Isabel Hardman

You couldn’t get a stronger contrast between the new Foreign Secretary and his predecessor. Jeremy Hunt is a minister who has earned the absolute trust of two Prime Ministers in an extremely politically charged job. He was brought in by David Cameron to clear up the mess after Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act disaster, and Theresa May kept him in place, quickly learning that he was one of the few ministers she really could leave to their own devices. This was a huge accolade from May, given her propensity to micromanage. Hunt earned that trust because he is a very loyal Cabinet minister. He does not style himself as an operator, unlike many of those he has served alongside.

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. But this option turned out not to be on the Cabinet table yet, with David Davis and other key ministers finding themselves as in the dark as the rest of us on the matter this morning. I understand that they still haven't been told what this new model is, but this is largely because the model hasn't yet been firmed up.

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 UK. As James says in his politics column this week, the challenges of these events, along with the ongoing problems both in the Cabinet and Parliament over Brexit, will make July one of the hardest months of May's premiership to date. But trying to tell her warring ministers to shut up seems easy compared to the foreign policy challenges that the Prime Minister is facing. They would not be easy for any leader.

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 Heathrow expansion. The vote on building one more runway at the airport finally comes on Monday, and Tory MPs will be whipped to support it. Hands, always a loyalist, was very polite when he announced he was off, describing it as an 'honour' to serve Theresa May and previously David Cameron, but he needed to honour his 2017 election pledge to oppose the new runway.

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'. He was speaking in the Commons shortly before a division was supposed to be called on this matter, and not long after the government had offered a compromise. That compromise involved David Davis issuing a Written Ministerial Statement which clarifies that the Speaker can decide whether or not a motion issued by the government using the EU Withdrawal Bill is amendable. Last week, the government had said that it would not be, but now it will.

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 a 'very good reason' for the current rules being in place. Yesterday May had also tried to block Javid from raising the matter at Cabinet, arguing that it hadn't been on the agenda. It's just one example of Cabinet ministers mounting very public campaigns for a policy change which they then get all the credit for.

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 to know what the real 'Brexit dividend' will be when we haven't yet left the European Union. Indeed, May couldn't say very much at all about how this extra NHS money will be funded: that's presumably because no Prime Minister wants to tell voters how much more tax they'll be paying, regardless of whether that tax is funding something as salient as the health service.

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 fair to Chope (and it is hard, especially for a magazine that prefers its motto of 'firm but unfair'), he wasn't suggesting that upskirting was in some way OK. He is part of a group of MPs with the odd hobby of objecting to Private Members' Bills on principle because they don't think that MPs from opposition parties should be able to write laws which could cost the government money or could be very bad policy. Oddly, though, this doesn't stop them introducing their own bills.

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 Office. It is striking that the government decided this week to relax these restrictions, given they are part of the tough immigration policy introduced by Theresa May. Time was when the then Home Secretary would repeatedly upbraid David Cameron for handing her a net migration target to deliver which her Cabinet colleagues were frequently trying to flout.

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 Whip Julian Smith spent the majority of the debate buzzing about the Chamber, consulting with ministers and backbenchers and also beckoning MPs out of the room in little groups. It is since clear that Smith was negotiating the compromise that Solicitor General Robert Buckland started offering during the debate. Initially, Buckland offered the rebels 'structured discussions' on the matter.

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 to form a government, let alone survive as leader for very long. Tonight, she's still here but still appealing to Conservative MPs for unity as the 'crunch stage' of the EU withdrawal bill arrives in the Commons. The briefing over the weekend did suggest that the Prime Minister was probably going to be ok, though in reality there are still a couple of votes that are going to be, at the very least, rather tight.