Coronavirus

Boris Johnson’s decision to impose a third national lockdown in England has won approval in the Commons by an overwhelming majority – with 524 MPs voting for the measures to just 16 against. It comes after only a handful of Tory MPs suggested they would oppose the lockdown measures in the debate on the issue today. This means that the new national lockdown will be in place for at least seven weeks – with many MPs expecting it to roll on longer. However, while the legislation allows for the lockdown to remain in place until the end of March, Johnson has signalled to MPs that he will return to the Commons for a vote if

As I mentioned on Monday, in a fortnight AstraZeneca will be putting 2 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine into vials every week. At that point the limiting factor on how many people can be vaccinated will switch from manufacturing to distribution – and in particular how long it takes to ‘process’ each person who turns up to be vaccinated. It allegedly takes three times longer in the UK than in Israel to do the on-site paperwork for each vaccinated person. Which, if true, means the UK would be processing a smaller number of people than it could be vaccinating every day. And in the current raging epidemic that would

­­During the battle against Covid-19, the government’s priority has been to ensure that schools remain open. Their rationale has been that closing schools would threaten children’s life chances. Covid’s risk to children, ministers argued, is relatively low while the cost of stunted learning is severe. But the new variant has changed that calculation. Prior to this mutation, children accounted for only a small percentage of Covid-19 infections and therefore keeping schools open was a reasonably safe course of action. Now case rates are rapidly increasing to previously unseen heights, leaving the NHS creaking at its seams. There is preliminary evidence suggesting that the new variant is more transmissible among the

More than 75 per cent of England will be in the top tier of coronavirus restrictions from midnight after Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a large number of areas would move up into Tier 4. This is part of an attempt to contain the spread of the new variant of Covid-19, as hospitals come under what Hancock described as ‘significant pressure’ to treat surging numbers of patients with the virus. Hancock was speaking on what he described as a day of ‘mixed emotions’, and he was naturally keen to emphasise the difference that the approval of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine would make to the length of time people will be subject

The reaction of the French commentariat to the Brexit partnership agreement will be largely one of extreme irritation that the traditional Christmas Eve dinner was so crudely interrupted. Any initial response to the deal has been rather abbreviated. Nobody has read the fine print. The usual pundits are out of town. Brexit has never been a subject central to French political discourse and since Covid it has shrunk further as a preoccupation of the country. The news channels with their skeleton holiday crews have been unable to mount a full-blown orgy of live remotes from Europe’s capitals and have resorted to more marginal regional figures, focusing on the fishing ports.

It seems like a lifetime ago when the Imperial College academic Neil Ferguson was caught breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover. Since then, a whole series of mad, bad and downright nonsense regulations have come and gone. At the time though, the breach was taken very seriously by both the government and Ferguson himself, who had been the main champion of strict lockdown rules being instated in Britain. On 5 May, Ferguson promised to stand down as a government advisor, saying he regretted ‘undermining’ the government’s harsh measures on social distancing. His decision was backed by the government. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said Ferguson had made ‘the