Boris johnson

If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until a sizeable portion of this article’s readership is dead. The next redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023 is almost certain to favour the Conservatives, adding ten seats to the already unhittable target of 123 constituencies Labour needs to win to govern on its own. There’s a possibility that Scotland could be independent by the end

Has Boris Johnson forgotten about the Cayman Islands? While the weather here is distinctly un-British, the overwhelming majority of the 65,000 or so inhabitants are British citizens. We are, after all, a British Overseas Territory, with a governor appointed by London. Next week, we’ll be enjoying a bank holiday to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. But during the pandemic, the British government has turned a blind eye to our Caribbean paradise by refusing to relax travel restrictions.  It’s hard to think of anywhere on Earth from which arrivals would represent a lower risk of bringing Covid into the UK. Since last summer, we have not had a single case of Covid transmission in the community.

It seems all but impossible to convince government scientists of the wisdom of proceeding with the final lifting of Covid restrictions on 21 June. No matter how much progress is made, officials seem to find a new reason to delay — a new variant or some similar development always pops up. The Indian variant has now become the dominant strain in Britain and our cases are rising. The question is whether that should change things. When the government’s roadmap was agreed, with 21 June as the end date, scientific advisers on the Sage committee drew up five scenarios for hospitalisations. None of them imagined that by this stage the figure

The government’s ambition to close the learning gap that has occurred as a result of the pandemic hit a stumbling block today. After the Department for Education announced plans for a £1.4bn programme in schools to help children catch up, ministers were criticised for not going further in their proposals. Now the government’s education catch-up chief has resigned. This evening, Sir Kevan Collins wrote to the Prime Minister to offer his resignation as education recovery commissioner. Collins cited the ‘huge disruption to the lives of England’s children’ that the pandemic has caused, arguing that only a ‘comprehensive and urgent’ response would do. That recovery, he said, relies on ‘significantly greater support than

The five most frustrating words a journalist can hear are: ‘This is not a story’. Over the years, I have heard that warding charm invoked by press officers governmental and party, private sector and charitable. Every time, it guaranteed I would work doubly hard to ensure the story in question made it into print. Political journalists, in particular, are thrawn by nature and cynical through experience. They begin from the assumption that you did it, everyone around you knows you did it, half of them are doing it too, and if they keep at you long enough you’ll eventually end up reading a prepared statement outside your front door one

Those of us who generally wish this Government well and consider Boris Johnson a preferable holder of the office of prime minister to any likely alternative are facing a new accusation this weekend. The vast brigade of pinko pundits who have predicted Johnson’s downfall on numerous occasions only to be proved wrong each time, have changed tack. They now mostly acknowledge that rows over prorogations or pelmets – or even this week’s Dominic Cummings spectacular – are likely to have only a very limited impact upon public opinion. But they shake their heads sadly at us and tell us this is not the point. Rather, what actually matters is that

Boris Johnson’s week has ended better than it began. After Dominic Cummings spent Wednesday launching a broadside against the Prime Minister over his handling of the Covid response, at least one of Johnson’s problems appears to be receding. This afternoon the government has published Lord Geidt’s report into the funding of the redecoration of the No. 11 flat Johnson shares with his fiancée Carrie Symonds. That refurbishment has been the subject of many column inches – with questions asked about whether donors initially funded the pricey project by the eco-designer Lulu Lytle. At least one of Boris Johnson’s problems appears to be receding Geidt – who is the Prime Minister’s

In one of the more surreal moments of Dominic Cummings’s testimony to MPs yesterday, the former No. 10 advisor suggested that Carrie Symonds and Dilyn the dog might be to blame for the UK’s sluggish coronavirus response. Cummings told MPs that on a key day in mid-March, as the government began to consider locking down, No. 10 were first of all derailed by a Donald Trump plan to carpet-bomb the Middle East, and were then sent into a tailspin by a story in the Times about Dilyn the dog – Boris and Carrie’s resident pooch. According to Cummings: ‘It sounds so surreal it couldn’t possibly be true – that day

One of Dominic Cummings’s strengths as a campaigner was his genius for a clear message – think ‘Take Back Control’ or ‘Get Brexit Done’. But the case that he was trying to make today was more complicated. He was trying to persuade people both that the Prime Minister was not up to the job and that the system has failed. Cummings’s testimony today made Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech look like a paean of praise The problem for him is that these two arguments cut against each other. If, as he himself acknowledged, even a Bill Gates-style figure would have struggled to deal with the problems of the Whitehall machine then

The Conservatives will be relieved that an independent investigation has not found the party to be institutionally racist, though relief is about all they can feel. Professor Swaran Singh’s report, which has taken two years to arrive, paints a picture of a party at best complacent about how its members talk about Muslims.  Professor Singh examined 1,418 complaints about 727 incidents between 2015 and 2020, of which two-thirds were allegations of anti-Muslim discrimination and three-quarters were from social media. The former commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concludes that: Anti-Muslim sentiment has been evidenced at local association and individual levels, as demonstrated by a number of social