Robert Peston is Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. His articles originally appeared on his ITV News blog.
Dominic Cummings’s role in government no longer looks sustainable, as members of the cabinet and Tory MPs turn against him – and in the words of one very senior member of the government, it is “only a matter of time” until the prime minister asks him to go. The problem for Cummings – and the
Dominic Cummings isn’t resigning – or, at least, not by choice. That much is crystal clear from No. 10’s statement that ‘Mr Cummings believes he behaved reasonably and legally’. But it is striking that there is no endorsement from Boris Johnson or the government saying that it was appropriate for him to drive 250 miles with his spouse,
A simple and compelling point was made on Peston by former WHO director Anthony Costello last night: the UK already has a potentially world class network for track and trace in its GP surgeries. But these are being sidelined as outsourcing giants Serco and Sitel have been hired to organise clinical and non clinical people
It is too easy to become obsessive in whole or partial lockdown. And my obsession for weeks now is why ministers and Whitehall failed to learn the big lesson of the 2007/8 banking crisis – namely that high impact, low probability risks wreak maximum damage, and if they have the potential to destroy your way
The miracle achieved by Boris Johnson’s 50-page ‘Plan to rebuild” strategy for ‘Covid-19 recovery’ is that somehow the PM succeeded in alienating the leaders of Wales and Scotland and create an apparent rift between the nations, when the liberation from lockdown he is offering the people of England is so slight as to be barely perceptible. There
There were three messages in Boris Johnson’s address to the nation, and quite a lot of important gaps. The messages were: Because the Covid-19 epidemic has been tempered but not eliminated, lockdown continues – though will be modified very gradually; It would be a jolly good thing if a few more of us could return
What worried cabinet ministers today was the disclosure to them that the rate of transmission of Covid-19 is not properly under control in either hospitals or care homes. In the community, R – the rate of transmission – is probably as low as 0.5/0.6, which means its savage progress through the population has been arrested.
Damian Holland, the former district Crown prosecutor for Luton and Bedfordshire, died in his bed at home in Chorley, Lancashire of Covid-19, just over a week ago. He was 56. His sister, Caroline Heaton, brother, Gregory Holland, and cousin, Chris Hughes, told me about the events leading up to his death. They believe he was
Assume an alert flashes on your NHSX Covid-19 tracking app that you’ve been in contact with someone who has the virus. This means that you and those you live with are supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days (not seven). Now if you have symptoms, you would be allowed to have a test to ascertain whether
There is so much to ponder in the prime minister’s interview about how Covid-19 almost killed him. But, in respect of the effort to protect us all, what stood out for me was how and when he was persuaded to move from Downing Street to St Thomas’s Hospital. ‘I wasn’t struggling to breathe but I
We’ll get a fairly detailed plan from the PM next week encouraging businesses to start operating again, public transport to increase its shrunken capacity, and children to return to school. But there’ll be no firm date for any of that to happen – only a condition that even such modest returns to normal life must not
The road to that unmentionable destination, the lockdown ‘exit’, is long and will take at least nine months. Which means economic recovery will be longer still. And that requires the Chancellor to plan now to make the decline and recovery as benign as possible. Probably the most important economic therapy (and certainly the most expensive)
There’s a confident expectation among those in government and banks that Chancellor Rishi Sunak will offer 100 per cent guarantees on emergency loans to small businesses. But last week the chancellor stated categorically that the 80 per cent government guarantee for the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) would not be changed (which the Prime Minister’s official
The next big event in the saga (I choose my words carefully) of our Covid-19 lockdown is the preliminary results in early May of the Office for National Statistics (ONS)/University of Oxford survey to find out who has had the virus. Officials and ministers hope this will help them to judge how far the current
At the risk of breaching lockdown etiquette, I feel it would be remiss not to mention that the stats on Covid-19 infections, hospital admissions and deaths have been stable or falling for around a fortnight. Since 5 April, there have been many more tests for coronavirus carried out, but numbers testing positive have been falling,
The government’s excuse for why it didn’t engage in a comprehensive testing and tracking approach to contain Covid-19 after it started to spread throughout the community was that – unlike Germany and South Korea – it did not have the sufficient number of labs to process the tests. Well that excuse is almost exhausted, because
Paul Marshall makes the compelling point that mistakes have almost certainly been made by scientists and Public Health England. However, in the British system, power lies not with the scientists and officials, but with elected politicians. And I have been concerned since the start of this outbreak that ministers were using the expert advice of
What we learned on Thursday is that, at least while the Prime Minister is convalescing, the boffins of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies are, in effect, running the country. Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Boris Johnson, made it crystal clear that he and his fellow ministers – who met on Thursday in
Before the government announced its Covid-19 economic safeguarding scheme to pay up to £2,500 a month to ‘furloughed’ or rested employees – the ‘Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme’ – a number of business owners and managers talked to me about their creative ideas to continue operating and trading on a different model after lockdown. But as soon
The stories I hear from what healthcare workers call ‘the frontline’ – code for those working directly with Covid-19 patients – are traumatising. ‘I am seeing scores of death,’ says one senior doctor. ‘It’s hideous… I’m palliating [giving temporary relief to] people in their 70s to 90s on the wards who were never remotely suitable for
