Boris johnson

The greatest single danger to this government is the state of the Union. Prime ministers can survive many things, but not the break-up of the country they lead. No. 10 has a plan to avoid this: it simply won’t allow a Scottish independence referendum this parliament. No legal referendum can take place without Westminster’s consent and it will be declined on the grounds that a generation has not elapsed since the ‘once in a generation vote’ in 2014. This approach, however, cannot change the fact that the Union is now in even graver danger than it was during that campaign. In recent weeks, the polls have consistently shown independence ahead.

Politics begins and ends with sovereignty: the duty and right to make the legitimate final decision. We have seen this clearly during the pandemic. In every country, people have come to depend on their governments, whose authority rests on acknowledged sovereignty. This is as true, or even truer, in democracies: while monarchs and aristocrats could dispute sovereignty – and, where it suited them, divide up the cake amongst themselves – in a democracy there can only be one ultimate sovereign: the people. No sovereignty, no democracy. For years we have been told the illusion, if not a fraud, that sovereignty can be ‘pooled’. Who takes the final decision when sovereignty

This is a week of bittersweet anniversaries for the Labour party. It is now 72 years since Clement Attlee’s government created the National Health Service, its most popular achievement. It is also 75 years since Attlee led the party to its first ever landslide victory, a triumph that made the NHS possible. But if these memories warm the hearts of Labour members they should be cooled by the realisation that their party is some way from even scraping back into office, let alone marching into power armed with a manifesto as radical as ‘Let Us Face the Future’, which rejected pre-war poverty and laissez-faire economics and embraced a new world

Today Boris Johnson launched his ‘new deal’ for Britain – billed as an economic recovery plan to follow the Covid recession.  It sounds positively Rooseveltian. It sounds like a new deal. All I can say is that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand – a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at a time of crisis. What has changed is the PM’s political positioning, away from the market economy and towards state intervention But were the announcements really a ‘new deal’ – or a new anything? The vast

Boris Johnson has responded to the resignation of Mark Sedwill, the now former Cabinet Secretary. The full text of The Prime Minister’s handwritten note is below Dear Mark, Over the last few years I have had direct experience of the outstanding service that you have given to the government and to the country as a whole. You took over as Cabinet Secretary in tragic circumstances, and then skilfully navigated us politicians through some exceptionally choppy water: a change of premiership, an election, then Brexit, followed by the crisis of Covid-19, where you were instrumental in drawing up the plan the whole country has by now followed effectively to suppress the

Even in these strange political times, it looks very difficult for a Conservative politician to become Mayor of London. In the 20 years since the advent of the mayoralty and the introduction of the London Assembly, only Boris – as we all know, an unusual politician – has managed to beat Labour, with successive terms in 2008 and 2012. He succeeded in this by being more popular than the Conservative party in London; a politician, even then, with an independent brand. In contrast, Ken Livingstone was less popular than the Labour party at the time. These favourable winds are unlikely to blow again. On the contrary, the political ructions of

The discovery in Britain that a £5 steroid, dexamethasone, can be effective in treating Covid marks a potential breakthrough in our understanding of the virus. Much remains to be learned about the wider potential of the drug but the claims made about its success are striking: that it reduces deaths by a third in patients on ventilators and by a fifth in patients receiving oxygen only. It has not been shown to benefit Covid patients who do not require oxygen. But this can still, in a global pandemic, mean thousands of lives saved. There are two further points to be made. With Covid-19, there is a better chance of finding

Since becoming the new Speaker of the Commons, the softly-spoken Lancastrian Lindsay Hoyle has sought to distance himself from the tenure of John Bercow. While the latter spent his days constructing long monologues and pontificating from the Speaker’s chair, Hoyle has instead focused on limiting his own contributions in the Chamber and attempting to be an impartial arbiter of Commons debates. Despite this change in approach (and the fact that he ran for Speaker as the anti-Bercow candidate) Hoyle has generally avoided criticising his predecessor directly. Mr S wonders though if that now might be about to change. This week, Hoyle was interviewed by chief executive of the rugby league

The New York Times doesn’t much like the United Kingdom. By that, I mean the dystopian fantasy United Kingdom the Grey Lady has confected to explain Brexit and Boris Johnson’s electoral triumph in December. Objectively observed, Britain today is further to the left on public spending, equalities legislation and social attitudes than just a decade ago. Not if you scan the pages of the Times, however, where the Britain that glowers back at you is a grey and unpleasant land, a grim shudder of cruelty, racism and imperial nostalgia buffering about in its late dotage after renouncing civilised Europe. A dull, foreigner-free retirement community with nothing but Spam, Union Jack

There is a grim inevitability to the trickle of round-robin letters from scientists who feel aggrieved at the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Right from the beginning, the Prime Minister gave scientific advisers a very public platform at the heart of government. He realised that if it became necessary to impose the most severe restrictions on personal freedom any government has had to introduce in peacetime, it would help if the public could see policy was being shaped by experts who understood the threat. But as time has gone on it has become increasingly clear that there is no such thing as ‘the science’ — a mythical set of