Lockdown

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

In defence of Emily in Paris

A frothy new drama called Emily in Paris arrived on Netflix last month. Starring Lily Collins — daughter of Phil — it tells the story of a pretty social media ‘expert’ who moves from Chicago to Paris, where she manages to offend almost everybody she meets, and yet somehow triumphs. It is Eloise in Paris for the Instagram/Trump generation. The show is a croquembouche-esque fantasy of Frenchness. Anorexic-looking chicks eat croissants and pretend to enjoy them. There are pre-war apartments with parquet flooring, and windows decorated with twinkling fairy lights. The men are handsome bastards who know how to cook omelettes. This is television designed for women the world over

Sam Carlisle

What lockdown means for families with disabled children

When lockdown starts, all kinds of things stop. The first one, in March, was the worst time of my life as a parent, not because of my daughter’s severe disabilities, but because of the lack of support. Elvi is 19. She has a mental age of three, sleeps four hours a night and can’t walk. She has to be showered, dressed, fed and physically moved around our home. I have learned so much from my beautiful, funny daughter. She works incredibly hard to achieve the smallest things. We were told Elvi wouldn’t live past two and that she was unlikely to speak. In the summer she said her first five-word

Tuesday

Stephen Griffin

The problem with the Great Barrington Declaration

With England returning to a full national lockdown, calls for a different response — a so-called ‘segmentation strategy’ — have also reappeared. The idea behind such an approach is that a ‘vulnerable’ section of the population is effectively sealed off from the rest of society. Meanwhile, SARS-CoV2 is allowed to spread among the remaining population, generating herd immunity which will eventually protect the entire population. This is the core principle of the Great Barrington Declaration, which has attracted a large amount of media attention since its inception a few weeks ago. This approach has had considerable appeal to those seeking to minimise the impact of the pandemic for a variety of reasons, be they

Monday

Marcus Walker

If anything is essential, it’s worship

That the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. There are few clauses of Magna Carta that are still in force today. Most have been whittled away by the stultifying hands of generations of bureaucrats. But one clause still stands in its in 800-year-old majesty: that the Church of England shall be free. (I realise that my Roman Catholic readers might quibble about what was meant by the Church of England in 1217, but I ask you to bear with me). Freedom of religion is a cornerstone of a free people. It stands at the heart of every declaration and charter of

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Why has Boris closed the churches?

This morning, my son, who’s 17, was turned away from our local church. The designated spaces for people attending mass were full. He tried to book online at the church down the road – they were full too (and last week they turned my daughter away). It was too late to make an online booking for the lunchtime mass at the London Oratory, but the reservations system for the tea-time mass was still open, so he’s booked that, on a system that hilariously resembles the booking system for a commercial theatre, except that it concludes, which they don’t, with God Bless You. I say this not to expose my failings

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Backsliding on a lockdown end-date has begun already

Will England’s lockdown end on 2 December? Even before this morning’s media round there was good reason to suspect it might not. The first national lockdown – we were originally told – would be for three weeks, with the explicit aim of building more capacity in the National Health Service. But the goalposts shifted and three weeks turned into more than three months: despite daily Covid deaths peaking in April, pubs and restaurants didn’t reopen until early July. Weeks later gyms and other leisure sectors followed, and public transport guidance changed to encourage employees back to their offices. This morning, half a day after the Prime Minister laid out his

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Instead of lockdown, let’s create a National Shielding Service

So what would you do? That was the question that cropped up on my Twitter timeline after I’d sent out various tweets condemning the shambolic decision by Boris Johnson to order another England-wide lockdown. I noticed the same question in the replies to an anti-lockdown tweet sent out by the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges too. And it is a fair one that I think deserves an answer from commentators used to throwing rotten tomatoes at the stage but seldom willing to climb up on it. So here is mine: First, it is too late to call off the lockdown now, as preparations for another approach will take some time.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: new lockdown ‘could be extended’

Michael Gove – New lockdown ‘could be extended’ Yesterday Boris Johnson announced that England would be entering another lockdown as of this Thursday, which will last for, at the very least, the entirety of November. Sophy Ridge’s first guest of the day was the Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, who told her that the envisioned end-date of Wednesday 2nd December was subject to change if the rates of Covid infection could not be reduced: SR: If the data on the whole is not looking as you are hoping, then the national lockdown could be extended? MG: We will always take a decision in the national interest, based on evidence… SR:

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The long winter – why Covid restrictions could last until April

Not much makes sense during a pandemic but in recent weeks the Covid puzzle has become a deeper mystery. When local lockdowns failed, the solution was to try even more of them. Manchester was put into Tier 3 restrictions when its Covid cases were falling; now there’s talk of a Tier 4. Confirmed infections are nowhere near the 50,000 a day that Boris Johnson’s scientific advisers warned about last month – but the panic now seems far greater. The fear, of course, comes from what officials think will happen next. We’re told that the Prime Minister fears a second wave larger than the first, but we’re not really told why. Decisions

Allison Pearson Allison Pearson

Mark Drakeford has made Wales a laughing stock

Imagine a country where you’re allowed to buy vodka and cigarettes but not baby clothes, because they are ‘non-essential’. A place where supermarkets can sell you socks but, mysteriously, neither tights nor lightbulbs. All right, you may plunge to your death down a dimly lit staircase in Pontarddulais, but at least you didn’t get that terrible Covid. Often the butt of ignorant jokes, my homeland Wales is now quite rightly a laughing stock. Supermarkets have been allowed to remain open during the 17-day ‘firebreak’ — or Llockdown as it could more honestly be described. But Welsh Labour, led by First Minister Mark Drakeford, has banned them from selling household goods,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Finally a lockdown drama that will endure: James Graham’s Bubble reviewed

