Politics

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

Friday

15 Jan 2021

Johnson is learning to curb his vaccine enthusiasm

Boris Johnson had a few positive things to offer this evening’s coronavirus briefing. Speaking alongside chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, the Prime Minister announced that 3.3 million people had received their vaccines, including nearly 45 per cent of the over-80s. Whitty, meanwhile, had the sort-of good news that the government thinks the peak of infections has now passed in London, the South East and East of England. The considerably less cheery flip side of that, of course, is that we have yet to reach the peak of hospitalisations and deaths in these regions, let alone the rest of the country. Johnson is

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris can’t afford to move slowly on lifting Covid restrictions

At 3.48pm on Thursday the Sun’s political editor tweeted out an explosive story that Steve Baker, the co-convenor of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, had warned that Boris Johnson’s party leadership would soon be under threat if restrictions were not lifted soon. Less than 100 minutes later, Baker put out his own tweet as follows: ‘What this country needs is the complete success of Boris Johnson… I am clear Boris is the only person to lead us out of these difficulties and I support him in that endeavour.’ In short, Baker had overplayed his hand to an embarrassing extent – much to the delight of those parliamentary colleagues

Katy Balls

Is the government underpromising on the vaccine rollout?

15 min listen

A leaked Scottish government document suggested that all over-50s could be vaccinated by the end of March, and that UK has capacity to deliver 3.8 million jabs next week. Has the government been underselling its efforts? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

Steerpike

The three-day Covid travel loophole

The government has finally attempted to crack down on the problem of people bringing Covid back into the UK, a mere 11 months after the pandemic began. The transport minister Grant Shapps has announced that from Monday, for the first time, travellers will be required to present a negative Covid test at the border, to ensure new variants aren’t brought into the country. The rules will apply equally to British and foreign nationals, which means holidaymakers will be forced to seek out a Covid test abroad before they return to the UK. But has Shapps missed a trick when it comes to the new testing regime? According to the rules,

Kate Andrews

Has the economy developed lockdown immunity?

This morning’s update from the Office for National Statistics has boosted optimism about the prospect of the UK’s economic recovery. GDP fell 2.6 per cent in November last year, reversing the trend of six consecutive months of increases since April’s significant contraction. This takes GDP back down to 8.5 per cent below last February’s levels — wiping out the recovery gains made between roughly the end of July and November. Not, on the surface, good news — but there is a case for optimism. Cast your mind back to the economic conditions in November: England’s second lockdown had just been announced and there was a host of fire-breakers and circuit-breaks throughout the UK.

Ross Clark

Reforming workers’ rights is an upside of Brexit

Of all the arguments put out against Brexit during the bitter referendum debate, one of the least convincing was that it would give a UK government the opportunity to repeal employment law, thereby impoverishing Britain and its people. Jeremy Corbyn once asserted that a Conservative government would turn the country into a ‘low-wage tax haven’. That is an interesting concept, which like the chemical element Seaborgium might theoretically exist but which has yet to be discovered in the real world – most tax havens seem to be pretty wealthy, at least compared with similar countries which haven’t set the fiscal and regulatory conditions to attract businesses and wealthy individuals. There wouldn’t

James Forsyth

Why the UK is sending a tough message on China

One of the arguments made against leaving the EU was that Brexit Britain would have to subordinate everything in its foreign policy to economics and the need for trade deals. But the UK’s approach to China in recent months shows that this hasn’t turned out to be the case, as I say in the magazine this week. On Tuesday, the government – in conjunction with Canada – announced measures to try and ensure that no products made using the forced labour of Uyghur Muslims end up in UK supply chains. Whitehall fully expects some kind of retaliatory response from China to this – just look at how Australia has been

Steerpike

Amber Rudd’s ‘establishment’ dig at Boris Johnson

It’s now been over a year since the former Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd resigned from Boris Johnson’s Cabinet, over the possibility of a no-deal Brexit and the ‘purge’ of 21 Tory MPs who voted against the government. After standing down in 2019, Rudd has since left frontline politics. Could the former frontbencher still be smarting over her departure though? Rudd certainly seemed to give that impression in an interview with the think tank, the Institute for Government. In the ‘ministers reflect’ session, Rudd took some well-aimed pot-shots at the Prime Minister, suggesting his style of governing had forced her to leave her post, saying: ‘But I would have

Thursday

14 Jan 2021

Lara Prendergast

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

36 min listen

Joe Biden won the US election, but is Big Tech really in power? (00:45) Churches are allowed to open during lockdown, but should they? (13:20) And can comfort eating and cosy socks replace human connections? (25:50) With historian Niall Ferguson; New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger; Father Jonathan Beswick; The Very Reverend Peter Howell-Jones; journalist Laura Freeman and psychology professor Dr Shira Gabriel. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Max Jeffery, Sam Russell and Matt Taylor.

Cindy Yu

Is Boris’s leadership really under threat?

12 min listen

Steve Baker, deputy chairman of the backbench Covid Recovery Group, has warned that Boris Johnson’s leadership will be ‘on the table’ unless he gives a path out of lockdown. But is the PM really under threat? Cindy Yu speaks to James Forysth and Katy Balls.

