Portrait of the week: A political squall, sub-postmasters exonerated and India’s Covid crisis

Home

By the beginning of the week, 12,071,810 people had received both doses of coronavirus vaccine, and the proportion of the adult population with both soon rose to more than a quarter. In the seven days up to the beginning of the week, 159 people had died, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus) to 127,417. Fares Maatou, aged 15, was fatally stabbed at half past four in the afternoon outside a pizza shop in Newham, east London. Anthony Thwaite, the poet and editor of Philip Larkin’s letters and poems, died aged 90.

A purely political squall blew up after Downing Street put it about that Dominic Cummings had leaked text messages from Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, to Sir James Dyson saying that he would remove tax penalties preventing people coming to Britain to produce ventilators at the height of the coronavirus outbreak. ‘I will fix it tomo. We need you,’ said one text. In response, Mr Cummings published a blog saying, first, that a friend of Carrie Symonds’s, the Prime Minister’s fiancée, was the leaker code-named Chatty Rat who in October had blown the gaff on lockdown; secondly, that Mr Johnson had tried to cancel an inquiry into the affair lest it upset Miss Symonds; thirdly, that he had told Mr Johnson that getting political supporters to pay for his wallpaper was ‘possibly illegal’. Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, told the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee that he would look into the matter; he thought Chatty Rat might never be revealed. The Daily Mail said that in October, when a second lockdown had been decided upon, Mr Johnson had said during a meeting at No. 10 that he would rather ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ than lock down again.