All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Whisper it softly but one day, eventually, politics will come back. And while it might not be the thing we’re all missing most, when it does a lot will hinge on what form it takes. As James Forsyth noted in his column this week, talk in government is that politics will be changed ‘for a
The science of epidemiology relies a lot on modelling because, for obvious reasons, controlled experimentation would be unethical. But in the case of Covid-19 we do have something approaching a real-life experiment – in that Sweden has declined to follow other European countries into lockdown. Instead, it has followed a policy which might be summed
Was Matt Hancock shrugging off Coronavirus in late January? An ‘insight’ article in the Sunday Times which has spread like wildfire online accuses him of doing so. The virus was making its way over the world, it says, but ‘it took just an hour that January 24 lunchtime to brush aside the coronavirus threat. Matt
Michael Gove – Government is not thinking about lifting lockdown restrictions yet Sophy Ridge began the morning interviewing the Cabinet Office Minister, Michael Gove. On Thursday, the government announced it would be extending the UK’s lockdown for a further three weeks to best tackle Covid-19. Gove downplayed reports that the government had drawn up a
Paul Marshall makes the compelling point that mistakes have almost certainly been made by scientists and Public Health England. However, in the British system, power lies not with the scientists and officials, but with elected politicians. And I have been concerned since the start of this outbreak that ministers were using the expert advice of
Should we, or should we not be compelled to wear face masks during a virus epidemic? It sounds a simple enough question. Indeed the answer seems so obvious to many, including the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, that they are questioning why this measure is not already mandatory. Surgeons wear them; they filter the air
This week, school starts again, but not in anything like the normal way. Were it not for Covid-19, millions of children would wake tomorrow to the familiar routine: a hurried breakfast, perhaps a panicked search for missing shoes or a stray jumper, then a dash to avoid being late. Instead, what awaits young minds that
Projecting the fight against Covid as a war on a virus – like the war on terror – tells us more about the politician than about the strategy. But in the struggle to halt and extinguish the disease, it is war that has provided us with tools to manage the present crisis. Take ambulances, field
A neighbour of ours, self-isolating and with poor lung function, has twice been telephoned recently by the medical authorities. After pleasant preliminaries about her health, both callers muttered something about ‘If the worst happened and you did become ill’. So she cut through: ‘Are we getting round to DNR [Do Not Resuscitate]?’ They admitted as much.
Boris Johnson has been out of action for almost a fortnight. His last meaningful act before going into hospital was to force frazzled Health Secretary Matt Hancock to ditch a threat to ban outdoor exercise that he’d made live on TV in response to some tweeted pictures of people sunbathing in a park. In place
As Boris Johnson was being treated in intensive care, Dominic Raab expressed his confidence that the Prime Minister would defeat Covid-19 and return to work because ‘he is a fighter.’ The press howled in opposition to these hopeful words. Things culminated in BBC Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis, disdainfully telling viewers: ‘You do not survive the illness through fortitude or
We don’t know if our model for estimating immigration into the United Kingdom works. It’s a long-standing dataset, produced by the Office for National Statistics – one of the best at what it does in the world. The model measures people entering and leaving the UK, something tracked at ports and airports. It’s a model
One redoubtable lady I know died in intensive care a few days ago. Neither her husband nor children nor grandchildren could be with her in her final days. The most natural impulse in the world, to rush and be with someone you love, is denied. The woman’s shell-shocked widower is now at home alone. Family
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The government revealed today that its testing capacity is at 38,000 a day. So why, then, are less than 16,000 tests being taken each day so far? Cindy, James, and Katy also discuss the new vaccines task force, the extension of the furlough scheme, and what the latest numbers out of China mean.
Another day, and yet more evidence has appeared that could indicate the number of people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, might be vastly higher than official figures suggest. This time a Californian study suggests the figure in one county could be more than 50 times the number who knew they had had the
In the weeks leading up to Boris Johnson announcing lockdown measures, ministers and aides wondered how in the world you could enforce a lockdown like the one seen in authoritarian China in a liberal democracy such as the UK. But following Dominic Raab confirmation on Thursday that there will be another three weeks of lockdown, public
That the World Health Organisation hasn’t exactly shone in the coronavirus crisis is now well-documented. It should remind us of the dangers of following one centrally-guided approach to tackling the disease. Thankfully, given how even experts have been unsure about how to respond to this enormous challenge, there was no unified EU response to Covid-19.
