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Sir Keir Starmer had a new song today at PMQs. The Tories are finished. He said it twice to Kemi Badenoch. It was a deliberate ploy. So what’s he up to? Kemi was ill-prepared for the session. She should have changed tack as soon as she heard Sir Keir’s opening statement about immigration. Kemi’s day didn’t recover. Her questions lacked bite ‘This party will end the open-border experiment of the party opposite,’ said the PM. Instead of challenging him, Kemi stuck to her prepared script. ‘Unemployment is up by 10 per cent since the general election,’ she said. ‘Why is it rising on his watch?’ Sir Keir has just arranged

Our prisons are nearly full to bust once again so the Ministry of Justice has been flying some kites ahead of the review of sentencing led by recovered Tory David Gauke. The ‘leaked’ idea involves the reintroduction of remission of time spent in prison for good behaviour. While the Justice Secretary Shabanna Mahmood is said to be impressed with how a similar system in Texas cut the prison population dramatically, the idea of time of your sentence for behaving yourself is quintessentially British. Most episodes of the BBC comedy Porridge will contain a reference to remission, granted or removed and how it shapes an offender’s journey. That’s because from 1948

Keir Starmer had a much more awkward Prime Minister’s Questions than he is accustomed to. This was largely because Kemi Badenoch was armed with the latest unemployment figures, but also because the Conservative leader was agile in dealing with the Prime Minister’s responses. However, the overall lesson from the session was that Starmer now wants to frame the next election as being a battle between Labour and Reform, with the Tories a ‘finished party’.  Badenoch opened by saying the attacks on Keir Starmer’s home were unacceptable, and an attack on democracy. She then asked him why unemployment was rising, to which he replied that she was talking the country down.

How do you make assisted suicide safe? In recent months, a large part of Kim Leadbeater’s answer has been to point to the involvement of psychiatrists. Having a psychiatrist sign off each death, Leadbeater said, would ‘add expertise’. They would be part of a much-touted ‘multidisciplinary’ approach. In particular, they would be able to check that applicants met the threshold of the Mental Capacity Act.  There’s just one problem. The psychiatrists themselves appear to think Leadbeater’s bill is a dangerous mess. I’m paraphrasing, of course. But last night’s statement from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, in which they identified nine major problems with the legislation and said they ‘cannot support’ it, is