Politics

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

Isabel Hardman

How will Tory backbenchers react to another lockdown?

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

Katy Balls

Senior Tories urge government to toughen restrictions

As government ministers hint at tougher restrictions to come, one of the themes of lockdown measures so far has been resistance from the Conservative parliamentary party. However, while there remains some unease on the Tory benches over both the Christmas measures and the lack of parliamentary scrutiny of them, there has also been an increase in the number of Tory MPs willing to call for the opposite: tougher measures sooner. Jeremy Hunt has made a public intervention today. The former health secretary has called on the government to move to a national lockdown without delay. He say this ought to include the closure of schools and borders — as well as a ban on

Katy Balls

How far will Boris tighten Covid restrictions?

16 min listen

Boris Johnson today said there was ‘no question’ that the government would announce tighter coronavirus restrictions, as case numbers continue to surge. It came after health secretary Matt Hancock said this morning that the existing tier system is ‘no longer strong enough’. What will further restrictions look like? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

James Forsyth

Matt Hancock: the Tier system is no longer strong enough

There is a sense of grim inevitability this morning that even tighter Covid restrictions are coming very soon. On his media round this morning, Matt Hancock has been emphasising that the new variant means that the ‘old tier system… is no longer strong enough’ and that the only thing that can stop the spread of the virus is people not seeing others. There is beginning to be a shift back to the ‘stay at home’ message we heard so much during the first lockdown. The increased transmissibility of the Kentish variant, let alone the South African one, means it is unclear if even a March-style lockdown would be enough to

Robert Peston

Covid statistics suggest schools are likely to be closed soon

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:

Sunday shows round-up: primary school children should ‘absolutely’ return, says Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson – Restrictions ‘probably about to get tougher’ The Andrew Marr Show returned this morning, and with it came an in-depth interview with the Prime Minister. It will surprise no one to hear that the bulk of the interview focused on the coronavirus, and Boris Johnson signalled throughout that the new year could see fresh restrictions being brought into place. He did not go into any detail about what measures could be introduced under a potential ‘Tier 5’, but it was clear enough that his 5pm Downing Street press conferences were not yet a thing of the past: BJ: It may be that we need to do things in

Katy Balls

Prime Minister hints at ‘tougher’ restrictions to come

Boris Johnson kicked off the new year with an appearance on The Andrew Marr show in which he warned of tough weeks ahead for the country. With Covid cases on the rise and concerns among the scientific community that the current restrictions will not be enough to contain spread of the virus, the Prime Minister said that restrictions are ‘alas probably about to get tougher’. Johnson told Marr that the government was ‘entirely reconciled to doing what it takes to get the virus down and that may involve tougher measures in the weeks ahead’ – even if that meant doing things in the next few weeks that ‘will be tougher in many parts

Steerpike

Labour MP’s vaccine fake news backfires

Oh dear. It’s not been a good weekend on vaccine news for the New York Times or the Labour party. The one time paper of record ran a misleading report claiming the UK planned to give Britons a dangerous cocktail of Covid vaccines. Despite that claim being debunked, it wasn’t enough to stop a Labour MP from sharing similar comments. Now there is another incident to add to the list. The self-titled shadow ‘cabinet’ minister for mental health Dr Rosena Allin-Khan set the cat among the pigeons late on Saturday night with a series of extraordinary tweets. The Labour MP – who is a trained doctor – took to social media to announce that she had

A haunting revelation from the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry

The path to the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry, which opened in September, has been a long one. It had to wait for the extradition from Libya and trial of the bomber’s brother, Hashem Abedi, and then for the first wave of coronavirus. Once underway, it has been a rollercoaster of emotion for the victims’ families, many of whom have sat through every day of the hearings. It began with two weeks of truly heart-breaking stories of the 22 lives cut short. The kind of person who attends an Ariana Grande concert is likely to be young and in love with life; that made their stories feel that much more tragic.

Steerpike

The New York Times’s UK vaccine clickbait

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

Nick Tyrone

My fellow Rejoiners are living a fantasy

On New Year’s Eve at 11 p.m., the United Kingdom departed both the single market and the customs union, making the end to the country’s former membership of the EU complete. It was a moment to celebrate for Brexiteers; the commemoration of sadness for some Remainers. Or should I say ‘Rejoiners’ — there is no remaining now, Great Britain having departed the European Union. Many Rejoiners have set out their stalls already. ‘When they tell you to “move on” DO move on — to the long, strong, campaign to rejoin,’ tweeted Simon Schama, the historian and noted fan of the UK’s membership of the EU, ‘However hard the road, however

Patrick O'Flynn

Has Brexit already destroyed Labour’s chances?

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

Thatcher was completely right about the Euro

It was a ‘rush of blood to the head’. Its central bank would prove to be hopelessly ineffective. And cultural differences would remain too deeply ingrained for an internal market to ever work as it should. We learned this week from papers released in Dublin that Mrs Thatcher was completely damning about the idea of a single currency for the European Union. Looked at with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, however, it is clear that the most remarkable point about her views is not just how intransigent she was but that she was completely right. The Euro has been a comprehensive failure, just as she said it would

When democracy worked in China

Spectator contributors were asked: Which moment from history seems most significant or interesting? Here is Jung Chang’s answer: My highlight of history would be the first 16 years of the Chinese Republic — 1912 to 1928 — when China was a vibrant democracy. This fact is generally unknown to the world, and I came to appreciate it fully only while researching my last two books, one on Empress Dowager Cixi, and the other on the three Soong sisters from Shanghai.  The democratisation process began with Cixi in the first decade of the 20th century, when she resolved to turn China into a constitutional monarchy. After her death, the Republic that came into

David Patrikarakos

Corbyn’s legacy is here to stay

It’s been just over a year since the British people finally squashed a hard-left push for power under the dismal but unyieldingly dangerous leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. On 12 December 2019 we dodged a collective bullet. But Corbynism lasted almost half a decade; it reshaped the national conversation. As we enter 2021 it’s worth considering what it has taught us about our politics and what its legacy might be for Britain. First off, Corbynism provided something much-needed: a reminder that the left does not have a monopoly on virtue, or even on that vague but actually pretty important political quality – niceness. The dangers of an unfettered right are a

Robert Peston

Cummings ready to testify that Boris rejected his lockdown advice

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

John Keiger

The EU is a divided house

What does 2021 hold for the European Union? At the end of 2020 Brussels has gone out of its way to engage in unity-signalling, announcing that all 27 members will begin vaccination on the same day and feigning a united front in the face of the UK’s new strain of coronavirus. But in truth its 27 member states are confronted by serious structural divisions in three fundamental areas: economics, culture, defence. Deep economic divisions surfaced in the EU after the 2008 financial crash along a north-south axis. The split between the richer ‘frugal’ northern economies and the ‘profligate’ southerners was starkest in 2012-13 over Brussels’ treatment of Greece. Papered over

Alex Massie

Most-read 2020: Boris Johnson isn’t fit to lead

We’re closing 2020 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Alex Massie’s article from May, in which he makes the case against Boris. Danny Kruger, formerly Johnson’s political secretary and now the MP for Devizes, has – perhaps inadvertently – done the country some small service. In a note sent to newly-elected Tory MPs, Mr Kruger has reportedly advised his colleagues that ‘calling for Dominic Cummings to go is basically declaring no confidence in [the] prime minister.’ Well, yes, indeed. That is the point. Because, in the end, this is not a story about Dominic Cummings but, rather, one about the Prime Minister. Even if