Boris johnson

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Boris Johnson’s face can’t be ‘performative’

Veronica brought me a hundred newspapers so that I could check on one word. Well, she didn’t bring a wheelbarrow, but she has at her office one of those online databases that bring up published articles. The word was performative, by which I had been annoyed on the wireless recently because a couple of speakers used it in a sense that I thought wrong. Of the 100 newspaper articles mentioning it, not one used performative correctly (to my mind). I must be the only person marching in step. Performative was invented by an Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin, who used it in lectures in 1952, then in the William James

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

What we learnt from the PM’s Liaison Committee hearing

Boris Johnson has previously enjoyed Liaison Committee hearings rather too much, trying to get through the long session with select committee chairs using humour and optimism. Both were in rather short supply on Wednesday, as you might expect given the UK’s current predicament in the pandemic. The Prime Minister covered a lot of ground, and not just when it came to coronavirus. On the pandemic, he warned that the ‘risk is very substantial’ that hospital intensive care capacity is ‘overtopped’. He also said that the government did not know whether the vaccines stop transmission of the virus as well as reduce the severity for each person, or indeed whether the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Starmer is yet to learn the art of PMQs

Where to begin? That was one of most absorbing PMQs of recent times. Three top moments: the Speaker rebuked the PM for improper language. The Labour leader was humiliated by one of his own backbenchers. And Ian Blackford asked a good question. That’s right. It finally happened. The SNP leader in the House of Commons — the great windbag of the Western Isles — made history by raising a sensible point. The Scottish shellfish industry, he said, has been shafted by Brexit. The problem? Red-tape. Last Monday a hapless trawlerman had to watch while his £40,000 haul turned rotten on the dockside as a posse of EU form-fiddlers fretted over

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Lindsay Hoyle ticks off Boris Johnson

A feisty exchange took place at Prime Minister’s Questions today, on the subject of free school meals, after widely-shared images showed children being provided with substandard food packages. Keir Starmer went on the attack, and suggested that the meagre meals were in line with the government’s current guidance. But it was Boris Johnson who provoked the ire of the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, after the PM suggested that Starmer’s stance on the matter was hypocritical. The remark led to the visibly angry Speaker giving Johnson a dressing down, with Hoyle calling on the PM to withdraw the remark. Watch here:

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers can no longer ignore the problems Covid has exposed

Tuesday’s cabinet meeting discussed the usual topics of Covid and the Brexit transition period, but at the end, Boris Johnson told ministers he had asked Sir Michael Barber to conduct a rapid review of government delivery ‘to ensure it remains focused, effective and efficient’. Downing Street’s readout of the meeting said the Prime Minister told his colleagues that ‘it remains important to ensure that work continues to ensure that we build back better from the pandemic’. Barber, currently chair of the Office for Students, set up the first ‘delivery unit’ in Downing Street in 2001, and has even written a book on How to Run a Government. He will be

Monday

Isabel Hardman

The delicate balancing act of lockdown messaging

Matt Hancock spent Monday evening trying to explain a very delicate tension to the public. There’s the good news of the vaccine and his determination that all four of the most vulnerable priority groups will be vaccinated by mid-February. And then there’s the bad news that in the meantime, coronavirus is spreading and we haven’t yet seen the worst of its impact on the NHS. So alongside announcing that more than 2.3 million people across the UK have had their first dose of the vaccine, Hancock warned at Monday night’s Downing Street press briefing that unless the public sticks to the rules, he will have to tighten restrictions on meeting others for

Saturday

Robert Hutton

Boris shouldn’t be allowed to forget cosying up to Trump

Eighteen months ago, I had the pleasure of telling Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s now departed head of communications, about the nickname that the American president had come up with for Britain’s new Prime Minister: ‘Britain Trump’. My amusement was matched by the look of horror on Cain’s face. This was very much not the label that Number 10 wanted for their man in 2019, and it’s even less so in 2021. The coincidence that both men rose after uprisings at the polls in 2016 is just that, they argue – a coincidence. The ‘Johnson isn’t Trump’ case is well made by James Forsyth in the Times, and it’s right, as far

Charles Holland

Boris’s latest lockdown rules are more baffling than ever

When Boris Johnson rolled back the legal restrictions over summer as Britain emerged from the first lockdown, he was clear that enough was enough: ‘Neither the police themselves, nor the public that they serve, want virtually every aspect of our behaviour to be the subject of the criminal law…After a long period of asking…the British public, to follow very strict and complex rules to bring coronavirus under control…we will be asking [people] to follow guidance on limiting their social contact, rather than forcing them to do so through legislation’. Alas (as Boris Johnson keeps saying), trust in people doing the right thing voluntarily, rather than under legal obligation, turned out to

Friday

Felicity Graham

Students are the forgotten victims of the pandemic

University is supposed to be among the most enjoyable and formative periods of a person’s life. Spare a thought then for the class of Covid-19. This week’s lockdown announcement again dealt yet another blow to an already disastrous year for university students. Despite having paid the usual tuition fees – and forking out thousands of pounds for pre-paid accommodation – the majority are now stuck at home, learning exclusively through Zoom. Universities cannot be blamed for the seemingly unrelenting succession of lockdowns caused by the pandemic. But that doesn’t alter the fact that we students have been compelled to pay £9,250 for a programme of often poorly-organised video lectures, alongside

James Forsyth James Forsyth

When will Covid restrictions end?

