Politics

Boris Johnson is coming under increased pressure from Tory MPs on both sides of the Covid debate today. On the one hand, there is former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt calling for schools and borders to close and a ban on all household mixing straight away in order to prevent the NHS from collapsing. On the other, there is Mark Harper, chair of the influential Covid Recovery Group, who has just issued a call for the government to start relaxing restrictions from February. The two demands aren’t necessarily mutually-exclusive: the two men just have rather different timescales. Hunt insisted this morning that the restrictions he is calling for ‘will be time-limited

Here are the numbers that show why schools are very unlikely to re-open any time soon in London and the south east, and why within a week or so the whole country may be in a lockdown that includes school closures. Tier 4, the so-called “stay-at-home tier”, is broadly equivalent to the two-week circuit-breaking lockdown that was imposed in November. It did not include school closures, but it suppressed the rate of transmission of Covid-19 to 0.85 or 0.9. In other words it led to the infection gradually shrinking in the community. Unfortunately, since then we’ve witnessed the explosive growth of the new strain of Covid-19. Here is the point:

The New York Times really does have it in for poor old Britain, doesn’t it? Not content with portraying Brits as boiled mutton eating swamp dwellers, America’s self-styled paper of record is now suggesting we’re being pumped full of a dangerous cocktail of Covid vaccines. ‘Britain Opts for Mix-and-Match Vaccinations, Confounding Experts’ screams the headline.  The reality? A different second dose will only be considered in very limited circumstances where there is an ‘immediate high risk’ to health. And that’s only if the previous type of vaccine isn’t known or isn’t available. Surely a reasonable precautionary measure if all else fails?  As Jonathan Stoye of the Francis Crick Institute notes, such a plan ‘does not seem unreasonable and

Part of the soap opera appeal of politics comes from the idea that it is a competitive sport based on fine margins – with a result that will be determined by the relative performances of the teams and their captains. Under the British first-past-the-post system two major parties slug it out in an epic tussle across hundreds of seats and then one of them wins. Sometimes things are so closely fought that neither party has an outright majority, in which case one or more of the minor parties gets to choose which should be propped up. From this point of view, every policy shift or zinger soundbite thrown by Boris

As many hospitals struggle to cope with a surge of Covid-19 patients, the most important judgement yet to be made about 2020 is how much difference it would have made had England been pre-emptively locked down in September. This is not an academic question. Because there were two separate occasions in September when the prime minister’s political and scientific advisers urged him to impose tough national restrictions and suppress the incidence of the virus back to low levels. It is well known that on 21 September the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies recommended a short ‘circuit-breaking’ lockdown. But I have learned that within Downing Street, it was at the