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.
10 min listen
Suella Braverman has resigned as Home Secretary over a row on immigration measures. Grant Shapps has been selected to replace her. Will more follow? Isabel Hardman speaks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth.
Grant Shapps is the new Home Secretary. This takes the government into strange territory, to put it mildly. Shapps was openly campaigning against Liz Truss as Prime Minister just days ago, boasting happily about the spreadsheet he had set up with hundreds of data points about where Tory MPs stood on her leadership, and saying
Prime Minister’s Questions was not an easy ride for Liz Truss. Nor was it catastrophic. As James predicted earlier, crunch moments rarely end up being as crunchy as expected. The Prime Minister turned up with some well-prepared defensive lines (also something James predicted), including, curiously, ‘I’m a fighter, not a quitter’. It wasn’t clear what
The Tory whips have, in their great wisdom, decided to make today’s opposition day vote on fracking a ‘confidence issue’ in Liz Truss’s government. The Labour motion this afternoon isn’t the usual non-binding partisan one, but a mechanism which would allow the opposition to introduce a bill into the Commons banning the practice. It is
13 min listen
Another day, another u-turn. Liz Truss met with her Cabinet today and is reportedly considering u-turning on the pensions triple lock. Are ministers heading for more ‘lengthy discussions’ on public spending? Should we brace ourselves for resignations? Also on the podcast, as Hunt looks at which departments to cut, what could this mean for the
Liz Truss was in an apologetic mood again this morning when she sat down with her cabinet ministers. She told them that the government had ‘gone too far and too fast with the mini-Budget’ and that this had been, in the words of her spokesman, ‘exacerbated by global factors with inflation rising around the world’.
Finally, we hear from the Prime Minister. Liz Truss has given an interview to the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. It comes at the end of a day in which she was accused of ‘hiding under a desk’ and emerged in the Commons only for a silent half an hour of blinking occasionally. She apologised,
Jeremy Hunt’s statement to the Commons underlined that he is now running the government. This wasn’t just evident from what he said, but from what was happening as he said it. The Chancellor spoke with the Prime Minister sitting behind him in silence, barely moving save to blink. Liz Truss had belatedly entered the chamber
After trying to reassure the markets by junking almost everything Liz Truss announced in her mini-Budget, Jeremy Hunt briefed Tory MPs about his premiership – sorry, plans as chancellor. The mood of those emerging from the briefing was probably the best Tory MPs have been in since the government U-turned on the 45p rate at
14 min listen
Isabel Hardman, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson discuss the appropriate units of time in which to measure the remainder of the Prime Minister’s tenure…
Liz Truss’s Downing Street press conference has made everything worse, as far as Tory MPs are concerned. As soon as it was over, a number of backbenchers who had supported Truss for leader were locked into a call with Thérèse Coffey, the PM’s closest friend in Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister. Those on the
Can sacking Kwasi Kwarteng really save Liz Truss’s premiership? In the past few minutes, the chancellor has had a meeting with the Prime Minister – and he has now left the government. Tory MPs have spent the past week doing a lot of writing. The first thing many of them have been writing is a
14 min listen
After a day of speculation, the rumours that Liz Truss was about to U-turn on more areas of the mini-budget proved untrue. Conservative MPs had a tense evening in the 1922 Committee meeting last night – are there any good options left for the Prime Minister? Isabel Hardman speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.
Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions taught us two things. The first was that Keir Starmer has still got a long way to go before he is the one putting Liz Truss on the ropes. The second is that Truss has got a long way to go before she isn’t putting herself on the ropes instead. It
Tory MPs were in an anxious mood as they returned to the Commons this afternoon after weeks of conference recess and government meltdown. Their first session in parliament was, appropriately enough, Treasury questions, where they had a chance to air some of their anxieties with the Chancellor and his team. It could have been a
In the past few minutes, Conor Burns has been told to leave the government after a complaint of ‘serious misconduct’ was made against him. Downing Street has released a statement saying: Following a complaint of serious misconduct, the Prime Minister has asked Conor Burns MP to leave the government with immediate effect. The Prime Minister
13 min listen
Liz Truss attended the European Political Community summit in Prague, where her frosty relations with Macron came to a head. Rather than ‘frenemies’, there were signs of thawing relations between the two. After years of diplomatic tensions over Brexit, immigration and energy, can the two leaders kiss and make up? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel
13 min listen
Liz Truss has today delivered her speech to the Conservative Party Conference where she set out the vision for her government. It was arguably the best moment of a difficult week for the party. Has she succeeded in calming Tory nerves? Who are the ‘anti-growth coalition’ that she is taking on? Isabel Hardman speaks to
Liz Truss’s speech at Conservative party conference was workmanlike; she performed the task she’d set out to do. It was helped by a brief protest in the middle by Greenpeace, which allowed the Prime Minister to drive home her point about an ‘anti-growth coalition’ to a hall that was united in willing her on and
Iain Duncan Smith is the latest senior Tory to speak out against cutting benefits by not uprating them in line with inflation. The former work and pensions secretary and party leader told a ConservativeHome fringe on Universal Credit this morning that he thought it was a ‘peculiar debate’ to be having, adding: Almost certainly there
