James Forsyth

Keir Starmer turned in his most effective parliamentary performance since becoming Labour leader at PMQs today. Normally, Starmer is quite monotone. But today he varied his style, and to good effect. Starmer started off with a bit of swagger, something which he often lacks, asking why Boris Johnson had failed to sack Matt Hancock. Starmer kept pressing and Johnson was left to fall back on the vaccine rollout and make jibes about Starmer’s own bungled reshuffle. Then, Starmer changed tone asking about Ollie Bibby who died of leukaemia in hospital on 5 May but was barely allowed to see his family, the day before those photos of Hancock kissing his aide were taken.

The sausage dispute between the UK and the EU may sound like something out of Yes Minister but it is the canary in the coal mine of UK-EU relations. In a sign of some progress, Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission vice-president, will announce this afternoon that the EU will agree to a UK request to extend the grace period for sausages and other chilled meats going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland for another three months. Both sides will offer their own unilateral declarations on what the extension means. RTE’s Tony Connelly provides a typically thorough run through of what we can expect. Two things are particularly worth noting. First, the UK is agreeing to a standstill on food standards during this period, not dynamic alignment with EU rules.

Covid restrictions are meant to end on 19 July. But parliament will not return to normal until September. The Commons goes into recess on 22 July and there’s no desire in government to end proxy voting for the dregs of the session. The chief whip has told colleagues that he might struggle to get MPs to come to Westminster for just the last three days of term. The Commons chamber has been a strange place during the pandemic: less bear pit, more petting zoo. Since so few MPs have been allowed in, it has been far harder for them to persuade their colleagues by force of argument or to put a minister under sustained pressure. This has neutered the chamber as a force. The Covid restrictions have distorted things in other ways too.

Even after the one metre rule and the limits on numbers are removed on July 19th, we will not be back to anything approaching normal life. From self-isolation to travel we will not be returning to the status quo ante. Another way in which life will be different, as I say in the Times today, is that offices will still be nowhere near as busy as they were before the pandemic. Ministers will end the work-from-home guidance next month. But there’ll be no national ‘back to the office’ day. It will be left to employers to decide how much they want to push the issue. Most ministers think people won’t start to return in big numbers until after the summer break.

Tory MPs in prosperous southern seats will be feeling rather nervous this morning. The Lib Dem victory in Chesham and Amersham, see Katy’s blog here, is another illustration of how the decline in tribal voting means there are far fewer safe seats than before. One immediate consequence of this result is that it will harden backbench Tory opposition to planning reform One immediate consequence of this result is that it will harden backbench Tory opposition to planning reform. In this campaign, the Lib Dems repeatedly attacked the Tories for wanting to take away local communities’ ability to block developments. This struck a particular chord in a constituency that has HS2 running through it.