Politics

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

Thursday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Vaccine passports for mass events might be the worst of all worlds

Are vaccine passports in our future? The ‘Covid-status certification’ review is underway, carved out of the Prime Minister’s roadmap and handed to Michael Gove in the Cabinet Office to assess and very possibly implement the scheme after Britain has been declared ‘free’. Since the first review update was published — clear on intention but vague on the details — there’s been plenty of speculation as to what kinds of events or establishments might require a passport to access them. Today we got some hints. A written statement from Gove has been published, on the ongoing ‘extensive review’ that has so far involved consulting ‘clinical, ethical, equalities and privacy specialists, faith and

Steerpike Steerpike

Will Laurence Fox top Count Binface?

It has been an interesting year for onetime Rada star Laurence Fox. The former Lewis actor turned Question Time guest announced he was running for London mayor last month but has thus far barely managed to make a ripple ahead of polling day in just a week’s time.  A city-wide poll last week showed the culture warrior on just a miserly 1 per cent — the same number as self-proclaimed joke candidate Count Binface. Whereas the former boasts of having a £5 million war chest for his ‘Reclaim’ party, the latter has had to crowdfund the £10,000 deposit needed for his campaign. Binface told Steerpike that all excess money will

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Will social care reform be delayed yet again?

Labour’s Liz Kendall is today calling for the government to treat social care in the same way as it treats physical infrastructure. In a speech this afternoon, the shadow care minister said that ‘in the century of ageing, social care is as much a part of our economic infrastructure as the roads and the railways’. This is quite a challenging analogy, as the state of the social care sector would make even the most outdated and crumbling parts of the northern rail network look pretty luxurious and well-appointed. Kendall is also speaking as a battle rages within government over whether social care reform will make it into the Queen’s Speech.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Will the No. 10 flat criticism bounce off Boris?

Will the Downing Street flat criticism bounce off Boris Johnson? The Prime Minister is under fire this week over the refurbishment of the No. 11 apartment. After the Electoral Commission launched a formal investigation, today’s front pages make particularly miserable reading for No. 10. However, the Prime Minister has earned a reputation as a politician who is ‘scandal-proof’ in a way that many of his colleagues are not. Will this be the same?  Polling since the story took off is fairly limited but a BMG Research poll published today — taken Thursday to Monday — on the question of ‘preferred prime minister’ puts Boris Johnson on 40 per cent and Keir

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The truth about the government and ‘herd immunity’

I spent much of the 1980s and 1990s reporting on company chief executives who didn’t understand the distinction between mine and theirs. They enjoyed lavish lifestyles — company flats, art collections, huge expense accounts — without the owners of the company (you and me through our pension funds) having a clue. Then came the corporate governance revolution, and much of this was cleaned up. So I had déjà vu earlier this week when reporting that the Tory party had loaned tens of thousands of pounds to lavishly decorate and refurnish the PM’s home in Downing Street. Maybe Tory donors and members think this is an appropriate use of their money.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The nightmare: Boris’s battles are just beginning

When Boris Johnson parted company with Dominic Cummings at the end of last year, it was inevitable there would be trouble further down the line. To pick a fight with one of Britain’s most formidable campaigners and his allies was always going to have consequences. It’s now becoming clear what they are. Some of the revelations from Johnson’s enemies are quotable: for example, the allegation that he said in private he’d rather let ‘bodies pile high’ than allow a third lockdown. But what he said in anger, or what he considered doing, matters a lot less than what he actually did. That’s why the most serious question he’s facing is

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The difference between private and public conversation

Like almost everyone else writing on the subject, I have no idea whether Boris Johnson told colleagues in October that he would rather ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ than have another lockdown. When such words are reported, they are given to journalists ‘on lobby terms’ and are therefore unattributable. But surely the report should indicate from which point of view they come. In this case, the BBC cites ‘sources familiar with the conversation’, a phrase which gives it permission, it thinks, to run headlines like ‘Boris Johnson’s “bodies pile high” comments prompt criticism’, as if it knows that the Prime Minister definitely spoke those words. Surely licence-fee

Katy Balls Katy Balls

How the Goveites took charge of No. 10

When Boris Johnson made the extraordinary decision last week to brief newspapers that Dominic Cummings was behind a series of leaks, the move seemed close to kamikaze. He had chosen a target who isn’t exactly known for walking away from a fight. And there’s another, more serious question: why did nobody in No. 10 stop him? Johnson has always been an impulsive politician, but he has also employed people who can act as a moderating force. He makes friends slowly, which is why he tries to take allies with him. Ann Sindall, his old secretary at The Spectator, went to work with him when he became London mayor. He hired

Steerpike Steerpike

Three in four do not know their police and crime commissioner

It is one week to go until the biggest set of polls outside of a general election in UK history, prompting some commentators to bill next Thursday ‘the British midterms’. Wales and Scotland both vote for their devolved parliaments alongside 13 directly elected mayoralties including Tees Valley, West Midlands and of course London with its assembly. Around 5,000 council seats will be fought across the country alongside the hard fought Hartlepool by-election.  But while next Thursday looks set to be a psephologist’s dream, one set of elections has attracted little attention or enthusiasm: the 39 Police and Crime commissioner contests in England and Wales, delayed a year due to Covid. Established by the Coalition government in its

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Talk to the Hancock because the face ain’t listening

Matt Hancock was in a rather sassy mood when he took tonight’s coronavirus briefing. It was obvious that he was not going to get as much attention for his announcement that the government has secured another 60 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine for an autumn booster programme, and he came armed with a strategy for dealing with the media focus on the Prime Minister’s conduct. That strategy was to tell journalists that he wasn’t even going to answer their questions. When the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked whether a government minister should resign if they’d broken rules on party funding, he replied: Given that this is a coronavirus press conference,

Andrew McQuillan

Who would want to replace Arlene Foster?

