Matthew Lynn

High Street chains are closing all the time. The restaurant chains are shutting their doors. The gyms are going out of business and it doesn't look as if all the airlines will survive. There have been lots of different industries that have been wiped out this year. But now we can add one more to the list: the polling companies. It remains to be seen who won the US Presidential election. Donald Trump and Joe Biden may fight it out for a few more days yet. But it is absolutely clear who lost. The people who are paid plenty of money to talk to voters and work out what they are thinking. It was meant to be a 'Blue Wave', meaning the Democrats would take both the White House and Congress, probably in a landslide.

Infections are rising. Hospitals will be overwhelmed. And very soon the vulnerable will start to die. From today, the Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford is closing down Wales with one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe, shuttering all but essential shops. For the next 17 days, hotels, pubs, restaurants and for a while, schools, will be closed as well. That is meant to fight Covid-19. And yet now the small print is emerging it is increasingly looking like something else is going on in Wales: a war against the economy and the free market. It would be easy to imagine that the Welsh lockdown is very similar to the national one in April and May. In most ways it is.

More help for bars and restaurants. Grants for businesses that are forced to close. Additional funding for the self-employed. The Chancellor Rishi Sunak has started shaking the magic money tree again, promising extra assistance to keep the economy alive during a second wave of Covid-19. There is a problem, however, and as the Chancellor runs through rescue package after rescue package it is becoming increasingly apparent. While Sunak is very good at coming up with wheezes to get through the next few weeks there isn’t yet much sign of a plan for a post-Covid economy – and that is increasingly what is needed. The problem is not the measures themselves.

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 — is it really £110 billion, rather £107 billion, or £113 billion? — that is crazy.

Fake companies set up under false names. Phantom employees invented to claim compensation. Start-ups trousering loans for ventures that don’t exist. Meals that were never eaten. The British economy has been in a bad place for the last six months. But it turns out one small corner of the economy has been flourishing: defrauding the public purse. The Chancellor's extraordinarily generous range of schemes to keep businesses afloat may have been necessary to prevent a complete collapse in output. But they have also proved a bonanza for spivs, chancers and con men, and that too will have a cost.

It will involve hundreds of hours of haggling over thousands of different products. It will have to pass torturous debates in Congress. And it will have to survive an election cycle or two. There are lots of hurdles in the way of a British trade deal with the United States. But now we have perhaps the greatest obstacle of all. Jamie Oliver doesn’t like it. Fresh from tidying up the collapse of his restaurant chain, and reminding us all how to get through lockdown by rustling up a tasty pasta bake, the chef is back with a new campaign, this time against ‘sub-standard’ American food. There is a problem, however. There is a very simple solution to the different ways food is produced on either side of the Atlantic.

Even a politician as tenaciously optimistic as Matt Hancock was struggling to put any positive spin on it: the world has woken up to the disappointing news that trials of the Oxford vaccine for Covid-19 had been paused after an adverse reaction in one patient. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was one of seven in Phase 3 trials, in which doses are administered to thousands of people of different ages and varying states of health. A spokesperson at Oxford has said the pause ‘is a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the studies, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials.

It is, by any measure, a heck of a lot of pizza. The ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme turns out to have been a huge success. We learned today that is was used more than a 100 million times in August. In many cities, it was virtually impossible to get a table from Monday to Wednesday. Plenty of restaurants were grateful for the sudden boom in business, and no doubt a few were saved from closure. There is a problem, however, and it is a significant one. It turns out that we have a Chancellor who struggles to add up, and Treasury officials who don’t know much about basic economics – and that matters. By any measure, Rishi Sunak’s half-price meal deal, launched to persuade us all to get back into the habit of eating out again, has been a hit.

Donald Trump is, perhaps predictably enough, pulling out of the World Health’s Organisation’s global vaccine programme. The Russian president Vladimir Putin has been cutting every corner to get a Russian shot out first, while allegedly sending spies to steal the Oxford one. And China is racing to have the first vaccine on the market, already trying one out on the military, and allegedly hacking the US company Moderna. As the Covid-19 crisis drags out, ‘vaccine nationalism’ is rampant. Everyone from the WHO to the European Union to the United Nations solemnly condemns that. We all have to work together to find a vaccine, and then distribute it fairly, we keep being told.