Kemi Badenoch must be fuming that Keir Starmer is flying back from the G7 in Canada right now, with Angela Rayner standing in for him at PMQs and convention dictating that the Leader of the Opposition also offers up a deputy. So it was that in a week where the headline topic remains the grooming gang scandal that Badenoch has decided is one of her key passion projects, it was one of her shadow ministers asking the questions. Badenoch has chosen not to have a regular deputy for these occasions, offering the job to a revolving cast of Tory frontbenchers. Unsurprisingly given what was obviously going to be the main issue, today it was the shadow home secretary. No, not Robert ...

Since Louise Casey published her report into grooming gangs, Kemi Badenoch has been wildly missing the right tone in her response. On Saturday, she sent an email to Conservative Party members complete with a jaunty exclamation mark: “We won! Grooming gang inquiry announced.” Anyone else who has read the details of these rape cases wouldn’t immediately assume there were any “winners” here. On Monday afternoon in the Commons chamber when facing the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, she claimed she “couldn’t believe my ears”, and seemed barely to contain her anger. Not, though, at the sickening betrayal of the victims, but at the fact Labour was staging “another U-turn”. Winter fuel and now this? What next, the non-doms? To what sounded like genuine shock ...

Only a year has passed since Sadiq Khan won a record third term as mayor of London. That victory – which plenty doubted – is one he can still relish (“it’s looking good for Susan Hall” has become a familiar election meme). This week has seen Khan confirm plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street after a public consultation found what he called “North Korean” levels of support. But what of his future? When I interviewed the mayor last August I was struck by his caution on the question of standing for a fourth term, which is scheduled for 2028. “Let’s wait and see,” he said, abandoning any hint of braggadocio (Khan has often quipped that he intends to serve six terms). This ...

The more one looks at last week’s Spending Review, the more one appreciates the challenges the economy and the government face. Health and defence were the two clear beneficiaries from the review, but even here the numbers do not mean that all of the spending pressures have been addressed. The NHS is going to see real-term increases in its resource budget of 3 per cent, which is much higher than any other department and much higher than economic growth as a whole. It is also lower than the average rate of growth in its budget since its creation of 3.6 per cent and much lower than the last time waiting times were brought down substantially when its budget increased by 5 or ...

“The findings are here, and they are damning.” This was the assessment of Yvette Cooper in response to the peer Louise Casey’s rapid national audit of the grooming gangs scandal. As the Home Secretary stood up to make her statement on the Casey report, a group of schoolchildren were hurriedly shepherded out of the public gallery, where they had a moment ago been watching Education Questions. A few stragglers will have heard Cooper speak of the conviction of seven men in Rochdale last Friday for “treating teenaged girls as sex slaves”. It has, she added, taken 20 years to bring them to justice. This was the theme of Cooper’s statement. She outlined the recommendations in Casey’s 200-page report, which MPs were frenetically ...

The decision to have an abortion is deeply private and extremely personal. One in three women in the UK have undergone or will undergo this procedure, and despite the views of some pro-life groups, it does not make them guilty of “most significant violation of human rights ever to occur”. Since David Steel’s 1967 Abortion Act, passed almost 60 years ago, women in the UK have been able to access abortion up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy, safely and under the care of a medical professional. Because that is what abortion is: a medical procedure – one that it is essential women can continue to access safely, privately and without judgement. Countless women before Steel’s reforms were not as fortunate; those ...

For decades the Middle East has haunted British politics: the Iraq war, the Syrian civil war and the war in Gaza. In his 2010 memoir A Journey, Tony Blair writes of his refusal to call for a ceasefire during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war: “[It] probably did me more damage than anything since Iraq. It showed how far I had swung from the mainstream of conventional Western media wisdom and from my own people.” As the election of four independent pro-Palestinian MPs last year proved, the boundary between the foreign and the domestic has become increasingly blurred.  Israel’s long-anticipated strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Friday mark a dramatic new phase in the region (more than 200 jets were involved in raids ...

It’s a statement of the obvious that politics requires resilience. You have ups and downs. You win some, you lose some. If you’re really good, or just lucky, the former might outweigh the latter. When you’re down, it’s essential, in Scottish parlance, to keep the heid. When I spoke to Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, this week he was understandably still cock-a-hoop at his party’s surprise victory in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election. He was full of praise for the ground campaign, which he described as one of the best he’s ever seen – an aide told me Labour knocked on something like 8,000 doors in just a few weeks. But then Sarwar is reliably upbeat. Even during a ...