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.
Most MPs’ minds are elsewhere at the moment, with the local elections on Thursday and the European elections looming at the end of the month. Many of them were physically elsewhere at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, which took place in a sparsely-populated Chamber with little atmosphere. A low rumble of bored chattering accompanied Theresa May
Jeremy Corbyn has again shown his power over the structures of the Labour party by winning today’s national executive committee showdown over its European elections manifesto. A faction of MPs, led by Tom Watson and backed by the GMB, Unison, Usdaw and TSSA unions, had hoped to change party policy to support for a confirmatory
Will the cross-party Brexit talks ever end? They seem to have been going on for almost as long as the negotiations to get Britain out of the European Union, and with a similar lack of anything for either side to boast about. Yesterday, David Lidington said he was ‘encouraged by the sense in the room
Jeremy Corbyn has insisted that Theresa May hasn’t yet moved on her Brexit red lines in talks with the Labour Party. In a broadcast clip this evening, the Labour leader said: ‘Well, the meetings are very long. A great deal of detail is gone into by both parties. We have people who have been on
Theresa May has this evening found enough people to fill the various ministerial holes left in her government by the recent slew of resignations. Some of these holes have been gaping for rather a long time: there has been no Minister for Disabled People since 13 March, for instance. But their lack of replacements until
Oh look, there’s water coming through the roof of the House of Commons! What a gift to those starved of metaphors for the mess that has been made of Brexit. The problem is that the water coming through the roof, which the House authorities are insisting is not a sewage leak (in a blow to
The Independent Group has brought forward its plans to become a political party, called Change UK, and appointed Heidi Allen as its interim leader. This is so it can stand candidates in the European elections, should Britain end up having to participate in them. The party will have its inaugural conference in the autumn. This
Once again, the Commons has concluded its day with rather chaotic scenes involving Tory MPs having a scrap with John Bercow. The Speaker managed to refrain from insulting anyone’s abilities as a whip, but he nevertheless irritated those who want a third meaningful vote by insisting throughout a series of points of order that he
If Theresa May wants an indication of how well things are going for a third meaningful vote, she could do worse than to look at the result of a vote on a statutory instrument in the Commons tonight. MPs have just approved the official piece of legislation that acknowledges Britain is no longer leaving the
Despite a number of MPs announcing that they will back Theresa May’s Brexit now that she has said she will leave within weeks of it passing, senior members of the European Research Group have come out fighting this evening to insist the deal still doesn’t have the votes. Steve Baker received what one source described
MPs are rather bewildered today. It’s not just that some of them are trying to understand the intricacies of the Labour Party whipping operation, with frontbenchers saying one thing in broadcast interviews, and the whips saying quite another in private conversations. It’s also that parliamentarians are having to decide what it is they actually want
The Commons has just erupted into a bizarre row over an insult thrown across the Chamber. Normally, in these situations, the Speaker ends up scolding the MP who deployed the insult, but in this case it was John Bercow himself who provoked the uproar in the first place. Demanding that Tory MP Greg Hands come
The most damaging thing that Theresa May did last week was to turn on MPs in her Downing Street statement, blaming them for the Brexit chaos. Given how settled Westminster seems to be on this conclusion, you might expect the Prime Minister to have tried to mend broken bridges in her Commons statement this afternoon.
This evening, Jeremy Corbyn walked out of a meeting between opposition party leaders and the Prime Minister about Brexit. The reason for his angry protest had nothing to do with what was being discussed, but his distaste for one of the attendees. Former Labour MP Chuka Umunna was there to represent the Independent Group, and
Boris Johnson was given an angry lecture by a minister in the voting lobbies about his comments that money had been ‘spaffed up a wall’ for investigating child sex abuse, I understand. The former Foreign Secretary upset survivors of the crime by using the term during radio interview last week. He told LBC that ‘you,
What a baffling group of people anti-vaxxers are. They rail against one of the miracles of modern medicine, peddling scare stories about vaccines which had nearly eradicated many deadly childhood illnesses in the developed world. Baffling, of course, is too soft a word for many: they’re dangerous, because their anti-science views don’t just put their
With just a few minutes to go before the division on the government’s motion on no deal, Tory MPs’ phones started buzzing. It was a message from the whips, telling them that the free vote they’d been promised since last night was now subject to a three line whip: the strongest possible instruction on how
Theresa May has just suffered another extraordinary defeat, losing on Caroline Spelman’s amendment (which rules out no-deal Brexit under any circumstances) by just four votes. This was not expected. Spelman even tried to withdraw the amendment, but was too late. This Spelman amendment said that the House “rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union
Philip Hammond’s squeeze message to MPs trying to work out how to vote on Brexit over the next few days was clear: if they don’t reach a consensus, then there won’t be lots of lovely spending on important domestic policies such as social care. Theresa May has been so busy procrastinating on Brexit that her
The Prime Minister’s Questions before an economic statement is usually rather pointless, with both party leaders going through the motions. But this isn’t a usual week, and so Jeremy Corbyn had genuinely important questions to ask Theresa May, and the answers mattered far more than anything Philip Hammond will say shortly. Naturally, Corbyn didn’t exactly
