Isabel Hardman

When she was moved to the Leader of the House position, it appeared as though Andrea Leadsom was being given a low-profile job because she wasn't performing well in the Cabinet. Whether or not that was the case, Leadsom has actually turned out to be exactly the right person for this role. She proved that again today in the House of Commons when answering an urgent question from Caroline Lucas about bullying of House staff. This urgent question was rather odd in itself: it was in response in part to allegations made against Speaker Bercow, who both granted the UQ and then chaired it. Perhaps this was an attempt to show he believes in scrutiny even of himself, or perhaps Bercow hoped that by being present, he might have an effect on the mood in the Chamber.

Theresa May should have had a rather difficult Prime Minister's Questions today. Jeremy Corbyn chose to lead on the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and then moved onto rough sleeping. Both matters are vulnerabilities for May, and ones Corbyn has consistently made a great deal of noise about. But there were two flaws in Corbyn's approach which allowed May to have one of her strongest sessions as Prime Minister. The first was that of course she had guessed the Labour leader was most likely to lead on Saudi Arabia, and so she turned up well-prepared to offer a robust defence of Britain's ties with the Kingdom.

Why on earth would we want to put up a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square? That's the question that a number of politicians are asking after the possibility arose once again at the weekend. 'Steady on,' said Nicola Sturgeon. Labour's Chris Bryant was (unsurprisingly, perhaps) rather more verbose. 'What Mrs Thatcher did to communities like the Rhondda deserves recognition in the annals of callousness; not another statue.' Down with the Tory fool behind the suggestion who just cannot stop reminiscing about the 1980s. Except the suggestion came not from a Conservative but a Liberal Democrat MP. Jo Swinson wrote a piece in the Mail on Sunday in which she describes witnessing the very policies that Bryant is so angry about: 'I grew up in the West of Scotland during the 1980s.

When Theresa May gave her big housing speech today, in front of a rather strange fake brick backdrop that made the Prime Minister appear to be emerging from a chimney, she was trying to speak to two audiences. The first was those who believe, as she says she does, that the housing crisis is one of the biggest barriers to social justice in this country. The second was those who may agree with the first sentiment in abstract, but who are very worried about inappropriate development and destruction of our green and pleasant land. It's a tricky game, playing good-cop, bad-cop all by yourself, but that's what the Prime Minister had to do in order to announce anything at all on housing.

Despite the rather muted colours for the staging of her Road to Brexit speech, Theresa May tried to make her address as upbeat and cheerful as it was possible to be. She started by talking not about Brexit but about her agenda, restating a great deal of what she said on the steps of Downing Street when she became Prime Minister. Perhaps this was because May is worried that people have forgotten what her domestic mission is, or perhaps it was because she felt it would be best to suggest that Brexit could play a large part in making Britain a better, happier and less divided country. She said that her Downing Street pledge 18 months ago 'is what guides me in our negotiations with the EU', and then offered a very strongly values-based list of what she felt was important in the negotiations.

Yesterday, after Jeremy Corbyn's speech on Brexit, he moved on from press questions about the substance of his policy change to seeking non-media questions. It was presumably to show that Labour is more interested in the real questions of real people rather than the biased agenda of the press. That real question ended up being 'please will you hurry up and be our Prime Minister?' Corbynites would argue that even a question as pointless as this is better than the mocking tone that journalists take as they try to claim, on the basis of whispered gossip, that this is a result of some kind of Shadow Cabinet falling out. Why not focus on the real issues, they argue. But the problem is that politicians are the least able to gauge what a legitimate press question is.

Could the Conservatives crash out of government in the next few months? That's certainly a prospect that Theresa May's allies want to talk up in order to scare would-be supporters of Anna Soubry's amendment on Britain staying in 'a' customs union after Brexit. We discuss whether making the amendment a confidence issue is really the smartest move on our latest Coffee House Shots podcast - and in today's Evening Standard I report that Remainers really do think the whips would be calling their bluff by adopting this strategy. But I've also picked up an interesting theory doing the rounds among would-be rebels, which is that Theresa May will use her Road to Brexit speech on Friday to announce a concession on the matter of Britain having 'a' customs union arrangement of one sort or another.

Iain McNicol's departure from the position of Labour General Secretary has been a very long time coming indeed. He wasn't Ed Miliband's first choice for the job, and he certainly wasn't Jeremy Corbyn's favourite person at Labour headquarters, either. After the snap election, Corbynites pushed for a 'purge' that involved ousting McNicol. They failed, then, but today he announced that he was off to 'pursue new projects', which is one of those Westminster formulae for 'booted out'. Corbynite Jennie Formby is being mooted as his successor. In a sense, it's admirable that McNicol managed to stay on for so long, given the constant attempts to get rid of him.

A common question in Westminster is ‘what is the point of the Liberal Democrats?’ The Lib Dems, it turns out, are asking their own existential questions: about PMQs. Since taking over as leader of the party, Vince Cable has been oddly absent from a number of these Wednesday sessions. His office says he has been to three out of the six PMQs held so far this year, and tends to turn up when he has a question allocated, which is around once a month. Tim Farron would make a great show of bobbing up and down to get Speaker Bercow’s attention at every PMQs, his face growing redder and redder from the frustrated effort.

What a convenient inconvenience the row about Jeremy Corbyn's links with a Czechoslovakian agent is for the Labour leader. While the allegations that he was an informant during the Cold War may well be the 'nonsense' that he claims they are (they certainly don't seem to correlate with anything released at the end of that period), the way a number of newspapers have covered them has given him an opportunity to launch an attack on the press. In what tabloids might term a 'bizarre video rant', Corbyn said the newspapers had 'gone a bit James Bond' with these 'smears', before warning the 'media barons' that 'change is coming'.

That the Tories are having to shift their policymaking far left even of the Milibandesque positions that Theresa May took before the snap election is quite obvious. Today's education speech by the Prime Minister involved an admission that the current system, drawn up by the Conservatives in coalition, isn't working. The problems that the Tories have noticed with that system are largely political, but that's not to say that there aren't flaws in the details, too. But it's not just on tuition fees that the party is having to change its tune from its time in government under David Cameron and George Osborne.

Theresa May hasn’t had many opportunities to talk about domestic policy since the snap election. It’s probably fair to say, too, that the Prime Minister hasn’t exactly seized what opportunities there have been, either. This week, though, the Tories are talking about education, offering their response to Labour’s very attractive tuition fee pledge, and letting new Education Secretary Damian Hinds out to talk about his vision for the brief. Hinds has made clear today that he’s the sort of Education Secretary that Theresa May often wished she had over the past year.

There is clearly a will in Westminster to change the culture of sexual harassment that was so horribly exposed in the autumn. Previously, there was little will and no clear way for victims to get help, despite widespread anecdotal evidence that there were quite a lot of victims out there. Today a cross-party working group of MPs, peers, staff, and trade unions published their report on how to ensure that victims don't feel ignored any more, and that there is a proper, independent process for dealing with complaints. But will the report really be a success? And how will we really know what a success looks like, when sexual harassment is, in reality, often much more complex than it first seems? One aspect of this complexity is that social mores are changing.