’s own policies. Jeremy Corbyn chose, rightly, to lead on
Aside from the need to act swiftly and with an element of surprise when striking Syria’s chemical weapons capability, it is still fair to say that Number 10’s preferred option was not to have a vote before the strikes took place at the weekend. David Cameron’s experience in 2013 of failing to get parliamentary consent
Recently, a rather agitated Tory MP came to me and asked why on earth his party wasn’t talking more about pensions. It was an important message to voters, he argued, managing to stay agitated about an issue that normally sends people off to sleep. This MP thought that highlighting the importance of a sound economic
This afternoon’s emergency debate on Syria isn’t quite working out as anyone had really planned. For Labour, it was an opportunity to undermine the government by complaining about the lack of parliamentary consent for the weekend strikes on the Assad regime’s chemical weapons capability. For the Tories, it was an opportunity to show that there
Though Theresa May, still responding to questions from MPs in the Commons on the weekend strikes in Syria, seems to have won support from a clear majority of MPs, her session has not been entirely comfortable. A large number of backbench Labour MPs made clear that they agreed with the Prime Minister’s assessment that the
Ministers have been caught so badly on the hop in the row about the Windrush generation that when Amber Rudd came to the Commons today, she was forced not only to tell MPs that her own department wasn’t working properly, but also to admit that she didn’t know how many people had been deported. The
How did the government manage to create such a terrible row over the Windrush generation? The Home Office has told many people who arrived here as children in the late 1940s and 1950s that they are in fact illegal immigrants because they cannot produce documents from 40 years ago about their residence here. That in
Overnight, British, French and US forces took part in strikes against the Syrian regime as a punishment for the use of chemical weapons in Douma. In a statement released in the small hours, Theresa May described these as ‘co-ordinated and targeted strikes to degrade the Syrian Regime’s chemical weapons capability and deter their use’. The
