Boris johnson

Thursday

Peter Jones

Cicero would have been quick to end the lockdown

The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus) of the people be the supreme law’. No surprise there: he had just returned from his sick bed. But as he knows very well, that injunction was military: salus meant ‘security, safety’. The consuls must do whatever was needed to ensure the state’s survival. The state’s survival today is not a military but an economic issue. One interesting consequence is that it has become fashionable among the old to express a desire to help by being unlocked at once and so swept away by Covid-19. Then the young, most of

Dot Wordsworth

From milk to prayer: the curious connections of ‘pasture’

‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a tunnel under an Alpine peak. One could almost hear the cowbells and the echo of a yodel. From schooldays the Prime Minister will remember in chapel the Psalm ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, which declares: ‘He shall feed me in a green pasture.’ The Prayer Book superscribes the psalm with its Latin beginning ‘Dominus regit me’. Under Elizabeth I, places where Latin was expected to be understood, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Eton, could use a Book of Common Prayer in Latin. I don’t think it has been much seen

Tuesday

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris needs to start treating Brits like adults again

It turns out that the biggest problem associated with lockdown hasn’t been the ‘covidiots’ – that tiny minority of people who ignored social distancing measures – but the ‘hunker in the bunker’ brigade who, after six weeks of house arrest, can barely envisage ever returning to normal life. Opinion polling shows the UK has one of the most risk averse populations in the world when it comes to the notion of restrictions being lifted. Nearly three quarters of us say we will be ‘very nervous’ about leaving home when limitations on our movement are removed, according to Ipsos Mori. Another poll, from YouGov, found that 28 per cent of us

Monday

John Connolly

Trade minister quits after loan threats

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

Sunday

Robert Peston

Is the PM an example of why those with Covid-19 should be hospitalised earlier?

There is so much to ponder in the prime minister’s interview about how Covid-19 almost killed him. But, in respect of the effort to protect us all, what stood out for me was how and when he was persuaded to move from Downing Street to St Thomas’s Hospital. ‘I wasn’t struggling to breathe but I just wasn’t in good shape and it wasn’t getting better,’ he told the Sun on Sunday. ‘Then the doctors got anxious because they thought that my readings were not where they wanted them to be. ‘Then I was told I had to go into St Thomas’s. I said I really didn’t want to go into

Friday

Katy Balls

Why Covid cuts are off the cards

How will the UK recover after lockdown? Although social distancing is expected to continue for months, talk has turned to how the government will deal with its coronavirus debts. The Treasury is seeking to raise £180 billion over the next three months to meet its pledges – putting the UK on course to see its budget deficit rise to a level never seen before in peacetime. Some estimates put borrowing this financial year at over £300 billion, far outpacing the years following the financial crash. This has led a number of public figures to predict a return to the Cameron and Osborne era with mass cuts in the years ahead. However, when Boris Johnson was

Robert Peston Robert Peston

How the lockdown could be relaxed

We’ll get a fairly detailed plan from the PM next week encouraging businesses to start operating again, public transport to increase its shrunken capacity, and children to return to school. But there’ll be no firm date for any of that to happen – only a condition that even such modest returns to normal life must not risk a dangerous resumption of rapid viral spread. The transport and schools stuff is hardest, because social distancing on a train or on the London Underground is not going to be easy to organise, and keeping young children far enough apart to prevent infection will also be tricky. But maybe employees will be encouraged back to

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Boris’s son is born, Commons sits apart and Belgians told to eat more potatoes

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,

Rachel Johnson

Rachel Johnson: What I wish I’d said about my brother’s treatment

When the post office and stores closed in our village on Exmoor, my youngest stared out of the car window as we drove past and saw its dreaded ‘Closed’ sign and ‘For sale’ placard outside for the first time. ‘That’s my whole childhood,’ he wailed, ‘GONE.’ As an over-50 who’s had peak everything, I can’t complain — out loud anyway — but I find the losses for younger generations too painful to contemplate. No travel, no parties, no pubs, no clubs, no sport, no sex, no education, a life unlived online for the foreseeable. Given how badly Oliver took that one tiny but vital enterprise shutting up shop, I’ve been

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s cautious path out of lockdown

Ever since Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital on 5 April, the government has been in a holding pattern. No big decision could be taken without the Prime Minister, but he was in no position to make one. He is now back at work, though, and has a plan for what to do next. Put simply, it is to drive the coronavirus transmission rate — the reproduction number, or ‘R’, which shows the expected number of infections directly generated by one case — down as low as possible and then stay on top of it through a ‘track, trace and test’ approach. In other words, the government is going to