Theatres can open if they want to. That’s the current position. The only factor keeping a playhouse dark is a lack of guts or imagination on the part of its leadership. A small pub in Vauxhall, The Eagle, is mounting new plays in its garden space to raise everyone’s morale. Punters must wear masks and sit in bubbles. ‘We’re adhering to the government guidelines,’ announced the artistic director before the start, ‘which are changing all the time.’ The show is a feelgood musical about drifters and dreamers in their twenties trying to make it in New York. Waverley wants to be an actress but her plans are blown off course

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

A circuit breaker would break the economy

More jobs will be lost in the long run. Businesses will go under. And government debt will soar even higher. Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds is pushing the argument that a circuit breaker — that is a short, sharp national lockdown — will be cheaper in the long run. It will keep the virus under control, and therefore enable the economy to bounce back quicker. Channelling her inner Gordon Brown, she has even come up with a very precise figure for that. Apparently, not having a circuit breaker will cost us £110 billion. But hold on. Even leaving aside the point that precise estimates should always make us suspicious —

Sunday

Dr Chris Papadopoulos

Chess vs football: the vital distinction in lockdown strategy

Nearly a month ago, I called for an urgent 24-day full national lockdown, arguing that the restrictions were unlikely to make a significant difference in reducing transmission. If we had acted strongly and decisively then, and implemented a circuit-breaker lockdown — as we now know that the government’s scientific advisory group Sage also wanted — we would be in a much stronger position today. Many readers considered it a controversial and unwise strategy. The government agreed, declining Sage’s advice and instead announcing the eventual rollout of a three-tier system covering areas of ‘medium’, ‘high’ and ‘very high’ risk, each with their own restrictions. Yet case rates, hospitalisations and deaths continue to increase across the country.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Angry Burnham takes on No. 10

Keir Starmer has made life difficult for Boris Johnson this week with his demand for a circuit-breaker lockdown. But the Labour leader’s colleague Andy Burnham is currently presenting a far greater threat to the Prime Minister. On Thursday, the Mayor of Greater Manchester gave a furious speech in which he accused the government of being ‘willing to sacrifice jobs here to save them elsewhere’ while treating his area like ‘canaries in the coalmine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy’. The government, he argued, was treating the North with ‘contempt’ by telling regional leaders there wasn’t enough money to protect jobs during the new restrictions while spending large sums on consultants

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: new alerts, birthday honours and fires on Kilimanjaro

Home ‘The weeks and months ahead will continue to be difficult and will test the mettle of this country,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said in the Commons. In a complicated new system meant to be a simplification, English regions were put into one of three tiers of alert level: 1, medium; 2, high; or 3, very high, according to the proportion of coronavirus cases there. In tier 3, further local restrictions could be added. Liverpool was selected for tier 3, in which betting shops and libraries would close and pubs too, unless they sold main meals. Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, called for a two- or

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

How new Covid restrictions are stalling the economy

The theory behind a V-shaped recovery relied on the assumption that the economy would open up almost as quickly as it shut down. This did not happen. The UK moved at a much slower pace than its European counterparts exiting stringent lockdown measures. And already restrictions are being implemented again. August’s GDP figures were surprisingly dismal, and now all future monthly updates for economic growth will be affected by a longer list of restrictions that are bound to impact recovery. As a result, scenarios for the UK’s economic recovery are being revised to reflect this. In the last day, we’ve had two updates: one from the IFS’s Green Budget (in association with

Monday

James Forsyth

Chris Whitty: tier three alone will not be enough

Chris Whitty made clear at tonight’s press conference with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that he doesn’t think that the tier three restrictions are enough to get on top of the virus in the worst hit places. He was explicit that local councils will need to go even further in terms of closures in some places. Later in the press conference he said that the government ‘knew full lockdown works’ but it was also aware of the societal and economic harm it does, and the government rightly wants to keep schools open. Taken together, the answers strongly implied that Whitty thinks that in Covid hotspots everything apart from schools

Thursday

The Spectator

What happens when a US president dies?

Vice squad Donald Trump catching Covid-19 has concentrated minds on what happens if a US president dies in office. Normally, the vice-president will take over — which is why it matters who is on the ballot. In 1972, however, Americans had no idea who would end up president by the end of what should have been Richard Nixon’s second term. Nixon’s vice-president was Spiro Agnew, but he was forced to resign after pleading ‘no contest’ to charges of tax evasion. Nixon then appointed House leader Gerald Ford as vice-president. Ford became president when Nixon himself resigned before he was impeached over the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Ford lost to

Susan Hill Susan Hill

East Anglia is the place for birds

I first visited Orford in 1970, at peak Cold War when this stretch of the East Anglian coast was one of the most dangerous places to be, so that for three months of each winter living in Aldeburgh, I was perfectly positioned for maximum danger between Orford Ness with its secret atomic weapon testing, and Sizewell’s nuclear power station. I was too busy writing books to worry but Orford, bristling with military security and terrifying ‘Keep out’ notices, gave me nightmares. Now it is quiet save for some magnificent gales and rain battering the windows of this house overlooking the water. I am in mid-book as usual, and Orford Ness

Rachel Johnson

All these lockdown puppies come at a price

‘Book H in for a colonoscopy at a private clinic,’ begins one entry in Sasha Swire’s enjoyable diaries about her husband (which she should have called What Hugo Did During Term-Time.) She accompanies him to his appointment — whether for juicy material or moral support, we are not told — and relates how the bored consultant bangs on in detail, not about her hubby’s bum, but about the time his pointer swallowed a budgie. ‘As for their fees, simply extortionate!’ the expensive consultant whines in conclusion of a ‘violent diatribe’ against our world-beating veterinarian profession. At this flagrant pot and kettling, Lady Swire flares up: ‘It’s a racket — not