Arlene Foster has announced that she will be standing down as DUP leader on the 28 May and First Minister of Northern Ireland at the end of June, bowing to the inevitable after the arithmetic suggested that 80 per cent of her Stormont and Westminster colleagues were set against her leadership continuing.  This will be welcomed by those who in recent days orchestrated manoeuvres against her; Foster staging a defiant last stand had the potential to turn the leadership election poisonous very quickly, which was the last thing the embattled party needs. Who would honestly want to replace Foster now, such is the troubling in-tray she is handing over to her successor?

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Have we reached herd immunity?

When the Office for National Statistics released the last antibody survey a fortnight ago, the results were underwhelming. After watching prevalence in the population shoot upwards for months, the figure had plateaued at 55 per cent. There were several reasons suggested for the stall, including the move to giving second doses and difficulties detecting fading antibodies (which the ONS is quick to point out does not necessarily mean a person no longer has immunity). But, regardless, it raised concerns that it might take longer to reach high antibody prevalence rates than previously hoped. Thankfully, today’s update has provided plenty of cheer. In the two weeks following the last update (taking

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: French MP factchecked on UK jabs record

France’s vaccine rollout has had its difficulties in recent months. In early January, the Mail on Sunday reported the ‘French are at better at torching cars than giving Covid vaccinations’ after vandals burned 861 vehicles on New Year’s Eve – more than twice the number of people inoculated over the last five days of December. Subsequent efforts to address rampant vaccine hesitancy were not hindered by President Emmanuel Macron, who claimed the AstraZeneca vaccine was merely ‘quasi ineffective’ with one poll showing just 20 per cent of French voters had confidence in the jab in March. Now though efforts have at last stepped up, with the country reaching a target of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Boris Johnson’s Krakatoa moment

He blew his stack. His mop almost came loose from his scalp. He wasn’t just jabbing his forefinger and tossing his arms around, he was throwing combinations and swinging at punch-bags. He almost did the Ali shuffle. At PMQs Boris delivered an amazingly combative performance. Last week he smouldered like Etna. This week the summit exploded. This was Krakatoa. Sir Keir arrived, with his starched quiff and his icy smirk, hoping to undo the Prime Minister by stealth. He raised the notorious October quote when Boris is alleged to have said that ‘bodies piled high’ would be preferable to a renewed lockdown. Did he say that? ‘No,’ Boris replied. ‘Lockdowns

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris was rattled at PMQs

Boris Johnson did not have a good Prime Minister’s Questions. It was never going to be a comfortable session, given the multiple rows about the funding of the Downing Street flat revamp and his reported comments about letting bodies ‘pile up’. But the way the Prime Minister approached it ensured both that the story will keep running and that he betrayed quite how annoyed he is by it. It is little use trying, as Johnson repeatedly did, to argue that the British people are not interested in the line of questioning that Sir Keir Starmer was pursuing. For one thing, there is nothing like a politician claiming that something is

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Boris Johnson has always been a penny-pincher

Sometimes, political scandals are important for what they reveal about character. The row over the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat seems to me one such case. Boris for many years earned a quarter of a million pounds a year for his Telegraph column, on top of his various other jobs. He can be expected to earn pretty well on leaving office, as Prime Ministers usually do.  Even with his complex private life and considerable outgoings, it seems unlikely to me that having set his heart on a £58,000 refurbishment of his living quarters he couldn’t one way or another lay hands on the dough to pay for it. What’s

Andrew McQuillan

It’s remarkable that Arlene Foster lasted this long

Arlene Foster’s spell as leader of the Democratic Unionist party is over. Today, Foster announced that she is stepping down as party leader on 28 May, and resigning her position as First Minister by the end of June. Her resignation came after a letter, signed by three quarters of the party’s MLAs alongside some MPs, was submitted to its chair Lord Morrow calling for her departure. In what is the most dramatic case of unionist infighting since Foster herself helped destabilise David Trimble’s leadership of the Ulster Unionists in the early 2000s, moves are also afoot to remove her erstwhile deputy Nigel Dodds. Several of her most senior advisers, including the party’s chief

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Electoral Commission launches probe into Boris’s flat refurbishment

The row over the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat has stepped up a gear this morning after the Electoral Commission launched a formal investigation. Following initial enquiries to determine who originally paid £58,000 towards the cost of the lavish refurbishment of the Prime Minister and his fiancée Carrie Symonds’s flat, the commission has concluded there are ‘reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may have occurred’. As a result, a formal investigation is now underway to establish whether this is the case. So what are they looking for? The government announced last week that Johnson has footed the bill for the works, with Liz Truss insisting on Sunday that the Prime

Steerpike Steerpike

Cameroons clash over Downing Street ‘skip’

As Flatgate rumbles on, it appears the government has adopted a new communications approach to a controversy involving the Prime Minister’s spouse: send for Michael Gove’s wife. The Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine popped up on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning to firefight the situation – an interesting choice given her love of incendiary quotes in her weekly columns. Presenter Nick Robinson asked Vine what she made of the row over whether £58,000 of Tory party money was spent on renovating part of No. 10 to which the latter responded with gusto: The thing about the whole No 10. refurbishment thing is that the Prime Minister can’t be expected to live in