Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Sunday

Steven Barrett

Was Dominic Cummings acting legally?

As a lawyer, I am firmly against the politicisation of law. It is important to remember that we who serve justice do so for everyone – not merely for people we like or to advance political causes. ‘Lockdown’ has so far been three different legal regimes, and for ease, I’ll restrict myself here to the first one. Under that, we all had the power in reg. 6(1) to leave the house whenever we had a “reasonable excuse”. What it said was “During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse”. What that means is: provided we had a reasonable excuse, we could leave

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Why Dominic Cummings’ departure may only be a ‘matter of time’

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 prime minister – is summed up in a Tweet by the former minister Caroline Nokes: “My inbox is rammed with very angry constituents and I do not blame them.” Nokes is typical, according to ministers and MPs. Like all prime ministers, Boris Johnson risks deep harm to his own authority and popularity if he ignores

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Revealed: 90,000 ‘void’ UK Covid tests

Every evening, at around 5 o’clock, a minister walks through the large panelled doors to Downing Street’s state dining room and delivers the daily coronavirus briefing. The conference always begins in the same way – ‘I’d like to update you on the latest daily figures’. The minister in question then proceeds to tell us just how many tests have been carried out over the last 24 hours and the number of positive cases discovered. We are left to conclude that the remaining tests must have come back as negative, that no infection was detected. However, there is a third category of result: void tests. These are tests that proved inconclusive, either because the

Saturday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Dominic Cummings imbroglio

15 min listen

The government has come out in defence of Dominic Cummings’s decision to travel to Durham during lockdown. On the podcast, two Spectator writers give their opposing views on whether or not he made the right decision.

Douglas Murray

Why should Cummings be sacked for protecting his family?

There have been an enormous number of positive attributes on display during the lockdown. Family members keeping an eye on each other. Neighbours looking after each other more. But there have been ugly attributes about as well. None uglier than the sort of tell-tale attitude that makes you realise how the secret police could always rely on a certain portion of the populace in any country. Everyone has their own anecdotes. A friend who lives in the countryside told me that someone she knew said to her, ‘Are you aware that this is your second walk of the day?’ That sort of thing. The people who have reported on others

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris Johnson gives Cummings his ‘full support’ amid lockdown backlash

Grant Shapps had hoped to spend today’s government press conference discussing extra funding for public transport as a result of coronavirus adjustments. Instead, the Transport Secretary spent it fielding questions about Dominic Cummings. After the Guardian and Mirror reported that the senior No. 10 aide travelled 260 miles to be near relatives so his family had childcare support nearby as they self-isolated with coronavirus, Cummings has been accused of flouting government advice with the SNP’s Ian Blackford calling for him to resign. A snap YouGov poll released this afternoon says that 52 per cent of those surveyed believe Cummings broke the rules and should go.  However, it’s clear from today’s press conference that the Prime

Bruce Anderson

Boris’s next big battle is against the virus of socialism

We should always avoid misusing history to underpin exaggeration. Covid 19 is not Nazi Germany. However many qualities Boris has, he is not Winston Churchill. But this virus will pass. British politics will then enter a new phase. Oddly enough, there are parallels between likely developments during that future phase and the course of events in 1944/45. There are lessons which the Tory party ought to learn. These divide into three categories: history, vision and personalities. In 1945, the Tories lost the battle of history, partly because their foremost historian, Churchill, had been a critic of the 1930s governments. Leaving the complexities of appeasement to one side, Labour’s record on

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

If Cummings stays in post, we’ll know who’s really in charge

Here’s the nub of Boris Johnson’s Dominic Cummings problem: ‘It’s one rule for Dominic Cummings and one rule for the rest of us.’ That’s what the anonymous member of the public who dobbed him in to the cops told the Guardian. The words could have come out of Cummings’ own mouth for they are the standard cry of populist punterhood whenever a politician or celebrity is exposed as a hypocrite or gets special treatment. Cummings understands popular anger at elites better than almost anyone in Westminster. He built a Brexit strategy and election campaign on it, both of which kindled public contempt for privileged Remainers using their wealth and connections

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Why Dominic Cummings must go

Most aspects of this present emergency are complex and resist easy solutions. Only a handful are elementary but one of these, and quite obviously so, is the Dominic Cummings affair. He must go and he must go now. There is no alternative, no other way out, no means by which this ship can be saved. The only question is the number of casualties Cummings will take with him. Judged by the cabinet’s performance on social media this weekend, the answer to that question is also simple: all of them. It cannot be stressed too often that the government’s authority during this crisis is moral much more than it is legal.

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

What else could Dominic Cummings have done?