The Jewish Chronicle might be rescued but if it is, it’s not going to be pretty. The world’s oldest Jewish newspaper announced, alongside the Jewish News, that it was going into liquidation on the eve of Passover. A few days later however, the paper’s current owner, the Kessler Foundation, unveiled a bid to take both titles
The mayor of Paris’s 20th arrondissement has asked residents of her neighbourhood to stop denouncing each other. ‘When it’s a question of violence against women or children, or selling drugs, I’m still all ears,’ said Frédérique Calandra this week. ‘But these calls stigmatising Parisians who wish only to get a breath of fresh for a
What we learned on Thursday is that, at least while the Prime Minister is convalescing, the boffins of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies are, in effect, running the country. Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Boris Johnson, made it crystal clear that he and his fellow ministers – who met on Thursday in
‘Now I can believe I’m alive.’ These were the first words I heard my father speak in over a month. It was 7.15 on Wednesday morning and I was just clambering out of bed for my morning jog on Bodmin Moor. I am lucky in that I can run a few miles down to an
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As expected, Dominic Raab announced an extension to the lockdown today, with no clear end date set. But he did offer insight into the criteria that the government is using to judge when that time might come. Katy Balls writes about it here and she discusses them on the latest episode with James and Cindy. The
Dominic Raab has this evening confirmed that there will a lockdown extension of three weeks. The First Secretary of State said that while there had been encouraging signs that the rate of infection had significantly reduced, it was still too early to break away from any lockdown measures. He said the most dangerous thing for both
Ofqual, the exams watchdog, has issued a consultation document about its proposals for exams this year. It’s proposing to delegate the whole business of awarding grades to teachers, based on mocks, previous work and anything else that comes to mind. Pupils would not, under these plans, be able to appeal the ‘professional judgment’ of teachers
Before he went into isolation, Boris Johnson had remarked to Downing Street aides that he was keen to get back to the agenda on which he had been elected. But as I say in the magazine this week, this virus has now so changed the landscape that there will be no simple return to the world
It was a tale of two interviews on the Today programme this morning. First up on the show was Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, who has been instrumental in forming the UK government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, and whose virus modelling led to the current lockdown being put in
Using differences in coronavirus death rates between countries to draw out policy conclusions is becoming a very popular pastime. Unfortunately, as Michael Baum has pointed out already in The Spectator, it is rarely a productive one. Over the weekend, Dr Elaine Doyle of the University of Limerick tried her hand, arguing that high death rates in the UK
Matt Hancock’s badge for carers is a perfectly good idea. The mockery of it is in many cases shallow, ill-informed, revealing and hypocritical. You don’t need me to describe the badge or the mockery. Anyone with an internet connection and a glancing familiarity with what passes for ‘news’ these days is aware that the Health
The government is reluctant to start talking about life after the lockdown for fear of diluting its social distancing message, but just as post-war planning started during world war two, long before the fighting was over, we too should start planning for the post-coronavirus world. The Beveridge report on our social insurance system came out
One of the problems with the political news cycle, whether in normal times or now, is that politicians believe that making an announcement about a policy problem is all they need to do to tick it off their to-do list. The more complex the problem, the more tempting it is to make an announcement that
‘What did you do in the coronavirus crisis, dad?’ ‘Well son, I’m glad you ask. I helped make a very important video, entitled ‘You Clap for Me Now’. It used a technique we call passive-aggression to make people realise what horrible racists they had been towards immigrants. The video was really a poem, set to
I was never in favour of HS2, but if we are going to build it we might as well get on with it, so, yes, the government is right to order the bulldozers into action in spite of Covid-19 – as long as rules are enforced to ensure physical distancing between construction workers. But if