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.
The threatened Commons drama of an MP using parliamentary privilege to name the alleged Chinese spy was dampened rather after the High Court lifted the anonymity order on Yang Tengbo. It meant the urgent question (UQ) in the Chamber this afternoon ended up being much more about the UK government’s attitude towards China generally –
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Labour will reveal plans today to re-design local government, with district councils set to be abolished, and more elected mayors introduced across England. The plans could be the biggest reforms of their type since the 1970s, but with the May 2025 local elections set to be Labour’s first big electoral test since the general election,
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Labour is supposed to be going for growth, so Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves will be disappointed with the news today that the economy unexpectedly shrank in October, and for the second month in a row. Rachel Reeves’s mood seems to have visibly changed in the last month or so, is she having her George
Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch had quite an angry clash at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. The Tory leader attacked on immigration, something Starmer had previously mocked her for avoiding. The questions and answers quickly descended into a bit of a grudge match about who actually cared about it. Badenoch’s first question was why immigration had
Is the fall of Bashar al-Assad really cause for celebration in Syria and across the world? UK government politicians have been trying to separate the relief of the dictator’s departure from any sense of celebration about what comes after. This afternoon in the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Assad was a ‘monster’,
Justin Welby has given his valedictory speech in the House of Lords, his first public remarks since his resignation. It was quite a sad speech in which the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t appear to know quite what he wanted to say about his own departure. He started by joking that ‘if you want to
Keir Starmer still clearly misses opposition. He spent almost as much of his reset speech complaining about the Tories and the mess he feels they made of things as he did talking about what he is actually doing. It’s almost as though government has turned out to be harder and less enjoyable than even he
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Last night was The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. Politicians of every stripe were in attendance, with Wes Streeting, Robert Jenrick and Stephen Flynn among those present. There were a number of notable speeches – including a fiery opening monologue from the Health Secretary – but none caused as much of a stir as
You’re an ambitious backbench Labour MP with a weighty constituency caseload, legislation that you’re interested in improving, and a few personal campaigns to right various wrongs and make the world a better place. You get a spot on the order paper for this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions. What could you possibly ask your party leader
Kemi Badenoch had an odd line of attack at Prime Minister’s Questions: she chose to pursue Keir Starmer over what he knew about Louise Haigh’s fraud conviction. It is not a story that has any impact on people outside Westminster, but it did still highlight how much Starmer has become like the politicians he used
The debate on assisted dying, which culminated in a victory for those in favour, hasn’t been long enough – we knew that from the start – but it has been a very good one. There have been some very powerful arguments on both sides. There has also been a division between those who think that
What are MPs actually debating today? Some of them seem a bit confused. We have had two hours so far of the debate on the second reading of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, and a number of them seem to be talking about entirely different things. Some are poring over the detail of
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In the small hours of this morning Louise Haigh resigned as Transport Secretary following the revelation that she had pleaded guilty to a criminal offence in 2014. Haigh admitted fraud by false representation at a magistrates’ court after she incorrectly told the police that a work mobile had been stolen in 2013. She was then
50 min listen
MPs are set to vote on the legalisation of assisted dying this week, the first such vote in almost a decade. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was tabled by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater and follows a campaign by broadcaster Dame Esther Rantzen and others. The biggest change since the last vote in
Unconventional as ever, Kemi Badenoch used her third ever Prime Minister’s Questions as Conservative leader to call on Keir Starmer to resign. The Tory leader was half speaking in jest, telling the Prime Minister that ‘if he wants to know what Conservatives would do, he should resign and find out’. It was her latest riposte
Normally when MPs criticise the uncertainty around the government’s relationship with another country, they are referring to the constant chopping and changing around how to engage with China, not Israel. But where the UK stands on both countries is in flux at the moment, and today’s Foreign Office Questions in the Commons didn’t help much
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Today is the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference, at which Rachel Reeves has laid out her plan to ‘Get Britain Working’ and prove Labour as the party of business … despite what the recent Budget and the employers national insurance increase might suggest. What’s the mood of big business today? Also on the podcast,
Should Shabana Mahmood be allowed to ‘impose’ her religious beliefs on everyone else? Lord Falconer doesn’t think so, arguing yesterday that the Justice Secretary was ‘motivated… by her religious beliefs’ in her opposition to assisted dying. He added: ‘I respect that religious belief but I do not think it should be imposed on everybody else.’ It’s
Angela Rayner was so keen to get out of the traps with her criticism of the last Conservative government at today’s deputy prime minister’s questions that she almost forgot to welcome her new sparring partner. Alex Burghart is not yet a household name: in fact, he isn’t even Rayner’s direct counterpart, as Kemi Badenoch hasn’t
Will there be more resignations following the departure of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury? The Church is, as on everything else, split on the issue, with some bishops saying that there needs to be wider accountability, and the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell saying that no more resignations are necessary. Given part of the