The question is, does Dominic Cumming’s four-year-old son possess preternatural resilience – a bit like the infant John the Baptist who went off into the desert as a boy. Or does he, like my own children at that age, need a bit of feeding, occasional supervision to stop him playing with matches and a bath at bedtime? If the former, and the child can fend for himself at this tender age, then it would indeed have been wrong for Mr Cummings and his wife Mary Wakefield (of this parish) to have taken themselves off to Durham, where his family lives, where his sister and nieces were volunteering to take care

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The dilemma at the heart of the Cummings controversy

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, who had Covid-19 symptoms, rather than quarantining for 14 days in their London home.  The bigger issue is about the tension between the public and private responsibilities of powerful officials So the debate about whether he should quit will rage for a bit. It seems to me, the competing arguments are these: his defence is

Paul Burke

Keir Starmer is an excellent Labour leader, which is why he’ll never be PM

We’ve all been very impressed, haven’t we, by Sir Keir Starmer’s performances at Prime Minister’s Questions? His calm, precise and forensic dismantling of Boris Johnson has drawn praise from all quarters. Quite right too. An effective Leader of the Opposition is vital to any democracy and at last, we seem to have one. An eminent QC with the courage to ask the tough questions and put our blustering PM on the rack. There are, inevitably, some petty quibblers who aren’t quite so Starmerstruck. They feel that the hindsight-fuelled bullying of a man still recovering from a near-death experience, and the castigating of a government forced to face horrendous economic and

Friday

Paul Collier

Should the UK create a post-Covid Sovereign Wealth Fund?

Soon, the short-term credit being lent abundantly to Britain’s small and medium firms to stave off bankruptcy during the shutdown will be due to be repaid. The prospect of this forcing many businesses to shed jobs by the thousands is rightly ringing alarm bells. The can could be kicked down the road for a few months by postponing repayment. But the people who kicked the can would still have to confront the problem. They would find that firms saddled with accumulated short-term debt, and revenues that remain reduced, will want to shed workers. The latest proposed solution, initially proposed in the Financial Times, is that these short-term liabilities should be

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Immunity passports are an unlikely route out of lockdown

The route out of lockdown has become a groundhog day in which the same ideas keep on coming round again, with unnerving regularity: test, track and trace, vaccine, semi-permanent social distancing and so on. Today it is the turn of another hoary old chestnut: immunity passports. Announcing that 5 per cent of the country, and 17 per cent of Londoners, have already been infected with the virus, Matt Hancock suggested that following the distribution of the millions of antibody tests that have been ordered from Swiss pharma giant Roche, it will be possible to consider ‘systems of certification’ which allow some of the people who have already recovered from Covid-19

Alexander Downer

Britain’s post-Brexit trade plan could be a missed opportunity

The economic argument for free trade is politically more important than ever. A drift towards the use of tariffs and other protectionist measures has increased in G20 countries since the global financial crisis and there are signs that the protectionist trend could accelerate in the wake of Covid-19. This at a time when a global economic recovery will urgently need the boost that trade offers. One of the great opportunities of Brexit is that the UK can lead the world, with countries like Australia, in championing free trade. The UK has made clear that signing free trade agreements is a top priority as it leaves the EU’s customs union. Negotiations

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris is convinced he’ll still get a Brexit deal

When coronavirus first struck, the assumption was that it would lead to an extension to the Brexit transition. After all, negotiating rounds had to be cancelled as it wasn’t feasible to have large numbers of people travelling back and forth between London and Brussels and crowding into meeting rooms. But the negotiations are now taking place by video conference and the UK government is determined not to extend the transition period beyond the end of the year. The UK’s view is that the differences between the two sides are so high level that they won’t just be solved by putting more time on the clock. As I say in the

Steerpike Steerpike

Angela Rayner’s SAGE fake news

As a former shadow education minister, you would expect Angela Rayner to be keeping a close eye on the scientific advice about when schools should begin to reopen. The government currently plans to reopen schools for some pupils on 1 June – a decision which has provoked the ire of several teaching unions, who say it is not yet safe for staff members or children. Which perhaps explains why this morning the deputy leader of the Labour party went on the attack, and tweeted out an article by the Times Educational Supplement, pointing out that: ‘SAGE concludes June 1st “too soon” to open schools. Teacher unions have been absolutely correct

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Kate Forbes Edition

37 min listen

Kate Forbes is an SNP MP and the Scottish Finance Secretary. She stepped in at the last minute when her predecessor, Derek MacKay, was suspended from the party on the day of the Budget. On the podcast, she talks about her international upbringing and how that relates to her nationalism, what it was like to step in for the Budget on that day, and how she squares her Christian faith with politics.