Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
Theresa May will give a statement to the House of Commons this afternoon on the disappearance of terror suspect Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed. The Home Secretary has earned a formidable reputation over the past few years for emerging unscathed from a variety of Home Office rows, and Labour has struggled to lay a finger on her.
The never-ending slew of messages from Labour figures about the party’s ‘clear’ position on high-speed rail was part of an attempt by the party to show that it is a credible opposition that scrutinises policies rather than blindly supports them. But this got rather confusing last week as each ‘clear position’ was a little different
Even though a significant number of Conservative MPs oppose the new high speed rail line, the focus for the past few weeks has been on what Labour plans to do about it, with a new ‘clear’ position coming from the party almost every day. Labour support now looks a little more likely given the language
Will Ed Miliband’s pledge on the Living Wage, made in today’s Independent on Sunday, work? Actually, that’s not really the most important question: the experience of the weeks following the autumn conference season is that you don’t actually need a workable pledge to be able to set the terms of debate. The Labour leader’s plan
One of the stranger rows since the Coalition formed has been over Tory chairman Grant Shapps/Michael Green, and whether or not businesses he ran before entering politics were engaged in unlawful activity. How To Corp, which Shapps founded before passing his share to his wife in 2008, sold a software called TrafficPaymaster, which copied content
It’s been a while since we had a nice big fat NHS row, but those who enjoy watching Andy Burnham and Jeremy Hunt fight over the ‘party of the NHS’ crown can rest assured that there’s a really bitter one coming up this autumn. NHS England has spent the past few months consulting on a
As expected, the government’s high-speed rail preparation bill cleared the Commons this evening, with 350 votes in favour and just 34 against. Only 18 of those were Conservative MPs, which deputy chief whip Greg Hands seems very keen indeed to highlight (see here and here), perhaps to suggest that he’s already working his magic in his new job.
It was quite strange yesterday that Michael Gove’s allies were quite so happy to concede ahead of his first proper scrap with Tristram Hunt that it was going to be a tough fight. They’d never given Stephen Twigg quite so much credit, although the complications of the Al-Madinah free school row and Nick Clegg’s wibbling
It’s a bad sign when a party has to insist that its position on a big policy is clear, but that’s what Labour has done this morning, with a statement from Shadow Transport Secretary Mary Creagh marking the start of the HS2 preparation bill report stage and third reading: ‘Labour supports HS2 because we must
Don’t expect this afternoon’s vote on HS2 to be the biggest insurrection of all time: it is the preparation bill and there are a number of reasons why MPs who could yet oppose the project won’t cause trouble this afternoon. One is the rather technical reason that some want to support this legislation in order
Talking about energy bills week in, week out might be good politics for both parties, but it sure does make for a grumpy PMQs session. David Cameron was still rather ratty this week, but he managed some better attacks on Miliband than he’s done in the past few weeks of the great energy debate. He
Nick Clegg used his monthly press conference this afternoon to deliver a strongly worded attacked on Labour over its energy price freeze and lengthy, unsolicited defence of what the government is doing to tackle the cost of living. There were some mildly interesting points from the Deputy Prime Minister on energy bills, as he insisted
Oh dear. As I explained yesterday, the most likely thing the Coalition parties could do to defuse Tristram Hunt’s troublemaking teaching qualifications debate this afternoon would be to table an amendment to the Labour motion which acknowledges the differences that both sides have, while supporting current government progress on education reform. This was the amendment
Yesterday marked the first reasonably good day that agitators for HS2 have had in a while. Northern business leaders started the day with a call to David Cameron to hold firm on the project, followed by Labour leader of Birmingham City Council Sir Albert Bore warning Labour of ‘protracted public conflict’ in the run-up to
Like all good select committee hearings where MPs are grilling some unsuspecting witnesses on something they’ve decided to be very angry about, this hearing of the Energy and Climate Change committee took a very long time. It has been cut off for the time being from Ofgem’s evidence by a series of votes in the
Opposition Day debates from Labour are often rather boring, with a frontbencher getting very angry about energy bills (one of their favourite topics for opposition day debates), and three backbenchers pulling stern faces at the lonely minister whose job it is to reply. But tomorrow’s debate is being billed as a ‘box office’ encounter (which
A select committee meeting with the Big Six firms would attract attention in any year when the companies had announced such eye-watering price rises. But it is the political frisson added by Ed Miliband’s energy price freeze pledge that makes this afternoon’s hearing quite so interesting. Labour had a swing in its step anyway as
Ministers’ attention is now firmly focused on arguing that to abandon HS2 would be a sign that Labour is ‘playing politics with prosperity’, as Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin is set to say later today, or ‘abandoning the North’. Yesterday the Prime Minister slipped in a joke about Ed Balls being absent from the Commons because
Why did the Prime Minister give a statement in the Commons on the outcome of last week’s European Council summit? Though he is expected to report back to MPs each time one of these jamborees takes place, David Cameron didn’t really have a great deal to tell them other than the tantalising suggestion that the
Ofgem is the energy market regulator that is supposed to be examining what it is that is going well or badly in the market. But it doesn’t seem to be doing the greatest job. This week we will hear more details about the annual competition test announced by David Cameron at PMQs last week, but