Isabel Hardman

Isabel Hardman

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.

What’s the true cost of the Rwanda deportation plan?

What’s the point of the government’s flagship Rwanda deportation scheme if it isn’t going to save money for the taxpayer? That’s a reasonable question to ask after the Home Office finally published its impact assessment on the plans – as yet unrealised – to deport asylum seekers to the East African country. That document revealed

Isabel Hardman

Is the economy wearing Rishi Sunak down?

10 min listen

As mortgage rates surge and a new Opinium poll finds Labour’s lead has jumped to 18 points, Rishi Sunak appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC show to insist that his plan is the right one. But was his slightly cranky reaction to some of the questions a reflection of how the party is really feeling about

Shock as interest rates hiked to 5 per cent

11 min listen

James Heale speaks to Isabel Hardman and Kate Andrews as the Bank of England announced it has hiked interest rates to 5 per cent. Faced with inflation, a looming mortgage crisis and personal debt, Rishi Sunak said today he is ‘100 per cent on it’. But can he turn things around? Produced by Natasha Feroze. 

Isabel Hardman

Is Labour bluffing on Lords reform?

Is Labour really going to reform the House of Lords? The party has ended up in a bit of a pickle over abolishing a chamber that it also wants to stuff with its own peers. The party’s spokesman yesterday told journalists that there was still a plan to create a Labour majority in the Lords

Rishi Sunak borrows from George Osborne’s playbook at PMQs

Rishi Sunak had a much better Prime Minister’s Questions than he might have expected, given the worrying economic news this morning. The Prime Minister sometimes turns up with too much, over-caffeinated energy. Sometimes he tries to defend his government with attacks on Labour that don’t sound as though he came up with them himself. But

Neither party is fully trusted on the economy

Jeremy Hunt was bombarded by MPs worried about the ‘mortgage timebomb’ when he took Treasury questions in the Commons today. Everyone on all sides was concerned, and offering their own ideas of what to do and who to blame. One problem for the Chancellor is that ‘everyone’ includes members of his own party, many of

Parliament votes to ban Boris

MPs have just voted 354 to 7 in favour of the Privileges Committee report’s finding that Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over partygate, and that he should be banned from having a former members’ pass. At some points in this evening’s lengthy debate, it appeared that there wasn’t going to be a vote, and even

Isabel Hardman

The Tories can’t escape partygate

Is partygate all in the past? That’s what Rishi Sunak is hoping. He sent Penny Mordaunt to the Commons this afternoon to back the Privileges Committee report into Boris Johnson, while saying the vote on sanctions for Johnson himself ‘is a matter for individual members’. The chamber had far more opposition MPs in it than

Isabel Hardman

Cameron tells Covid Inquiry to blame ‘groupthink’

Everyone giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry has their own corner to defend. And every ex-prime minister has a part of their premiership that they spend the rest of their life talking about and trying to justify. For David Cameron, it was his public spending cuts. Experts blame them for the health service being in

How damning is the Privileges Committee’s report?

11 min listen

We have finally got the results of the Privileges Committee’s report into whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament, and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading for the former prime minister. The 30,000-word document finds that he committed multiple contempts of parliament, including deliberately misleading the house, deliberately misleading the committee, breaching confidence, impugning the committee

Isabel Hardman

The partygate report is damning for Boris Johnson

The Privileges Committee has published its report on whether Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over partygate. It is damning. The 30,000-word document finds that he committed multiple contempts of parliament, including deliberately misleading the house, deliberately misleading the committee, breaching confidence, impugning the committee and the democratic process of the house and ‘being complicit in

Why hasn’t Nadine Dorries resigned yet?

Nadine Dorries has this evening explained why she isn’t yet resigning as an MP, after she initially quit ‘with immediate effect’ last Friday. The Mid Bedfordshire MP had gone mysteriously quiet after her announcement, prompting Downing Street to suggest that she was letting her soon-to-be-former constituents down. She has now revealed that she is waiting

Isabel Hardman

Has Labour really U-turned on childcare?

Is Labour U-turning on another big spending pledge? Last week, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves scaled back the party’s £28 billion green energy spending plan to take account of a tougher economic picture. Today, reports suggest the party is planning a similar retreat on childcare, dropping plans for a universal system in favour of means testing.

Isabel Hardman

Backbench Tories support Sunak at PMQs

Keir Starmer had a dilemma at Prime Minister’s Questions. Focus on the Boris Johnson psychodrama, or the more tangible story about mortgages and interests rates? He went for Tory infighting first. But then Sunak took the curious approach of deciding to use Starmer’s opener as an opportunity to address the Johnson question head on, rather

Boris Johnson quits parliament

Boris Johnson has announced he will be standing down from parliament with immediate effect, after the Privileges Committee recommended a ten-day suspension for his conduct over partygate.  There will be a by-election in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Johnson will not contest his seat. In his resignation letter, the former prime minister attacks the

Sunak and Biden’s White House love-in

Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden’s White House press conference started late, presumably to make a point that the two had just found so much to talk about in their bilateral. Like a date that had gone really well. When the pair eventually appeared before journalists, they spent most of their opening statements banging on about

Isabel Hardman

How far can the Green Party go without Caroline Lucas?

12 min listen

The Green Party’s first and only MP, Caroline Lucas, has announced today that she’ll be stepping down at the next election. On the episode, Katy Balls talks with Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson about Lucas’s achievements and what it’s like to be the sole MP of your party in a parliamentary system like ours. Produced

Isabel Hardman

Will Britons be injecting their way out of obesity?

Is it right that the government is going to let more people use weight-loss jabs on the NHS? Anti-obesity jabs, such as Ozempic, are one of the hottest talking points right now. How fat we are has long been one of those problems that people think can be solved by ‘one quick trick’. But these

Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions stoops to a new low

An appearance from ageing rocker Gene Simmons from KISS, watching from behind his dark glasses in the gallery, was one of the few highlights from today’s stand-in session of deputy Prime Minister’s Questions. This session wasn’t so much glam rock as it was rock bottom boring. Oliver Dowden and Angela Rayner had written a list

Labour’s AI attack strategy comes unstuck

What’s wrong with the government’s AI strategy? Labour has been claiming today that it is ‘already out of date’, with shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell arguing that developers should be licensed by the government before they can work on advanced AI. Powell has suggested that an arms-length body could run the licensing regime in the