Isabel Hardman

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

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

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

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

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

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