Politics

Following the Prime Minister’s address last night, Twitter was ablaze with mockery of the equation the government will use to determine our route out of lockdown. In particular, people were keen to show their mastery of primary school-level maths, by observing that ‘if the number of infections is 183,000 and R is 0.7, our threat level is 183,000.7 – how does changing R change the threat level?’ Others were quick to point out that: ‘R is a ratio and the number of infections is an integer so it’s meaningless to add them.’ However, at some point during their GCSEs they must have nodded off, because they would otherwise have encountered

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 to work, especially on construction sites and in factories, so long as that can be done in a way that does not imperil health; The pace at which lockdown is modified, and whether it is modified at all, is in the collective hands of the British people, and will be wholly determined by whether we

When Boris Johnson addresses the nation on Sunday night to unveil his roadmap for easing lockdown in the coming weeks and months, it isn’t just the public he needs to bring with him – he also needs to convince his parliamentary party. Over the past week there has been a shift in mood in the Tory Party with a rising number of MPs growing anxious over what they perceive as the slow pace of lockdown easing. As one MP puts it: ‘People have started to get skittish.’ When Johnson returned to work following his hospitalisation over coronavirus there had been a hope among the party’s libertarian right that this would mean

Writing in this magazine a month ago, I applauded the government’s stated aim of trying to follow the science in dealing with Covid. Such promises are easier made than kept. Following science means understanding science. It means engaging with rival interpretations of the limited data in order to tease out what is most important in what we don’t know. Instead, the government in the UK (and many other places) seems uninterested in alternative viewpoints. The chosen narrative – that lockdown has saved countless lives – has been doggedly followed by all spokespeople. No doubt is allowed. We have been seeing the groupthink response to a perceived external threat that Jonathan

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. But in the very places where the frail and sick are supposed to be shielded, too many people are still being newly infected. Ministers were especially shocked to learn that some hospitals are really struggling to manage the rate of spread of illness. That is why Dominic Raab announced today that for the UK as