When we interviewed Matt Hancock this week, he was clear that the government isn’t going for herd immunity through vaccination. Instead, the government is seeking to use the vaccine to protect the vulnerable and break the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Once that is done, the government will start to ease restrictions. Crucially, he was also clear that the government now regards the first shot as the most important metric when counting vaccinations. In his Monday night address, Boris Johnson said that if the government could succeed in giving a first shot to the first four groups in the vaccination programme by mid-February then the government would start ‘cautiously,

Thursday

Alex Massie

After Trump’s carnage, Joe Biden is the president America needs

A day of infamy but also a clarifying one. The scenes at the US capitol building yesterday were both a wholly predictable and a predicted finale to Donald Trump’s wretched presidency. Predictable because it was obvious four years ago – at least it was obvious to those who cared to open their eyes – that Trump was a festering threat to America’s great democratic experiment. And predicted because everything Trump has said and done since losing the presidential election in November led inexorably to this final, shabby, shameful coda to his presidency. For if you spend years lying to people and years telling them they are being cheated, you cannot

Katherine Forster

Cancelling exams shows Boris has failed to learn his lesson

‘Don’t worry, they won’t cancel exams again,’ I confidently assured my fifteen-year-old middle son shortly before Christmas. He was sitting his mock GCSEs, and fretting over how much they might matter, admitting: ‘I haven’t done enough work.’ Only a month ago, education secretary Gavin Williamson gave a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ exams would ‘absolutely’ go ahead in England. It seemed clear he and Boris Johnson had learnt their lesson. They’d not be so foolish as to do the same thing over again: pull exams without a proper plan of what to do instead. More fool me. For my family – and for plenty of others in a similar position – it’s once bitten, twice shy.

Andrew Marr

The comment that baffled Boris

Real men are not supposed to confess to feeling fear. But I am frightened, second time round, about the plague. There is superstition involved. Back in March, I had an underlying belief that I would be somehow immune. This time, I feel differently. It’s partly those vertiginous graphs and partly my gloomy streak, a ‘just-my-luck’ sense that if I did succumb, it would happen with the vaccine only a hand’s-grasp away. So I’m cautious. For many people, the latest lockdown is atrocious, job-destroying, family-wrecking news. For me, it’s more of the same. Work aside, I go out only for a daily walk, hobbling along the local canal or round Regent’s

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris Johnson’s Scotland problem

A few months ago, Tory aides spotted a suspicious pattern. If they agreed on a new Covid policy to be announced in a week, Keir Starmer would get wind of it and demand it was implemented immediately. In No. 10, two conclusions were drawn: that they had a mole (perhaps on Sage) and that the Labour party’s policy was to try to look prescient. The conclusion? Ignore it. In such times, they reasoned, no one cares about Westminster games. But it’s a different matter when it comes to being upstaged by Nicola Sturgeon. To many Tories, she is the real opposition leader these days. If Boris Johnson’s premiership collapses —

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Can the PM sustain his vague lockdown timetable?

Boris Johnson doesn’t have as angry a Conservative party to deal with as he might have expected after announcing his third national lockdown. The Covid Recovery Group of MPs has largely moved on from opposing further restrictions to putting pressure on the government over its vaccine timetable, meaning any revolt on tonight’s vote will be much smaller than the 55 who rebelled against the tiered system in December. But that’s not to say that the Prime Minister can afford to be careless with the way he communicates with MPs, and his statement in the Commons today showed that. He opened by telling MPs that there was a ‘fundamental difference between the

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson’s justifications for lockdown

Boris Johnson this evening tried to give a little more background to why he had called England’s latest lockdown – and why he had confidence that this really was the darkness before the dawn. The Prime Minister told the Downing Street coronavirus briefing (yes, we are back in that sort of lockdown) that more than 1 million people in England are now infected with Covid – around 2 per cent of the population, according to the ONS – but that as of today, the same number of people in England, and a total of 1.3 million people across the UK, have received the vaccine. He had to explain why he

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Boris Johnson isn’t the only one to blame for Britain’s Covid crisis

Britain has suffered one of the world’s highest Covid death tolls and worst Covid recessions. It has managed this abysmal feat despite spending nearly £300bn on countering the virus, a sum far greater than almost any other comparable country. We have achieved the triple crown of medical, economic and fiscal failure because of a reason that is under-discussed: the lethal divisions on the right. They have paralysed the government, and condemned thousands to premature deaths and needless suffering. Yet we do not see them with the clarity we should because of our skewed culture. Conservative titles dominate the written media, and for reasons I will get to, opposition to public health

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Why haven’t we shut the UK border already?

‘This country has not only left the European Union but on January 1 we will take back full control of our money, our borders and our laws,’ said Boris Johnson in October last year. The transition period is now over; we are out of the single market and customs union, which means freedom of movement of people is at an end. The UK has total control over its borders (other than the one on the island of Ireland, but let’s not go there today). So it is worth asking why the government is choosing not to exercise this right in anything approaching an appropriate manner at present, particularly when such

Monday

Isabel Hardman

How will Tory backbenchers react to another lockdown?

Boris Johnson is coming under increased pressure from Tory MPs on both sides of the Covid debate today. On the one hand, there is former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt calling for schools and borders to close and a ban on all household mixing straight away in order to prevent the NHS from collapsing. On the other, there is Mark Harper, chair of the influential Covid Recovery Group, who has just issued a call for the government to start relaxing restrictions from February. The two demands aren’t necessarily mutually-exclusive: the two men just have rather different timescales. Hunt insisted this morning that the restrictions he is calling for ‘will be time-limited

Thursday

Robert Peston

Cummings ready to testify that Boris rejected his lockdown advice

As many hospitals struggle to cope with a surge of Covid-19 patients, the most important judgement yet to be made about 2020 is how much difference it would have made had England been pre-emptively locked down in September. This is not an academic question. Because there were two separate occasions in September when the prime minister’s political and scientific advisers urged him to impose tough national restrictions and suppress the incidence of the virus back to low levels. It is well known that on 21 September the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies recommended a short ‘circuit-breaking’ lockdown. But I have learned that within Downing Street, it was at the