The Spectator

Coronavirus predictions Sir: While precautionary advice regarding the coronavirus should be followed, Ross Clark is right (‘Feverish imaginations’, 29 February) to urge an open mind on the doomsday predictions which are edging us towards panic. In 1996 the then government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Kenneth Calman, predicted that 500,000 people could die within a few years from the human form of BSE. Another official adviser, Professor Richard Lacey, described the disease as ‘the time bomb of the 20th century, equivalent to the bubonic plague’. In the event, the reported death toll was 177, while the scare cost the UK an estimated £7 billion.

News broke this morning that the former head of the Equalities Commission Sir Trevor Phillips had been suspended from the Labour party over allegations of Islamophobia. Phillips has spent his career documenting the realities of race and integration in British life.  The think tank Policy Exchange has now released the correspondence between Sir Trevor and the Labour party disciplinary department. Phillips is a senior fellow at the research institute.

Home After a Cobra emergency meeting about the coronavirus Covid-19, when the number of cases in the United Kingdom had reached 40, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said that they had ‘agreed a plan so that as and when it starts to spread — as I’m afraid it looks likely that it will — we are in a position to take the steps that will be necessary’. The plan expects up to a fifth of the workforce to be off sick during the peak of an epidemic. After a week in which shares lost 12 per cent of their value, the Bank of England said that it was working ‘to ensure all necessary steps are taken to protect financial and monetary stability’. The Budget had to be adjusted.

The government has released its official action plan to deal with the coronavirus epidemic, warning people that 'we are all susceptible to catching this disease'.  During a press conference at Downing Street this morning, the Prime Minister told reporters that the government's plan involved four phases: 'contain, delay, research, mitigate'. Boris Johnson said: 'Let me be absolutely clear that for the overwhelming majority of people who contract the virus this will be a mild disease from which they will speedily and fully recover'.  However, he added: 'It is highly likely that we will see a growing number of UK cases'. There are currently 51 known cases across the UK.

A cornerstone of any -functioning democracy is the separation of police and the courts on one hand, and government and parliament on the other. Where the latter are charged with making the law, they should never, ever be allowed to interfere with the enforcement of that law. Politicians have no power to tell the police what to investigate. As Lord Denning once observed, no policeman is subject to orders of the Secretary of State: ‘No minister of the Crown can tell him that he must, or must not, keep observation on this place or that. Or that he must prosecute this man or that one… He is answerable to the law, and to the law alone.’ In Britain, for most of the time, that separation has been respected.

Home The Budget, still scheduled for 11 March, had to be rewritten after Rishi Sunak was made Chancellor of the Exchequer when Sajid Javid resigned rather than agree to his special advisers being sacked and provision being pooled between No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street. Questions were asked about how far this was the work of Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. In the cabinet shuffle, Julian Smith was replaced as Northern Ireland Secretary by Brandon Lewis. Suella Braverman replaced Geoffrey Cox as Attorney General; she had recently written an article regretting that ‘decisions of an executive, legislative and democratic nature have been assumed by our courts’.