All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Why did Covid prove so lethal in care homes? Between 2 March and 12 June, there were 66,112 deaths of care home residents in England. Of these, 19,394 ‘involved’ Covid (in the Office of National Statistics’s own terminology) – 29.3 per cent of the total. As has been apparent from the beginning of this crisis,
For an organisation that likes to be popular these are troubling times for the BBC. This month the Corporation started sending out letters explaining that it had ended the universal exemption from paying the licence fee for the over-75s. From now on, unless you are in receipt of pension credits (taken as evidence of poverty)
It’s official – lockdown will eventually have a greater impact on our lives and health than Covid-19 itself. That, at any rate, is the conclusion of a study by the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was published quietly on 15 July. The study uses a measure known as quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), which
Are the Lib Dems finished? It’s not the first time that question has been asked. In fact, it’s a fairly regular refrain. With the days when the Liberal Democrats reliably won around 40 to 60 seats a distant memory, the party has struggled since the coalition years to find relevance. Ahead of the 2019 snap election, the
The Tories are well aware that the public won’t endlessly give them the benefit of the doubt on their handling of the coronavirus crisis. They are also aware that one of the most tangible signs to people that the government is still not in control of things is if schools fail to open – or
At last, the government is doing something sensible. Amid the anxiety surrounding a putative ‘second wave’ of Covid-19, the Department for Education is standing firm in its commitment to re-open schools for all year groups come September. Reassuringly, the schools minister Nick Gibb is making this a non-negotiable priority. ‘Thank you Nick Gibb’ is not
Our lives remain dominated by the plague, aka Covid-19. The government’s handling of it — admittedly a difficult task — has not been brilliant, but no worse than the performance of its scientific and medical advisory group (no acronym has ever been less apt than Sage). There is one obvious lesson to be learned: the
As a number of top civil servants take shelter from the ‘hard rain’ Dominic Cummings has forecast for Whitehall, it’s unsurprising one feline has also taken the opportunity to announce his retirement. It’s fair to say my friends and former colleagues who work at the Foreign Office are much sadder to see the back of
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The Liberal Democrat leadership race will finally come to an end this month but, after December’s crushing election defeat, is the party over too? In a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots, Gus Carter speaks to Katy Balls and Nick Tyrone, author of Politics is Murder, about how a new leader could pull the
Open or close? Open the schools and close the pubs? Open bowling alleys but not skating rinks? Allow open restaurants but not wedding receptions? Britain is playing musical chairs with different services and businesses, but the whole game is misguided and without any scientific epidemiological basis. To open society gradually is certainly wise, but how
Noel Quinn, the chief executive of HSBC, declines to say whether his bank will disown pro-democracy staff who fall foul of China’s draconian new security law for Hong Kong. The bank, he says, follows the law of every country in which it operates: it will treat the issue case by case. What he may not
In the run up to the 2015 general election, there was a lot of talk in Westminster about the demise of two-party hegemony. We were coming to the end of five years of coalition government and the thinking was that neither the Tories nor Labour could get a majority, possibly ever again. This theory has
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Belgium, Andorra and the Bahamas were added to the UK’s quarantine list yesterday evening, meaning Brits returning from those countries will be required to stay at home for two weeks. With Belgium’s neighbour, France, also seeing a surge in coronavirus cases, will they be next? Gus Carter speaks to Katy Balls – who is on
A rigid and complicated planning system has long been one of the issues holding back the UK economy. The planning reforms announced by Robert Jenrick this week are designed to bring more predictability and speed to the system. Jenrick’s document is very much a case of politics being the art of the possible. The green
Last Friday, Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard, was celebrating his nomination for a peerage. But while the future looks bright for soon-to-be Lord Lebedev (son of the former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev), there is bad news for some of those who work for him. Today it was announced that the
Power struggles at the heart of government continued today, with a key member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office announcing his retirement. Palmerston the cat, Chief Mouser of the department since 2016, announced he was stepping down via the Foreign Office Twitter account. In a statement, Palmerston explained that working from home over lockdown had
