Politics

Is the only route back to normality through a coronavirus vaccine? That’s what the Prime Minister will suggest today when he addresses the virtual Coronavirus Global Response International Pledging Conference. With the conference aimed at driving forward a collective global effort for a vaccine, Boris Johnson will say only a mass-produced vaccine will truly defeat the virus:  ‘To win this battle, we must work together to build an impregnable shield around all our people and that can only be achieved by developing and mass producing a vaccine.’ A vaccine is viewed as the simplest route out of the pandemic. As a result, every country is interested in finding one – with

Could we see ‘immunity passports’ in Britain? Ministers are reportedly discussing them as a route out of lockdown. According to today’s Guardian, the UK tech firm Onfido is in discussion with ministers about creating a ‘digital certificate’ that would be issued to those who have already been infected with coronavirus – who are presumably more immune – so they could return to some resemblance of normal life, including heading back into work.  The technology needed to carry out such a scheme is reportedly in the ‘discovery stage’ and big questions linger as to whether British bureaucracy – which has struggled to source plastic PPE and has trailed other countries in Covid-testing for months

Grant Shapps – Raw mortality figures don’t tell the whole story Sophy Ridge’s first guest this morning was the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. There have been over 28,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19, now that the government is including figures from care homes and the wider community. Ridge confronted Shapps with comparisons of known mortality figures in other countries, pointing out that the UK was poised to become second only to the United States in the total number of deaths. Shapps argued that there is not enough data available at this stage to say whether the UK is faring objectively worse than other countries: SR: The objective of this government is

A reply by the Isle of Wight’s MP to Freddy Gray’s: Is the Isle of Wight really the best place to launch a tracing app? Dear Freddy, You have written disparagingly about the Isle of Wight, its tech and a little bit about its identity. You said the internet was ‘rubbish’ and that we live in the 1980s. I would like to challenge that. The internet really does work here. I am aware there’s black hole of sorts in Seaview, where you sometimes stay. However, that is atypical of the Island. I have had Sky’s Adam Boulton, no less, congratulate me on the quality of my connection and I live

The visible face of this virus, for most of us, is the ambulances. All else that we see – empty streets, spaced out queues, face masks, rainbows in windows – is secondary. Only the ambulances tell of the disease itself. They are the eerily siren-less blue flashing tips of the iceberg. So I am surprised that Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Ambulances’ has not, as far as I know, been identified as the text of the moment. I suppose it’s bleaker than one might like – uplifting poems are generally preferred at such a time. In fact I saw that another Larkin poem, ‘The Mower’ has been placed on a list of

One of the great Cameron legacies has been an era of very low unemployment. In his biography, the former PM cited two defining moments of his teenage years; the first was getting caught smoking weed at Eton and the second was reading the 1982 IEA pamphlet ‘What cost unemployment?’. While Cameron avoided many of the radical policies that emanated from the free market think tank, he did adopt one of the central tenets of the paper: that those in work should be better off than the unemployed. By the time he left office in the wake of the 2016 referendum, UK unemployment sat at just 5 per cent. When Boris Johnson

How do you share a platform without sharing a platform? Step forward Diane Abbott, Schrödinger’s anti-racist, to explain this feat of quantum Corbynism. On Wednesday, the former shadow home secretary and colleague Bell Ribeiro-Addy participated in a virtual meeting of the continuity Corbyn group ‘Don’t Leave, Organise’. Also taking part were expelled Labour members Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker as well as prominent anti-Zionist activists and others who have sought to minimise the extent of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The Jewish Chronicle reports that one participant said Ken Livingstone, who claimed Hitler ‘was supporting Zionism’, had been ‘expelled from the party for saying in truth a historical statement’. This EHRC investigation

Do Alan Clark’s diaries have a lesson for us about Boris Johnson’s ability to continually defy the odds? In his entry of 7 April, 1982, Clark wrote about the whiff of mutiny in the air among Tory grandees towards Margaret Thatcher at the time of the Falklands War: ‘It is monstrous that senior Tories should be behaving in this way. It is only on occasions such as this that the implacable hatred in which certain established figures hold the Prime Minister can be detected…If by some miracle the expedition succeeds they know, and dread, that she will be established for ever as a national hero…The greater the humiliation…the greater the likelihood of a