Robert Peston

The Prime Minister only has himself to blame for the public outcry over 70-year-olds being vaccinated when there are still many over 80-year-olds waiting even to be invited to be vaccinated. What I mean by this is that there was a perfectly good argument for vaccinating 70-to-80 year olds before the more elderly, or at

We are supposedly getting a lot more data on the numbers of us being vaccinated, later on Monday. What’s less clear is whether we will be getting data that is useful. Here is what we should be told on a granular daily basis, to reinforce confidence both that the vaccination operation is efficient and effective

As I mentioned on Monday, in a fortnight AstraZeneca will be putting 2 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine into vials every week. At that point the limiting factor on how many people can be vaccinated will switch from manufacturing to distribution – and in particular how long it takes to ‘process’ each person who

Here are the numbers that show why schools are very unlikely to re-open any time soon in London and the south east, and why within a week or so the whole country may be in a lockdown that includes school closures. Tier 4, the so-called “stay-at-home tier”, is broadly equivalent to the two-week circuit-breaking lockdown

As many hospitals struggle to cope with a surge of Covid-19 patients, the most important judgement yet to be made about 2020 is how much difference it would have made had England been pre-emptively locked down in September. This is not an academic question. Because there were two separate occasions in September when the prime

We are back in a full-scale economic crisis. In London and the south east, the richest part of the UK and engine of the economy, normal commerce has been suspended by the imposition of Tier 4. And the decision of much of the EU and a growing number of rich countries to put the whole UK

Here is the fundamental stumbling block to a free trade deal, one that the Prime Minister has just confirmed in PMQs. And it is not clear how it can be sorted. The EU wants the unilateral right to toughen up its labour laws, or environmental standards or other so-called level playing field rules.  Any such new

There is a tonne of contradictory stuff flying around about what Michel Barnier says is the EU’s bottom line for fair competition in any free trade agreement with the UK. As I understand it, what follows is the EU’s position. For the ‘level playing field commitments’ there should be ‘non-regression’ — i.e. on standards for

I’ve been passed the government’s ‘reasonable worst case scenario planning assumptions to support civil contingencies planning for the end of the transition period’. The 34-page document describes itself as a ‘challenging manifestation of the risk in question’ but ‘not an extreme or absolute worst case scenario’. A government source confirmed the official sensitive document, which

These are confusing times for all of us. But for small-government libertarian Tories, Covid-19 is all their worst nightmares compressed into nine months. It is hard to think of any basic civil liberty that hasn’t been impinged in the cause of limiting the spread of coronavirus, except perhaps freedom of speech. As for Thatcherite constraints

There is a view that we don’t have to worry about the record debt the government has accumulated since coronavirus laid waste to our way of life and our economy. And in two senses I would half agree – though the other half of me is wracked with anxiety.  First, this is not a uniquely

Nothing will be decided in a formal sense until all four nations of the United Kingdom are as one. And the decision is slightly harder because Northern Ireland’s leadership wants a Christmas consensus with Dublin. But it is looking highly probable that all four UK governments’ special Christmas exemption from coronavirus restrictions will allow us

On 24 July last year, I wrote that the government of Boris Johnson was being taken over by Dominic Cummings and his Vote Leave team. That was not hyperbole. Since then, both the reality of Cummings and the myths about him, have defined Johnson’s first 16 months as Prime Minister. Which is why, as one Downing

The Bank of England includes as one of its ‘conditioning assumptions’ in its forecasts today that the Bank Rate – the interest rate that is the benchmark for all rates – becomes negative for the first time in history next year, at minus 0.1 per cent. It describes a world in which banks are charged

These are the measures to be announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his 5 p.m. press conference, as I understand it. They will last until 2 December. And they are, in effect, a new ‘Tier 4’ that will be imposed for a month – initially to the whole of England – in a bid