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.
Boris Johnson’s rather bold move on the customs partnership hasn’t yet landed him in trouble, even though it has enraged some of his pro-Remain colleagues. At the Number 10 lobby briefing today, the Prime Minister’s spokesman avoided giving the Foreign Secretary a slap down when asked whether Theresa May was happy that he had told
If you want to know how last night was for the Labour Party, you need to look no further than the statement that Jeremy Corbyn has just released on the results. It is not a celebratory comment on Labour’s spectacular night, but a defensive one, describing the local elections as a ‘solid set of results’.
Lucky Penny Mordaunt. She’s the latest minister to find themselves the holder of the women and equalities brief in the great pass-the-parcel of this role. It was created for Harriet Harman under the Labour government, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do with it. Since then, though the Tories have never quite understood
James Brokenshire is back in government after his illness. He is the new housing secretary, which marks quite a change from Sajid Javid. Brokenshire is one of those ministers May trusts deeply: he worked with her in the Home Office where she found him to be a quietly loyal colleague. What does this mean for
When the Windrush scandal broke, it was largely seen as Theresa May’s fault, given the Prime Minister had introduced the hostile environment policy when she was Home Secretary. But this week, the focus has shifted to Amber Rudd, and whether she knew what was going on once she took over the role. This afternoon the
Amber Rudd must, privately, be hopping mad about the Windrush row. Not only is she having to defend policies that her predecessor and now boss introduced when she was Home Secretary, she is also having to try to resolve the mess that was exacerbated by Number 10 in initially refusing a meeting with Commonwealth leaders
Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions saw the Maybot reactivated. Jeremy Corbyn decided to lead the session on the fallout from the Windrush row, widening out his questions to the flaws in the hostile environment policy on illegal immigration, and on who was to blame for these flaws being apparent but not fixed for so long. The
The government has got at least two colossal messes to deal with, and yet Theresa May managed to survive today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. This was all the more surprising given the topic of PMQs was on a mess created as a result of one of May’s own policies. Jeremy Corbyn chose, rightly, to lead on
Aside from the need to act swiftly and with an element of surprise when striking Syria’s chemical weapons capability, it is still fair to say that Number 10’s preferred option was not to have a vote before the strikes took place at the weekend. David Cameron’s experience in 2013 of failing to get parliamentary consent
Recently, a rather agitated Tory MP came to me and asked why on earth his party wasn’t talking more about pensions. It was an important message to voters, he argued, managing to stay agitated about an issue that normally sends people off to sleep. This MP thought that highlighting the importance of a sound economic
This afternoon’s emergency debate on Syria isn’t quite working out as anyone had really planned. For Labour, it was an opportunity to undermine the government by complaining about the lack of parliamentary consent for the weekend strikes on the Assad regime’s chemical weapons capability. For the Tories, it was an opportunity to show that there
Though Theresa May, still responding to questions from MPs in the Commons on the weekend strikes in Syria, seems to have won support from a clear majority of MPs, her session has not been entirely comfortable. A large number of backbench Labour MPs made clear that they agreed with the Prime Minister’s assessment that the
Ministers have been caught so badly on the hop in the row about the Windrush generation that when Amber Rudd came to the Commons today, she was forced not only to tell MPs that her own department wasn’t working properly, but also to admit that she didn’t know how many people had been deported. The
How did the government manage to create such a terrible row over the Windrush generation? The Home Office has told many people who arrived here as children in the late 1940s and 1950s that they are in fact illegal immigrants because they cannot produce documents from 40 years ago about their residence here. That in
Overnight, British, French and US forces took part in strikes against the Syrian regime as a punishment for the use of chemical weapons in Douma. In a statement released in the small hours, Theresa May described these as ‘co-ordinated and targeted strikes to degrade the Syrian Regime’s chemical weapons capability and deter their use’. The
Theresa May is holding an emergency Cabinet meeting today on how to respond to the latest chemical weapons attack in Syria. Already sources are briefing that the Prime Minister is prepared to take military action without a vote in Parliament, which has naturally enraged a number of parliamentarians. Jeremy Corbyn has said that ‘parliament should
Jeremy Corbyn didn’t pick the most obvious topic to lead on – or indeed mention – at Prime Minister’s Questions today. While the Tories are in deep discomfort on the Worboys case, the Labour leader chose instead to talk about something on which even he had to concede Theresa May has shown a fair bit
Who is the most powerful person in government at the moment? In normal times, the automatic answer would be the Prime Minister, but things are rather more complicated at the moment. Theresa May’s stock has risen in recent weeks, thanks to her confident handling of the Salisbury attack – and partly because Labour is in
Theresa May covered a fair bit of ground in her statement to the Commons on last week’s European Council meeting. She talked about how EU leaders were supporting Britain in the stand-off with Russia following the Salisbury attack, on the agreement that leaders reached on the next stage of Brexit negotiations, steel tariffs, and on
Is there really a cross-party consensus on tax rises for the health and social care system? A group of MPs from across Parliament has written to Theresa May calling for a year-long parliamentary commission on funding for all branches of the health system. Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt is calling for a ten-year settlement for the NHS,