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.
Downing Street is trying to put a lid on the row about Matt Hancock’s affair with someone he appointed as an unpaid adviser and then non-executive director at the Department of Health following the Health Secretary’s own apology. At today’s lobby briefing, a spokesman for the Prime Minister repeatedly said the ‘Prime Minister has accepted
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The Sun broke the news this morning that Health Secretary Matt Hancock has seemingly been up to some extra-marital exploits with his aide Gina Coladangelo, possibly breaking many of the Covid restrictions that he himself put in place. What will be the consequences of his hypocrisy? ‘This simply demonstrates that we’ve been through a period where
Are the Conservatives going to repeat their mistakes of a decade ago on NHS reform? If a week is a long time in politics, perhaps ten years is such a lengthy period that it erases the memory entirely. The current Health and Social Care Bill is due for publication any day now and contains much
Sir Keir Starmer had a powerful line of attack at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. He led on the government’s own review of the treatment of rape and sexual violence, which recommended sweeping reforms to the way cases are handled so that the current low rate of charges and convictions can be reversed. Prosecutions have fallen by
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While Labour are shuffling people round yet again.. ‘There needs to be a change in messaging from the leader’s office, because otherwise it just looks like he’s rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.’ – Isabel Hardman And the DUP are getting ready to welcome in their third leader in less than a month… ‘Donaldson is actually in
Labour’s attempt to bring Tory divisions over planning reforms into the House of Commons flopped this evening, with no Conservatives at all supporting the party’s opposition vay vote. They all abstained. Labour’s failure to capitalise on the row following Chesham and Amersham doesn’t mean the planning problem is going away It was a reasonably anodyne
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With the Conservatives still taking stock after their loss in the recent by-election, it seems the governments ambitions for planning reform are now firmly under the microscope. ‘When you speak to these MPs… they are absolutely convinced that planning reform is dead’ – Katy Balls And on what would have been ‘freedom day’, there are
Big changes afoot tonight in Sir Keir Starmer’s top team: his head of communications Ben Nunn has stepped down to pursue other projects, with deputy Paul Ovenden also resigning for family reasons. Steph Driver is taking over as director of comms while plans are being made for the new direction of the team. I understand
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New DUP leader Edwin Poots faces his first challenge today as he tries to push through a controversial candidate for First Minister. There are now rumours that the party may launch a vote of no-confidence in him, only a month after he became leader. How much trouble is the party in? Katy Balls points out that
When Rishi Sunak told Andrew Neil this evening that he had his eyes on the future, he was ostensibly talking about the nation’s finances. But it was difficult not to conclude from his interview on GB News that he wasn’t also keeping at least one eye on his own future, too. A particularly striking exchange
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Another day, another Dom bomb. In Cummings’s latest release, a number of WhatsApp messages reveal communications between himself and the Prime Minister, with the latter describing the health secretary Matt Hancock’s performance as effing ‘hopeless’. Is this damaging to Hancock? Or is this the sentiment that you can expect from senior people who work at close
What has Dominic Cummings revealed about Matt Hancock that we didn’t already know? The most eye-catching stuff, of course, is the Prime Minister calling the health secretary ‘totally fucking hopeless’. But on the specific charges that created this impression, much of his lengthy blog on evidence reiterates what he told the select committee session last
Keir Starmer was back on his home turf at Prime Minister’s Questions today, attacking Boris Johnson for what he said was a lack of competence in containing the spread of the Delta variant. The Labour leader focused on the delay in putting India on the red list, turning one of the Prime Minister’s stock phrases
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The government has agreed its first post-Brexit bespoke trade deal. But the agreement with Australia has already caused consternation among Conservative MPs about the potential competition from Australian farmers. Are these fears overstated? James Forsyth argues yes: ‘Both its proponents and its critics exaggerate its importance. Meat prices in Asia are roughly twice what they
The government has just suffered a further verbal drubbing for the way it announced it would be delaying the roadmap out of Covid restrictions. Matt Hancock gave a statement in the Commons tonight, a couple of hours after the Prime Minister announced all the details of the delay. Before he spoke, though, he had to
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It seems Freedom Day is no longer June 21st. The writing was clearly on the wall this morning, but now the Prime Minister has officially told the public, it is likely to be another four weeks of restrictions. ‘Conservative MPs are getting really agitated by this moving of the goal posts‘ – Isabel Hardman But after
Matt Hancock enjoyed an early boost in his evidence session to the select committees investigating the lessons learned from the government’s handling of the pandemic, when one of the committee chairs Greg Clark confirmed that Dominic Cummings had not submitted written evidence for the allegations he had made in his own session. Those allegations included
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Today, talks between David Frost and the EU’s negotiator Maroš Šefčovič ended with little agreement about how to move forward on the Northern Ireland Protocol. As James Forsyth says on the podcast: ‘it didn’t end with either man walking out of the meeting, but you probably can’t say much more for it than that.’ This is partly
Normally when a Prime Minister goes on the attack in the Commons, it’s the opposition in his sights. Not so today, when Boris Johnson accidentally attacked his own MPs, including former prime minister Theresa May, for being ‘lefty’ propagandists. He was responding to questions from SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford about the cuts in foreign
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Though the amendment on foreign aid was not selected by the Speaker yesterday, the row over the budget cut is not over yet. Today MPs will have an emergency debate about the policy, and Lindsey Hoyle has advised that the government should bring the matter in front of the House in the future. This is