Bruce Anderson

Clarets to see in the summer

This April was indeed the cruellest month, at least for those of us banged up in cities. From the country came reports of overflowing asparagus beds, the elfin splendour of the bluebell woods, precocious roses: the drinking of rosé, in England, at Easter. Now that we have the prospect of an end to the most onerous restrictions, what is going to happen to the weather? The British approach summer in the same way as the English approach cricket: with mistrust. Glorious days may occur, but there is no faith that they will endure. English cricket and the British climate could share a motto: sic transit. Yet there are ways of

Sunday

Simon Courtauld

The radical history of The Spectator

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

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Vodka, kaolin and morphine: my welcome drinks at The Spectator offices

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

The Spectator

The case for trusting the public is stronger than ever

Our Plan is entirely new, comprising – 1. The whole News of the Week: selected, sifted, condensed and arranged as to be readable throughout. 2. A full and impartial exhibition of all the leading Politics of the Day. 3. A separate Discussion of Interesting Topics of a general nature, with a view to instruction and entertainment at the same time. 4. A Department devoted to Literatures… 5. Dramatic and Musical Criticism. 6. Scientific and Miscellaneous information. — R.S. Rintoul’s announcement of a new weekly, July 1828 In the history of publishing, no magazine has ever printed a 10,000th issue. Until now. The Spectator is unusual not only in that it

Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan: The strange vocabulary of coronavirus

The vocabulary of Brexit has passed into oblivion. Now there’s fresh work to be done. We all know about ‘flattening the curve’, but are you comfortable yet with ‘fomite’, a word my older son, a virologist, taught the family early on? It’s an object or surface on which an infectious agent like a coronavirus might be lying in wait — just for you. A cheque in the post, next door’s cat, the tennis balls you are about to double-fault with — all good candidates. You knew that already. Then how about ‘lipid envelope’, the outer shell of certain viruses. We learn with relief that the envelope of our coronavirus of

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Getting coronavirus does not bring clarity

I had thought that actually getting the coronavirus would bring clarity — that there would be some satisfaction in meeting the enemy, feeling its spectral hands around my lungs. No such luck. Uncertainty is the hallmark of Covid-19. Even its origins are murky: wet markets or the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control? Who knows, and who would ever believe the Chinese government anyway? When you’ve got it, the sense of medieval unknowing only deepens. Is this definitely it? Will it get worse? Will it come back? My version of the virus began with a nasty headache and a grubby feeling of unease, after which I threw up on the bathroom

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Who is in charge of the government?

Boris Johnson is still officially recuperating from coronavirus at Chequers and is ‘not doing government work’, according to No. 10. But he is starting to do some activities that sound distinctly work-related.  He will be having an audience with the Queen over the phone this week, and will also be phoning President Trump on Tuesday to thank him for his wishes when he was in the hospital and to get an update on the G7 response to the crisis. But the Downing Street line remains that ‘he isn’t doing government work but he is getting updates on the situation’. In Westminster, it’s almost as easy to find someone else to

Monday

Steerpike

Keir Starmer comes third in a two horse race

Following a weekend of negative headlines for the government over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, any cross-party truce to hold off criticism of the Prime Minister while he recovers is well and truly over. However, one group with whom Boris Johnson remains popular is the general public. In recent weeks, the Conservatives have enjoyed some of their best approval ratings since Johnson entered office. The election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader was billed as something that could change this. However, so far any Starmer effect has failed to materialise. A YouGov poll asking who out of Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer would make the best Prime Minister puts Johnson in the lead at 46 per

Saturday

Patrick O’Flynn

What the country needs most is Boris Johnson back at his desk

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 of that threat, Johnson’s Downing Street changed the tone by sending out a message telling the British public ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ for their efforts. Though the Government initially claimed Mr Johnson would work on his red boxes and receive briefings while in hospital, this did not actually happen (no doubt due to

Friday

Katy Balls

When will the public accept an end to the lockdown?

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 resistance is the least of ministers’ concerns. The biggest surprise about the lockdown within government has been the level of public support for it. Polling has repeatedly shown that rather than fighting the social distancing measures, Britons are embracing them more obediently than anyone in might have dared imagine. A YouGov poll prior to Raab’s announcement found