Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham finally confirmed last night that he is indeed standing for the Labour leadership – just in case anyone was confused about what the Mayor of Greater Manchester is up to as he stands in the Makerfield by-election. Speaking on BBC Question Time, Burnham said: I'm not somebody who gets ahead of myself. I can't do anything unless I'm lucky enough to get the support of people here. But if I get your support, I would seek to represent you at the highest possible level and give this constituency maximum power and influence. I think Wes Streeting seems to have launched a leadership contest, so if that is running, I would seek to join it.

We have now reached the stage of political debate around Henry Nowak’s murder where politicians are talking more about tone policing than they are about actual policing. Keir Starmer has today condemned Elon Musk for ‘interfering in our politics in the last few days, trying to whip up division – that’s not who we are in Britain’. He added that: ‘When we have a terrible case like Henry’s case, Henry Nowak, we react calmly, as his family have done.’ It is important for politicians to push back against attempts to create further division in society: part of the role of a political leader is to lead on the standard of debate, as well as the content.

Kemi Badenoch clearly decided that it would be difficult to call for calm around the Henry Nowak case, and then to spend Prime Minister’s Questions talking about it at length. The format of the session rarely lends itself to calm, and she had rightly judged that others – including Nigel Farage – would bring the matter up themselves. Instead, the Tory leader did what Keir Starmer did when he answered his first question, which was to call for calm. And then she moved onto welfare spending, using Pat McFadden’s private message to Lord Mandelson as an opportunity to revisit Labour’s failure to reform benefits. But Nowak still dominated the session, and not just in the questions.

It’s refreshing that social care has become a topic over which the putative Labour leadership contenders are prepared to scrap, given how neglected it has been for decades now. Both Andy. Burnham and Wes Streeting want to argue that they would be the leader who would take the radical step of legislating for a National Care Service – something Burnham first proposed back in 2009, just to give you an idea of how long it is taking for anyone to do anything meaningful on this matter. The babies born in the year Burnham unveiled his green paper on adult social care can now drive cars, but they still have no prospect of their grandparents, or indeed parents, being able to access a care system that actually works and is funded properly.

Like the rest of the King’s Speech, Keir Starmer’s address on the government’s legislative agenda had been prepared long before the turmoil in his party, and therefore bore little resemblance to reality. The Prime Minister did make a few joking references in his opening lines about the list of people endorsing Naz Shah’s book – adding that it was finally a list that everyone could get behind. But he largely spoke as though he were not hours away from a potential leadership challenge – or as though there were sections even of this speech that his own party wasn’t fully on board with.

All three of the resignation letters from ministers who have quit government in the past couple of hours will be painful for Keir Starmer, but Jess Phillips’s will hurt the most. The Safeguarding Minister makes a series of accusations against the Prime Minister which he will find personally hard to take. They cut right to the heart of why his premiership has failed. She describes him as a ‘good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things’, with the inevitable criticism following straight after: ‘however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough’.

Keir Starmer’s big survival speech could never be big enough to save him as Prime Minister. Whether he ends up getting the push now or later in the year has very little to do with what Starmer said today – he has been cooked for a while. But if this really had been the make-or-break speech that it has been billed as, it wouldn’t have worked, either. It largely served to highlight Starmer’s weaknesses further. Starmer really didn’t have much analysis bearing out his claim he had ‘learned a lot in the first two years in the job’ of Prime Minister It wasn’t just that he filled the speech with meaningless phrases such as ‘delivery is of course essential, but it’s not sufficient on its own to address the frustration voters feel’.

The final Prime Minister's Questions of a parliamentary session is often quite a demob-happy affair with a pantomime atmosphere. Today's, though, was more important for Keir Starmer, who is now in a daily battle to show that he's still got enough support to keep going a bit longer. He didn't have a bad session, but as with many of the events in the Commons this week, it won't make much difference to his longevity.  Badenoch's opener drew a contrast between the start of the parliamentary session, when 'sycophantic' Labour MPs had asked Starmer supportive questions, and this week, when the 'Prime Minister was reduced to begging those same MPs to save his own skin'.

For something that’s apparently only a ‘desperate political stunt’, Keir Starmer is taking the looming vote on whether to refer him to the privileges committee pretty seriously. There is a gargantuan effort tonight underway behind the scenes to persuade Labour MPs not to vote for the referral that the Tories want to make, with Labour grandees including Gordon Brown making public statements of support for the Prime Minister. This effort may pay off to the extent that the Tories only get to say to voters on the doorstep that their Labour MP blocked an investigation into the Prime Minister. But as with all prime ministers who reach this level of ‘embattled’, it only delays the inevitable.

Sir Olly Robbins dropped a series of political bombs throughout his evidence session on Peter Mandelson to the Foreign Affairs Committee. Like all civil servants, he did so in exactly the same calm, polite tone of voice as he would have used when talking about something boring, but the content of that evidence was anything but. It was seriously damaging for Keir Starmer – and it wasn’t just about Mandelson. The former permanent under-secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) told MPs within minutes of starting his session that, when he began the job, ‘I walked into a situation in which there was already a very, very strong expectation’ that Mandelson needed to be in America ‘as soon as possible’.

What a funny pair Lee Anderson and Zarah Sultana are: so vehemently opposed to one another’s politics and yet so similar in the way they operate, right down to getting sent out of the Commons this afternoon for calling the Prime Minister a liar. Anderson was first up with his question: ‘The problem the Prime Minister has got is no one believes him. The public don’t believe him, the MPs on this side of the House don’t believe him. His own gullible backbenchers don’t believe him. Does the Prime Minister agree with me he’s been lying?’  By asking a question containing unparliamentary language, they ensured that Starmer didn’t have to answer it at all The Speaker demanded that he withdrew the word ‘lying’, as it is considered unparliamentary language.