Liaison committee

Tuesday

Oscar Edmondson

What happened at the Liaison Committee?

16 min listen

Parliament is about to go into recess for the Easter holiday and so – as is customary – Keir Starmer sat in front of the Liaison Committee this afternoon, where he was grilled on topics including tariffs, defence and welfare. This comes on the day when there has been a momentary reprieve in the markets, which experienced a modest bounce – most likely as a result of suggestions from Trump that he is willing to negotiate with China. Markets seem to have priced in that these tariffs could be negotiated down, but that is of course a big ‘if’. The question remains for Keir Starmer: what more can he do

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Will you need a vaccine passport to go to the pub?

Boris Johnson has spent the afternoon giving evidence to the Liaison Committee made up of select committee chairs. The Prime Minister was quizzed on a range of topics from the UK’s vaccination programme to Brexit issues for the music sector. Here are five main takeaways from the session:1. Vaccine passports could be needed to go to the pub It wasn’t so long ago that ministers in Boris Johnson’s government were insisting that immunity certificates were most definitely not coming to the UK. How times have changed. Today Johnson said the ‘basic concept of vaccine certification should not be totally alien to us’. Asked whether pubs will be able to bar

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Boris’s Brexit music gaffe

Boris Johnson appeared before the Liaison Committee this afternoon to face a smorgasbord of select committee chairs on everything from pubs to passports. After culture chief Julian Knight grilled Johnson on the continued problems facing British musicians touring Europe, Liaison chair Bernard Jenkin took his chance to nimbly interject. Westminster’s answer to the ‘capo dei capi’ took the chance to pose a question of his own: would the PM would join him on a Zoom call to hear performers’ vociferous concerns for the purpose of ‘listening and gathering intelligence’? Unfortunately Johnson appeared ignorant of the reams of intelligence already gathered in various broadsheets the past three months on this subject, including a letter signed

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

What we learnt from the PM’s Liaison Committee hearing

Boris Johnson has previously enjoyed Liaison Committee hearings rather too much, trying to get through the long session with select committee chairs using humour and optimism. Both were in rather short supply on Wednesday, as you might expect given the UK’s current predicament in the pandemic. The Prime Minister covered a lot of ground, and not just when it came to coronavirus. On the pandemic, he warned that the ‘risk is very substantial’ that hospital intensive care capacity is ‘overtopped’. He also said that the government did not know whether the vaccines stop transmission of the virus as well as reduce the severity for each person, or indeed whether the