Boris johnson

In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse Oblige, some words embody upper-class usage (U), and some definitely do not. To the Non-U toilet and serviette might be added floor in the sense of the ground outdoors. Did Boris Johnson succumb to Non-U usage in remarks about coronavirus? ‘If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger,’ he said, ‘then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor.’ Floor or ground? On VE Day 1945, speaking from the balcony of the Ministry of Health, Winston Churchill said: ‘A

Home The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was for office workers to avoid sharing staplers and to face the wall in lifts. An Ipsos Mori poll found that 61 per cent of people would feel not very comfortable about using public transport. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, appeared at a daily coronavirus press conference and said: ‘We have come through the peak, or rather we have come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we have been going through some huge Alpine tunnel, and we can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of

Trade minister Conor Burns has resigned from the government, after a parliamentary inquiry found that he had used his position as an MP to intimidate a member of the public in February 2019. In a statement announcing his resignation, the MP said it was ‘with deep regret I have decided to resign as Minister of State for International Trade.’ Adding that ‘Boris Johnson will continue to have my wholehearted support from the backbenches.’ According to the Committee on Standards, Burns used parliamentary stationery to contact a member of the public about a dispute over a loan with Burns’s father. In his letter, Burns implied that he could use parliamentary privilege

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, returned to work at Downing Street after recovering from his Covid-19 sickness. Speaking outside No. 10, he said that there were ‘real signs now that we are passing through the peak’. By the beginning of Sunday 26 April, there had been 20,319 deaths, mostly in hospital, of people who had the disease; a week earlier the cumulative total had been 15,464. There were additionally 2,000 coronavirus deaths in care homes in the week ending 17 April, according to the Office for National Statistics, twice the number of the week before. In the week ending 10 April, of the 7,996 excess deaths above the average,

A newspaper – it would be more than 100 years before it became a magazine – calling itself a spectator of events, while consistently standing up for individual freedom, was bound to fall out with its readership from time to time. In the early years, under the editorship of its Scottish founder, Robert Rintoul, The Spectator’s support for the Tolpuddle Martyrs, for the Chartists and for the abolition of slavery in the colonies did not cause too many raised eyebrows. Thanks to Rintoul’s enlightened imperialism, a fund was established to settle labourers and young married couples in Australia and New Zealand. But when the new joint editors, Meredith Townsend and

In 2001, aged 44, I was hired to write a weekly column for this august paper, and for the first time in my life there was a London door on which I could knock or ring, at any time of the day or evening, and be welcomed in. And what a door! To walk along the Regency terrace sun trap of Doughty Street in Bloomsbury on a summer evening, then breeze through the open door of number 56, and to know that the people to be found inside were the funniest, cleverest, most unsnobbish collection of individuals, and that booze was the second language, was a dream come true. I