Isabel Hardman

Vince Cable's announcements about shaking up the Liberal Democrats don't exactly inspire confidence in the party as an energetic force in British politics. Despite pitching themselves squarely as the anti-Brexit party, and despite there being growing talk of a group of voters - and MPs - who feel politically homeless, the Lib Dems are struggling to attract attention or offer a sense of purpose. The Lib Dem leader's plan to open up the party's membership to a 'new class of supporters who pay nothing to sign up to the party's values' has sparked a fair bit of criticism from those who think this would leave the Lib Dems vulnerable to entryism, as happened when Ed Miliband enacted similar reforms in the Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn's spokesman this afternoon caused something of a stir when he insisted to journalists that the Labour leader had always said that the evidence from the Salisbury attack pointed to direct or indirect Russian involvement. This didn't seem quite right: Corbyn attracted a great deal of opprobrium for failing to blame Russia for the attack at the time. It's worth going back over what precisely the Labour leader did say after the attack - and what he didn't. On 12 March, when Theresa May made her first statement to the Commons about the matter, she told MPs that 'the government have concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal'.

Funnily enough, MPs across the Commons were today very keen to welcome Jeremy Hunt to his position as Foreign Secretary and suggest that he might garner more praise from them than his predecessor. At his first departmental questions in the new role, Hunt also had to address one of the messes left by Boris Johnson - and explain what his priorities were for the aspect of the portfolio that Johnson resigned over: the EU. The priorities of a Secretary of State can often be divined from which questions he or she chooses to answer at these sessions, and which ones are farmed out to his junior ministers. Hunt answered questions on the mass killing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma, the detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran and Brexit.

It is quite clear what today's NEC results mean for the Corbynites in the Labour Party: they've consolidated their control over the party structures. All the candidates who won were backed by Momentum, apart from Peter Willsman, who had seen the Corbynite grassroots organisation drop its support after a recording emerged of him making anti-Semitic comments. Willsman pushed moderate candidate Eddie Izzard out and will remain on the party's ruling body. Izzard and 'independent left-winger Ann Black' came 10th and 13th respectively. Less clear is the implication for that rather nebulous group of anti-Corbynites generally known as 'the moderates'.

If you wanted an easy illustration of the importance of a Parliament that looks vaguely like the country it works for, look no further than a tiny consultation issued this week by the Home Office. In it, ministers suggest new guidelines on the treatment of women in custody who are on their periods. This sounds like quite small fry - and the sort of subject that makes at least 50 per cent of readers recoil from going any further. But it’s important, not just in itself, but also because it shows what happens when more women join the House of Commons.

William Hague’s warning today that the Conservative Party mustn’t change the rules by which its leader is elected shows quite how much has changed in British politics over the past few years. Ideas that were very much in vogue in 2015 are now widely trashed. Where once it was considered a no-brainer that parties should make it easier and cheaper for members to join and even give them more say over policy making, now parliamentarians and commentators are running scared of just that. Why?

Benjamin Netanyahu's intervention in the row about Jeremy Corbyn and the memorial wreath has been incredibly handy for the Labour leadership. The Israeli Prime Minister said Corbyn's presence at the wreath laying for members of the group behind the 1972 Munich terror attack 'deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone - left, right and everything in between'. A number of Labour MPs have been calling on Corbyn to show contrition in order to resolve the ongoing row, but instead the party leader decided to hit back, accusing Netanyahu of 'false' claims and pointing to 'the killing of over 160 Palestinian protesters in Gaza'.

Theresa May's defence of Julian Smith this afternoon hasn't gone down amazingly well. The Prime Minister stuck to the line that Smith's instruction to Brandon Lewis to ignore the pairing arrangement he had with Lib Dem Jo Swinson and vote on two key Brexit divisions was an 'honest mistake'. This seemed somewhat implausible before the Times reported that Smith had in fact asked other paired Tory MPs to vote, and that he had also admitted to a chief whip from another party that he had instructed Lewis to vote. But the Tories now look dangerously as though they are sticking to a lie. Of course, this being politics, Labour has accused the Prime Minister of offering 'blatantly untrue excuses' rather than the straightforward word 'lying'.

When Sajid Javid became Home Secretary, he did so on the basis that he would be able to undo some of the political damage done by the 'hostile environment policy'. Last night, he rather quietly announced that a key element of this policy would be paused, something Labour's David Lammy immediately seized upon, hauling Javid's junior Caroline Nokes to the Commons for an urgent question. Noakes insisted that this pause was 'temporary', adding that she would not give consent to the data sharing between government departments and other organisations until she was confident 'that we will not be impacting on further members of the Windrush generation'.