Kirstie Allsopp is in trouble. The posh-but-nice telly lady committed two cardinal errors of modern life: first by saying something interesting on Twitter, and second by assuming people would credit her with good intentions. She wrote: ‘If your job can be done from home it can be done from abroad where wages are lower. If
It’s not unusual that the left and right hands of government don’t know what the other is doing: despite being based in the same postcode, different departments are notoriously bad at communicating. They even stop speaking to one another occasionally, with secretaries of state blocking new policies at what is known as the ‘write-round’ stage
Daniel Kahneman called it anchoring; I call it tunnel vision. It’s when we depend too heavily on our pre-existing ideas and first pieces of information – the anchor – to inform our judgments. How a problem is perceived, how it is described, how it makes us feel alongside our individual experience and expertise shapes the
If there’s one thing you’d think the Tories might have learned over the past ten years in government, it’s that trying to reform the planning system will cause an almighty row. Under David Cameron, the party ended up in a bizarre fight with the Daily Telegraph and the National Trust over its plans to build
The Bank of England offers a mixed bag of forecasts today. It now expects Britain’s economic downturn to be less extreme than feared, while also predicting a recovery will take longer than originally thought. The Bank now expects the economy to contract 9.5 per cent in 2020, substantially less than the 14 per cent drop
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The government has announced the most ambitious planning reforms of a generation – but could they backfire? Meanwhile, as the contacting tracing regime continues to lag, health officials launch a new coronavirus app that will tell people if they may be at risk from the virus. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews.
Until relatively recently I was under the impression that preventing people breaking the law was the primary job of a police officer. But is this always the case? Or is tackling crime sometimes substituted for a form of morality-based policing? The protest for reparations in Brixton last Saturday – and the reaction of the police –
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s late-Eighties to early-Nineties comedies have not gone down in history as great triumphs. Films like Junior and Twins – in which he played a pregnant man and Danny DeVito’s unidentical twin respectively – are movies only arch nostalgists could love. But now we learn that Kindergarten Cop, another product of that strange period,
Donald Trump has hardly covered himself in glory in his latest public responses to the pandemic. His calamitous interview with Australian Journalist Jonathan Swan will probably enter the presidential history books for all the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, the news that Facebook has removed a video of the President’s latest appearance on Fox News on the
Douglas Ross is the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives and since his predecessor lasted all of 167 days, best of luck might be more in order than congratulations. The Moray MP was awarded the position unopposed after Jackson Carlaw resigned entirely of his own volition and without any input from Downing Street. Ross inherits
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Douglas Ross has won the Scottish Conservatives leadership election – but can take on the SNP without risking a second independence referendum? Meanwhile, pressure is growing on the Tories to suspended a former minister accused of rape. Finally, a new report by a cross-party group of MPs suggests the failure to impose quarantine on travellers
What should the British government do to help Lebanon recover from the Beirut explosion? Ministers say they are working to provide the Lebanese government with technical support and financial assistance, but they are coming under pressure from senior Conservative colleagues to use the disaster as a turning point in the way Britain approaches the Middle
Sweden has released growth figures for the second quarter – a contraction of 8.6 per cent – and two narratives are circulating. The first is that the Swedish experiment has failed spectacularly, resulting in both a higher death toll than its Scandinavian counterparts as well as a collapsed economy. The second is that Sweden has
The Tories are still coming under fire for failing to suspend the unnamed MP who was arrested at the weekend on suspicion of rape, sexual assault and coercive control. A group of charities and trade unions are the latest to criticise the decision, saying in a statement released yesterday that ‘we are still not confident
We are going to hear a lot about Test, Trace and Isolate (TTI) in coming weeks, as we approach autumn and fears of a second wave of Covid-19 grow. Now we have moved away from national lockdown but do not yet have a vaccine, the test-and-trace system is our main bulwark against a resurgence of
What political opportunities Covid-19 has presented for Nicola Sturgeon. Day after day in recent weeks she has appeared at her press conference, presenting a picture of a Scotland where the disease has been all but eliminated – placed in contrast with England where, she says, the government is merely trying to contain the disease, and