Government

You’ve just become prime minister. The public finances are in a mess, the Bank of England has stoked inflation, cutting taxes may make it worse, energy prices are through the roof, people are hurting so you can’t cut social spending, the Health Service is lengthening its waiting lists despite record budgets. What can you do? Given that you will be hearing a lot from people who do governing all day, here are ten things to remember on behalf of the rest of us – the governed: Assume all public bodies have the same goal – and it isn’t what it says on the tin. You might think the Committee for

Andrei Kelin – Russian war crimes allegations are ‘a fabrication’ Clive Myrie took the reins of the BBC’s Sunday Morning show, and the centrepiece was a pre-recorded interview with the Russian ambassador Andrei Kelin. Myrie confronted Kelin with evidence of war crimes by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, as in the town of Bucha and the razing of Mariupol. Kelin spent the interview stonewalling most of Myrie’s claims: Brandon Lewis – If we don’t stand up to Russia now, what’s next? Myrie went on to interview the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis. He asked Lewis if the UK government was prepared to ask Ukraine to cede territory to Russia in order

Is the government considering activating its ‘plan B’ Covid plans? Not yet.  After the Business Secretary played down talk of new restrictions this morning, Sajid Javid used today’s press conference to confirm that he would not be implementing the back-up plan ‘at this point’. However, the Health Secretary suggested that further measures – namely vaccine passports, work-from-home orders and mask mandates – could not be ruled out if the data substantially worsens. The main message from the press conference: get vaccinated There was a marked change in tone from Javid since the days soon after his appointment as Health Secretary when he declared that there was ‘no going back’. He said that

On the walls of the Chancellor’s office hangs a print of Eric Ravilious’s lithograph ‘Working Controls while Submerged’ (1941). Two engineers in blue overalls heave the levers of a submarine. A third slumps asleep on a bench. An image, perhaps, of the ship of state, several hundred feet underwater, but by no means sunk yet. We might picture Rishi Sunak in the Treasury control room, changing the gears, working the pumps, keeping the country bumping along even at the bottom of the economic ocean. Or perhaps Sunak looks at his four framed screen-prints by the artist Justine Smith — ‘Pound’, ‘Euro’, ‘Dollar’, ‘Yen’ — and thinks: if only it were

The government always knew it would have to expend political capital to get its planning reforms through. Making it easier to build houses was never going to be popular with Tories in leafy areas. The benefit of an 80-seat majority was meant to be the ability to push through difficult but important changes. The problem is, as I say in the magazine this week, that the government has been expending political capital on rather a lot of other things recently. Tory MPs are in a fractious mood, irritated by the number of U-turns, and opposition to planning reform is beginning to build up. One normally mild-mannered former cabinet minister tells

The Prime Minister wants us back to normal by Christmas. If he is serious, then his government needs to take a big step forward in how it communicates evidence on Covid-19 with the public. Every day we get new insights about the coronavirus from research and statistics. Yet, for some reason, the government is holding its cards close to its chest about how it is assessing new scientific developments, and how this may affect policy decisions. Government communications currently seem to avoid telling people where their risks from Covid are actually low. There is a general reluctance to speak openly about how risk is assessed and the trade-offs there are

It’s never a good sign when a government relaunches itself. Look what happened at the end of Theresa May’s time in power — there was a relaunch almost every other week, each one with diminishing effect. But although it has been over-hyped, Boris Johnson’s attempt to start again isn’t a mere re-branding exercise. It is not just about rehashing policy proposals but about trying to tackle the dysfunction at the heart of the state. The PM is attempting to do something past leaders have thought to be an impossible job: to rewire the whole system. Johnson has time on his side — four years to get things back on track

Michael Gove gave the Ditchley Annual Lecture on Saturday in which he discussed the responsibility of government and the need for Whitehall reform. The full speech is below. Writing in his Prison Notebooks, ninety years ago, the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci defined our times. “The crisis consists precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying – and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Gramsci’s analysis was developed between 1929 and 1935. The stability of the Edwardian Age – of secure crowns, borderless travel, imperial administrative elites and growing economic globalisation – was a memory. The inherited world of aristocratic

The Tory parliamentary party is in a febrile mood. As I say in the Times on Saturday, the two-metre rule has become a particular focus of MPs ire. It is now symbolic for them of a cautious approach to lockdown easing, which they fear could lead to the UK having one of the slowest economic recoveries, as well as one of the worst death tolls, in Europe. Optimists in government are confident that the two-metre rule will be gone by the time that pubs and restaurants reopen on the 4 July. Interestingly, the guidance to those establishments that will be given the go-ahead to resume then doesn’t emphasise the two-metre rule. But

Upon how many fronts can a government fight at any one time? Political capital has a short-enough half-life as it is without the risk of it being diluted through simultaneous multiple battles. Concentration of political firepower matters. At a rough count, Boris Johnson’s ministry is currently fighting the civil service, the media, the European Union and now, of course, a looming public health emergency from a likely coronavirus epidemic. There is also the small matter of a budget and the government’s actual – or, if you prefer, notional – plans for ‘levelling-up’ the United Kingdom. Some of these are more significant problems than others, and some of them required no

Who runs Britain? When Boris Johnson’s lawyers made their case in front of the Supreme Court this week, defending his right to prorogue parliament, they in effect brought it back to this simple question. This was a controversy for politicians to settle, not courts. Judges, they said, should think twice about ‘entering the political arena’ and unsettling the UK’s ‘careful constitutional and political balance’. He may be the first prime minister to frame the matter so starkly, but no previous prime minister has had to. This is about far more than Brexit. Britain is witnessing political litigation on a hitherto unseen scale. We have a government that has lost a