Stephen Daisley

Richard Leonard’s successor has an unenviable task ahead

Seventh time lucky? Richard Leonard, who has resigned this afternoon, was the sixth Scottish Labour leader since the SNP elbowed the party out of power in 2007. His tenure was the second-longest since devolution began, mostly because Labour is in such bad nick north of the border that no one else wants the job. The Yorkshire-born Scot secured the leadership in 2017 in part by allowing the impression to get about that he was a Corbynista. In truth, he hails from the harder edge of the soft-left and in his three years at the helm of Scottish Labour he did not shift the party significantly to the left. He leaves

Katy Balls

Steve Baker’s warning for No. 10 points to the next Tory battle

As government ministers avoid putting a date on an easing of restrictions, let alone an end to them, scientific advisers have stepped in to fill the silence. Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam has suggested the lockdown could remain in place well into spring while Professor Neil Ferguson – who briefly stood down from his role last year for breaking lockdown rules – has suggested measures could be in place until the autumn. This, however, is not going down well with the Tory MPs who make up the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group. As the Sun reports, Steve Baker has issued a rallying call to his fellow members over the situation. He suggests that opposition

Stephen Daisley

Jabs for jailbirds: why prisoners should skip the vaccine queue

Labour MP Zarah Sultana has caused a bit of a stir by proposing that prisoners be allowed to skip the queue for the Covid-19 vaccine. She’s even been Steerpiked, a rite of passage for any aspiring ‘Loony Left’ Labour MP. If anything, her compassion for lags marks a welcome development in someone who six years ago was pledging to celebrate the deaths of Tony Blair and Benjamin Netanyahu. Sultana asked vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi at the science and technology select committee yesterday whether the government had considered ‘prioritising vaccinating detainees as well as those who work in prisons’. Despite the backlash to Sultana’s suggestion, the problem is that there’s evidence to back up her argument. Some things are

Steerpike

Fisheries minister was too busy at nativity to read Brexit bill

Oh dear. There are some things in life it’s probably best not to admit. Government minister Victoria Prentis found that out the hard way yesterday, when she confessed to a Lords select committee that she hadn’t bothered to read the era-defining Brexit deal which was agreed with the European Union in December. Among other things, the deal concerned the rights of European fishermen to access the UK’s waters. So it was not exactly ideal that Prentis hadn’t found time to read the text, considering she is the, err, fisheries minister. Asked by the committee if her jaw had dropped when the deal was released on Christmas Eve, Prentis explained that

Nick Tyrone

Tories should start taking Starmer’s new Labour seriously

The shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds’s speech last night has received little attention. But it would be a big mistake for the Tories to ignore what Dodds had to say on the new direction she hopes to steer the Labour party in. Don’t laugh, but in years to come, last night could be seen as a significant turning point for Keir Starmer’s party. For a start, the lecture was entirely free of sanctimony, which in and of itself marks a huge break with recent Labour history. Gone were blank attacks on ‘austerity’ or weepy complaints about the Tories being heartless; instead, Dodds put forward a case for why a social democratic approach to the economy

Charles Moore

My memories of Sir David Barclay

Even with its 27 amendments, the US Constitution is only 7,591 words. I keep it beside me, and find in it — as Sir Walter Elliot found in the Baronetage — ‘occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one’. The final part of Section 3 of Article 1 is relevant in this distressed week: ‘Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to Removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.’ To use, after Donald Trump’s departure, a device designed to remove a president seems strange. Surely there are two important things to

The Spectator

A tighter lockdown risks being a less effective one

When lockdown was first proposed in March, one of the many arguments against it was that people would tolerate being deprived of their liberty only for a few weeks. The idea of criminalising basic community behaviour — welcoming a guest into your home, educating children, going to church to pray — was viewed as an extreme measure with a short shelf-life. One of the big surprises of the pandemic is to see that lockdowns, in fact, are popular in large quarters. People have complied for far longer than was ever envisaged. But it’s a careful balance — and examples of overzealous policing risk upsetting that balance. It does not help

Matthew Parris

Mandelson’s story could have been so very different

Matt Forde, the stand-up comedian and presenter of his regular Political Party Podcast, has hit on an overlooked technique for getting the most out of big-name interviewees. He pretends to know nothing. Wide-eyed and star-struck (actually he is neither), Forde puts them at their ease in conversation with an apparent fanboy ingénue. ‘Do keep up, Matt,’ said Peter Mandelson, affectionately, as in his Christmas holiday interview Forde claimed to be unaware of some half-forgotten political turbulence that Lord Mandelson, his star interviewee, once encountered. It worked a treat. Lord Mandelson is normally a wary interviewee, but with Forde I have never heard him so unguarded: more confessional even than in

James Forsyth

We’re starting to see a new foreign policy for Brexit Britain

What will Brexit Britain do differently? This is going to be the most important question in our politics for the next decade. If the answer is that nothing much will change, it would be hard to argue that the disruption of the past four and a half years has been worth it. But if Brexit means the country becomes quicker at adapting to changing circumstances, then the electorate’s decision in 2016 will have been vindicated. The quick decision to remove VAT from tampons and sanitary towels is a small, early sign of how Brexit enables parliament to respond more directly to public pressure. The decision not to join the EU’s

Arabella Byrne

The dos and don’ts of the inauguration outfit

Given recent events on the inauguration scaffolding, Jill Biden may do well to wear a bullet-proof vest to watch her husband become the 46th President of the United States and be done with it. But Inauguration Day calls for some serious sartorial politicking and it seems unlikely Dr B will want to miss out. Long before Michelle sashayed her way to the 2013 ceremony in that Thom Browne coat, Thomas Carlyle spoke of the power of clothes in his 1834 Sartor Resartus: “Society is founded upon cloth” he said simply, and most women in the world would agree with him. Yet what the First Lady wears as she stands shivering