Isabel Hardman

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. But campaigners are asking at what cost this comes, given the human rights abuses of the current regime, and want Theresa May to condemn the practices of the Erdogan government. This presents a tricky dilemma for the Prime Minister. Turkish political culture - and that of many of the Islamic countries that Britain has strong diplomatic ties with - does not respond well to public shaming.

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 Boris Johnson's description of the new customs partnership as 'crazy'. This elicited a rather robotic response from the Prime Minister, who helpfully chanted to the Commons that 'we are leaving the European Union, we are leaving the customs union'. Corbyn made things still more awkward for his opponent by then switching to quoting Greg Clark's warning that jobs would be at risk without frictionless trade with the EU.

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 All Geographers campaign wanted to challenge this, and did so by sticking drawings and messages about the hostile environment around the picture until it was removed. 'We are pleased to announce that the @theresa_may portrait has been removed from @oxfordgeography!' the geographers announced.

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’. He adds: ‘In a sign of how worried they are about Labour’s advance, the Tories talked up our chances to unrealistic levels, especially in London. The results show they're right to be worried - we came within a whisker of winning Wandsworth for the first time in over 40 years.’ Corbyn is right, by the way: the Tories spent months telling anyone who was half listening that they were going to get trounced in these elections.

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 what this Minister should do, other than chivvy other departments, they daren’t abolish it, lest they seem to be anti women and equalities.  The women and equalities pass the parcel has been incredibly awkward at times, with the job skipping Nicky Morgan, for instance, because of her opposition (at the time) to gay marriage. It has had to move around departments to prevent any embarrassment over certain ministers’ voting records.

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 housing policy? It means May has now got one of her people overseeing this crucial policy area: Javid is not known for his quiet loyalty, as yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph interview showed. He is also known for his desire to push May to back radical ideas to get housebuilding going.

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 Guardian has a leak which suggests Rudd's grip on her department is even weaker than we'd previously thought. Following a chaotic 24 hours in which the Home Secretary told MPs on the Home Affairs Committee that there were no Home Office targets for immigration removals and then corrected herself in the Commons the following day, the newspaper has now published a secret memo which suggests Rudd was wrong to say she did not know about these targets.

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 about the matter, and then made worse still by Caroline Nokes' interview suggesting that people had been wrongly deported when there was no such evidence of this happening. That's not to say that Rudd doesn't have her own questions to answer: as she argued herself this afternoon when before the Home Affairs Committee, while the principle of the hostile environment immigration policy may well be right, the practice has been wrong. Her session was not a comfortable one.

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 the treatment of the Windrush generation, and had a decent series of questions for the Prime Minister. These ranged from a case he had previously raised of a man called Albert Thompson who had been denied NHS treatment, to highlighting Amber Rudd’s comment about the Home Office being too concerned with policy and strategy to attacking May’s own ‘hostile environment’ policy on immigration.

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 policy to public sector workers' pensions would be a good way of persuading them that the Conservatives are on their side. He has a good point: the Tories could do with working out how to talk to public sector employees, given their current tendency to vote Labour, and given the importance that many of those workers place on their pensions.