Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
19 min listen
Boris Johnson once boasted that you couldn’t hold a cigarette paper between him and David Frost, the man he brought on to take Brexit over the line. Yet this key ally has resigned when the Prime Minister is at his most vulnerable. In his resignation letter, Lord Frost cites his concerns on whether the country
The latest Sage papers have been published, envisaging anything from 200 to 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron depending on how many more restrictions we’ll get — up to and very much including another lockdown. Earlier today I had an unexpected chance to ask questions of Graham Medley, the chair of the Sage modelling committee. He’s
It’s an open secret that ministers are nervous about advice from Sage, given its track record in exaggerating the risk posed by Covid. But where else to look? One answer is to the financial markets, who have only one question: is Omicron going to be genuinely more severe? If so then it’s time to sell.
When asked what went wrong in North Shropshire, Boris Johnson gave a fascinating answer: journalists. Apparently, they have been reporting the wrong kind of stuff. He told Sam Coates of Sky News: Basically, what’s been going wrong, Sam, is that in the last few weeks some things have been going well. But what the people have been
We have just witnessed one of the most dramatic defeats in the history of British by-elections. A 38 per cent swing against the governing party has happened only a handful of times in postwar politics and tends to be a sign of bad things to come. The last time the Tories lost a safe seat to the
11 min listen
The Conservative majority of 23,000 was wiped out overnight in North Shropshire, with Liberal Democrat Helen Morgan winning the by-election by nearly 6,000 votes. Tory MPs are already making their frustrations known, with Roger Gale saying Boris Johnson has ‘one more strike and he’s out’, and John Redwood saying it’s ‘Time to listen to Conservatives.’
90 min listen
Welcome to the special Christmas episode of The Edition! In this episode, we look at five major topics that dominated the news this year and the pages of The Spectator. First up a review of the year in politics with our resident Coffee House Shots’ team James Forsyth, Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. We discuss
21 min listen
Last night Boris Johnson suffered the biggest rebellion of his Tory premiership. But, unlike his predecessor, he still managed to get his vote through with Labour’s support. Nearly 100 Conservative MPs voted against the government’s plans for vaccine passports. Their reasons for rebelling varied. For some, they want to send a message to the PM
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Cindy Yu talks to Katy Balls, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson about the contents of – and the potential fallout from – Boris Johnson’s address to the nation last night.
Sajid Javid ditched vaccine passports when he became Health Secretary but he now has to bring them in again, albeit in an updated form where a lateral flow negative test will also be accepted. But how to get this past the Commons where 65 MPs have now decided to rebel? How to do this now given
37 min listen
In this week’s episode: Is there any substance to the government’s new drugs agenda? In The Spectator this week Fraser Nelson writes the cover story on the government’s new 10 years drugs plan and finds that while on the surface this seems like a new war on drugs, it might actually have some thoughtful and
If progress is ever made in the ‘war on drugs’, it will be thanks to people like Lorna Hughes. She runs a community centre in the Bell Foundry council estate in Loughborough. It was set up by residents appalled at how their neighbourhood had sunk into an underworld of drugs and crime. They wanted someone
15 min listen
Cindy Yu talks to Kate Andrews, Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson about the contents of the Prime Minster’s latest Covid press conference.
20 min listen
It is all kicking off in Westminster. A leaked video has emerged where the former Prime Minister’s spokesperson is seen laughing when questioned about a Christmas party at 10 Downing Street last year. In yet another blow, many Conservatives shared their dismay at the leaked footage. At PMQs, Boris Johnson said that he is furious
15 min listen
With the Omicron variant putting everyone on edge, there has been quite a bit of mixed messaging from the government about how we should all be conducting ourselves this festive period. With a bizarre emphasis placed on snogging – some preaching caution, others saying snog away. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard people say the
10 min listen
A new Covid variant dubbed ‘Nu’ has been discovered in South Africa and the UK has already put travel restrictions in place. Though early tests have shown that Nu is more transmissible, we don’t know conclusively if it is any more deadly or can evade vaccines. ‘We don’t know yet, whether this variant is more
13 min listen
Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson about the latest lockdown in Austria, the prospect of Germany following suit, and Austria’s plans for mandatory vaccination.
15 min listen
COP26 is now over, but was it a flop? Even Alok Sharma, the President of COP26, apologised on the last day for ‘the way this process has unfolded’, as he teared up when announcing the final agreement to phase down, rather than phase out, coal. On this episode, Cindy Yu talks to Fraser Nelson and
Amanda Pritchard, the new NHS England chief executive, has had quite a week. She wrote an article for the Health Service Journal about the pressures on the NHS and followed up with a Sky News interview where she had this to say: Where did she get that 14 times figure from? By using statistics in
17 min listen
British troops have been deployed to the Polish border as part of a ‘reconnaissance’ mission, as Poland tries to stop migrants crossing from Belarus. Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, backed by Russia, is flying Syrian, Iraqi and Yemeni citizens into his country and encouraging them to cross the border into Poland. As the United States turns