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.
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
The Speaker’s decision to rule out an amendment which would have forced a vote on international aid cuts tells us a number of important things about the current situation in Westminster. The first is of course that Lindsay Hoyle is not John Bercow, who was prepared to ride roughshod over the advice of the clerks
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After the government cut the UK’s foreign aid budget a group of rebellious tory MPs bound together to try and reverse the decision, will it come to a head this week?‘This cut has caused some resentment amongst other nations’ – Isabel Hardman And has the culture war spread to cricket after the suspension of Ollie
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Matt Hancock defended his position at a Downing Street press conference yesterday. He told journalists that, by his ‘recollection of events’, he told the Prime Minister that hospital patients would be tested before being sent to care homes ‘when we could do it’. Dominic Cummings says the Health Secretary promised all patients would receive a
Matt Hancock’s approach to Dominic Cummings’s allegations has been to come out fighting. He believes he has spent most of today answering questions about these allegations. But Thursday night’s press conference highlighted what he has really been doing today: merely talking at length about the allegations, while dodging any real answers. No longer cushioned by eager Conservative
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After the hanger full of Dom bombs that were dropped in yesterday’s epic seven hour hearing, health secretary Matt Hancock got a sizeable chunk of Cummings wrath. Isabel Hardman talks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth about how Hancock has been handling himself since the allegations were levelled at him. James points out on the podcast that Hancock was never going to have
Matt Hancock’s first attempt to defend himself against the bombardment of allegations from Dominic Cummings went well. The health secretary appeared in the Commons to answer an urgent question from Labour’s Jon Ashworth on the matter, and he managed to get through the session without appearing beleaguered. This was partly as a result of a
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From accusing Matt Hancock of criminal incompetence, to lifting the lid on the true nature of his relationship with Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings’s evidence was nothing short of explosive. Katy Balls talks to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth about the highlights and what we learnt. There were few who escaped Cummings’s censure. But in some
Today we heard more than seven hours of testimony from Dominic Cummings, much of it taking aim at Matt Hancock. Tomorrow it looks as though Hancock will give us several hours of his own take on the way the government – and Cummings – handled the pandemic. This evening, a spokesman for the minister said:
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Downing Street as Dominic Cummings gave his evidence to the science and technology and the health select committees this morning. As it happens, we had the chance to see Boris Johnson reacting almost in real time to the revelations and allegations from his former aide, because
What a mess. Ministers have today been defending the decision to place eight areas in what is being called a ‘lockdown by stealth’, after it turned out that the government had quietly published guidance to slow the spread of the Indian variant without telling anyone in those areas. That guidance, which pitched up on the
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Islamophobia ‘remains a problem’ in the Conservative party, a report has found. Professor Swaran Singh, who analysed more than a thousand complaints of misconduct for his investigation, said that some Tories needed a ‘completely new mindset’. Boris Johnson himself gave evidence to the inquiry, and when asked about his column saying a group of black
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When Dominic Cummings appears in front of a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, the former aide is expected to attack Whitehall’s institutional structure, a lack of government transparency in the pandemic, and the Prime Minister himself. In a still growing Twitter thread, the former aide has laid out his critique of how the government handled Covid-19.
There are few public health interventions as successful as parkrun. It wasn’t set up as a public health intervention, which may be one of the reasons it has worked so beautifully. The first one was just a group of friends doing a 5k time trial in London’s Bushy Park. But in the years since that
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Politicians have buttressed Prince William and Prince Harry’s criticisms of the BBC in the wake of the Dyson report, which detailed Martin Bashir’s forgeries to get access to Princess Diana, and the BBC cover up which ensued. Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about the renewed scrutiny on the broadcaster.
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Despite some misgivings in Cabinet, free marketeers seem to have won the argument on the Australia trade deal, one of the first major deals to be struck after Brexit. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about the latest discussions in government.
The government is sounding increasingly upbeat about the prospect of sticking to the roadmap. At this evening’s coronavirus press briefing, professor Jonathan Van-Tam said the Indian variant was probably no higher than 50 per cent more transmissible than the Kent strain, at least according to initial assessments. Meanwhile, Dr Jenny Harries said there was currently no
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Nicola Sturgeon unveiled her new Cabinet today, reshuffling familiar faces with a clutch of new ministerial appointments. Will it be a line-up that causes sleepless nights for No 10? Joining Isabel Hardman to assess Team Sturgeon’s new look are Katy Balls and James Forsyth.
Prime Minister’s Questions today wasn’t a particularly easy session for either man taking the main exchanges. For Boris Johnson, it was a struggle to answer what Sir Keir Starmer referred to as a ‘simple question that goes to the heart of this issue’: if it’s not advisable for people to travel to amber list countries