Lucy Dunn

The leader of the opposition found it difficult to land her punches in Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, with Kemi Badenoch not quite able to work out how she wanted to attack Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister fended off a number of issues from the Tories, from the economy to the Chagos Islands to Gerry Adams – but in the end it was a question from his own side that threw the Labour leader off balance. It wasn’t the usual soft questioning the Prime Minister might have expected from his own party when new Labour MP Brian Leishman stood up to speak.

Will the elections taking place across Ireland today result in a whole new government? Not really, is the conclusion most Irish citizens seem to be coming to. ‘It’ll be the same two main parties in government – nothing will change,’ one hospitality manager notes reluctantly, nodding to the current three-party coalition in the Dáil of the centre-right Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil with the left-wing Greens. ‘Ireland likes a moderate government,’ another voter added. ‘Anything that’s not radical.’  Fine Gael has suffered an exodus of longstanding politicians The current Taoiseach, Fine Gael’s Simon Harris, saw his popularity soar by 17 points to 55 per cent just months after he replaced Leo Varadkar in March.

In the history of devolution, no Westminster government has ever given Scotland as large a block grant settlement as the one announced by Labour on Wednesday. In her fiscal statement, the chancellor declared that politicians north of the border will receive £1.5 billion this year and a record £3.4 billion next year via the Barnett formula. It’s a move that caught the SNP by surprise, and one that has thrown the nationalist’s political strategy into doubt.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has made a lot of noise about the perilous state of the NHS, insisting the institution must ‘reform or die’. But while the rhetoric is right, what does Labour actually plan to do about it? There are ‘three shifts’, health minister Stephen Kinnock told Isabel Hardman at The Spectator’s ‘How to fix a broken NHS’ audience today: a change of focus from hospital care to a more community-centred approach, a move from a paper-based, analogue-style practice to better use of AI and digital technology, and a transition from dealing with sickness to emphasising prevention. But it’s not just the NHS that has to adapt and modernise: other facets of Britain’s healthcare system require change.

Junior doctors made headlines this week after they begrudgingly accepted the government’s pay deal. Two thirds of British Medical Association (BMA) members voted in favour of Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s offer, meaning medics across England will see a 22.3 per cent rise consolidated into their pay. Yet the move hasn’t entirely eased tensions between junior doctors and the government, with co-chair of the BMA Dr Vivek Trivedi insisting that medics will still ‘expect pay uplifts each and every year’. The co-chair of the doctors’ union went on to warn Streeting that wage increases must ‘occur in a timely fashion and at the pace that our members have asked for’ – otherwise, as Kate Andrews wrote, medics will consider striking again.

Priti Patel’s Tory leadership launch in Westminster this afternoon was an upbeat affair, featuring mango lassi and a tonne of merchandise. With caps, tote bags and even festival-esque ‘tour’ date t-shirts on offer for enthusiastic supporters, today’s event was excitedly dubbed a ‘political Glastonbury’ by one of her team, already kitted out in pro-Priti gear. Certainly, Patel’s speech took on an optimistic tone. Leading on her 14 years of experience as a Tory MP (including three as Home Secretary) she touched only briefly upon the recent ‘historic defeat’ suffered by her party at the general election.

Scotland’s exam results day has been something of a disaster this year. An already stressful time for anxious pupils has been made worse after hundreds of students across the country received blank email templates instead of their grades – a gaffe which the Scottish Qualifications Authority is scrambling to fix – while a flailing Scottish government struggles to explain why the poverty-related attainment looks worse, and wider, than ever. The bad news for Scottish students doesn’t end there. 2024’s national exam results don’t just demonstrate that the gap has widened; today’s figures have almost all eclipsed pre-pandemic levels.

Robert Jenrick chose a swelteringly hot day in sunny Newark to stage his official leadership campaign launch. ‘I’m in politics for you,’ he told the packed-out room, filled with a mixed crowd of young families and veteran Tory supporters. ‘We can persuade young people to join the Conservatives again,’ the 42-year-old insisted. ‘We must be better. We can be better.’ It was in this optimistic vein that Jenrick’s speech continued. In a rosy summary of the Conservatives’ time in government, the former government minister first pointed to his party’s achievements: school reforms, keeping Corbyn out, swooping to the side of Ukraine and – despite being a Remainer himself – Brexit. ‘All of this begs a big question,’ Jenrick concluded.

When Sir Keir Starmer arrived in Southport on Tuesday to pay his respects for the victims of the stabbing tragedy, he was heckled by locals. ‘How many more children are going to die in our streets, Prime Minister?’ called one distraught resident, as another cried: ‘Get the truth out!’ Just hours after the PM left, the roads were filled by far-right protesters after misinformation about the identity of the perpetrator spread on social media. Two days of rioting and over 100 arrests later, the Prime Minister today called an emergency press conference after urgently meeting with the country’s top police chiefs.

It’s not often that Irish republican party Sinn Féin hosts events in London, but the group included the UK capital in its post-election victory lap this week. Five of its seven MPs gathered in a dimly-lit hall in Hammersmith’s Irish Cultural Centre on Tuesday as the room filled with jubilant supporters, with many a Guinness in hand. There is certainly cause for celebration in the party: Sinn Féin has achieved a ‘perfect hat-trick’, as Belfast West MP Paul Maskey described it, becoming the largest group in local government, the Stormont Assembly and now Northern Irish party in Westminster. Retaining all seven of its seats, Sinn Féin increased its vote share in the general election by four points to 27 per cent.

King Charles has now finished taking part in the state opening of parliament for the first time as monarch. The purpose of today’s King’s Speech was to set out the government’s legislative agenda for the upcoming parliamentary session, the first since the general election. Sir Keir Starmer has put forward a big government programme that promises to ‘always put the country first’. It will be based upon ‘security, fairness and opportunity for all’, with a heavy emphasis on economic stability and the need for decisions to be ‘consistent with its fiscal rules’. In a lengthy statement by the King, the new Labour government announced the highest number of bills since 2005.