Is Boris Johnson a convert to the nanny state?
18 min listen
Politics
Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Friday
Plumber trolled for defending Boris’s lockdown plan
Remember the no-nonsense plumber who criticised those who claimed to be baffled by Boris Johnson’s lockdown announcement? Ryan Price defended the Prime Minister, telling Channel 4 ‘It’s not really hard to understand’ when asked to comment on the next steps in the lockdown plan. Price – who has been giving free call-outs to NHS workers – was hailed a hero by some, but it seems not everyone was best pleased with Price’s remarks. He told LBC this morning: ‘I didn’t sleep for a couple of days, couldn’t eat…anxiety because of the messages and things like that, and I’ve never had anxiety before. I wasn’t making a political view…people just need to stop
The chasm between the UK and EU’s Brexit positions
David Frost briefed the Cabinet yesterday on the state of the Brexit negotiations and he has now issued a very downbeat statement. Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator says that the third round of negotiations ‘made very little progress’. The problem is that (as always in these talks) the UK and the EU have very different interpretations of what is reasonable. The UK thinks that because it ‘just’ wants a free trade agreement it shouldn’t be expected to follow EU rules in a host of areas and should be offered a deal similar to what Canada, South Korea or Japan have. The UK has even accepted that this deal might see
Boris Johnson declares war on obesity to tackle the virus
One of the constants of Boris Johnson’s political career has been his opposition to ‘nanny state’ interventions in people’s lives. In 2006, he overshadowed David Cameron’s first conference as Tory leader by supporting mothers who were pushing pies through school railings in protest at attempts to make their children eat Jamie Oliver inspired healthy school dinners. As recently as last year’s Tory leadership contest, he was attacking the so-called sugar tax for being ineffective and hitting the poor hardest. But, as I say in the Times this morning, in a discussion with some of his senior ministers and advisers last week, Boris Johnson told them, ‘I’ve changed my mind on
How the Labour party ran out of ideas
After losing the leadership contest in April, the left of the Labour Party regrouped. Organising as part of old factions like the Socialist Campaign Group and new ones such as Don’t Leave, Organise, they have held Zoom events and created websites, pledging to make life difficult for Keir Starmer. One thing is missing, however, from their plans: any serviceable ideas. The left of the party can’t seem to name one solid thing in policy terms on which they disagree with Starmer. And, they appear unable to point to a single practical thing they would do differently had they won the leadership contest. Instead, they frame everything in culture war terms,
How should the Tories handle Nicola Sturgeon’s Covid devolution?
This week was meant to mark the moment the whole of the United Kingdom began to ease lockdown. Instead, it’s England that has become an outlier – moving to the slogan ‘Stay Alert’ while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland stick with ‘Stay Home’. With the devolved governments adopting different approaches to easing lockdown, Downing Street is facing a communication battle – and it’s the First Minister of Scotland who is leading the charge. Before Boris Johnson even got to his desk on Sunday night to make his address to the nation on the roadmap out of lockdown, Sturgeon had taken to social media and the airwaves to criticise the Government’s new slogan. She suggested
Thursday
League of nations: guessing our way out of lockdown
38 min listen
European countries all seem to be doing something different, so what are the lessons from the continent (00:45)? Plus, how the West’s lockdown impacts the developing world in a very real way (13:05). And last, rediscovering the joy of driving on the country’s empty roads (24:55). With economist Fredrik Erixon, the Economist’s Anne McElvoy, Stanford Professor Jayanta Bhattacharya, Indian economist Ashwini Deshpande, writer Alexander Pelling-Bruce, and transport journalist Christian Wolmar.
Is the Roche antibody test a gamechanger?
11 min listen
Public Health England has approved its first mass antibody test. Roche, the supplier behind it, says that the test has an 100 per cent accuracy. So how much of a game changer is this development?
Covid has exposed the weakness of Whitehall
Britain has long flattered itself that it leads the world in administration. But, as I write in the magazine this week, Covid-19 has highlighted just how far from being true that now is. It’s hard to argue that the UK has done much better than France, Spain and Italy, and we have clearly done worse than Germany. We are miles behind South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. This crisis has exposed the limitations of the UK’s government machine. One Whitehall veteran says that the ten days leading up to 23 March were ‘the nearest the wiring of the state has come to collapse. It wasn’t just blowing a fuse: the motherboard was beginning
Britain should break the taboo on ‘challenge vaccines’
So far, so good: the Oxford university trials on a potential vaccine for Covid-19 is reported to be going well. It has been tested on more than a thousand people, and it looks to be safe. There is another, more important question, however, and one where an answer might take a frustratingly long time. Does it work? It is too early to say. Right now, not enough of the people vaccinated have been exposed to the virus for any reliable results. Now the team are planning to move it into hospitals where the chances of exposure are significantly higher. The chances are that will give them more of an idea.
Don’t panic about how Britain will afford its coronavirus bill
Having a passionate national debate now about specific future tax and spending plans is like having a debate about how to fund the restoration of Notre Dame while it is burning down. It is too early for many reasons, but mainly because we just don’t know yet what the shortfall is. Put the fire out, assess the damage, get estimates for the cost of repairs, and then work out how you will fund it. Our budget discussion is hampered by the fact we don’t know the depth of the recession, how quickly the economy will bounce back, what the national debt will be at the end of it, nor –
NHS Covid app plans leaked
Nothing causes Whitehall headaches like a government IT project. Remember the Ministry of Defence digital upgrade back in the 2000s? MoD officials originally told MPs that the software roll-out would cost an eye-watering £2.3 billion. The upgrade, which suffered multiple delays, eventually ended up costing the taxpayer somewhere north of £7 billion. Or cast your mind back to the NHS’s national programme for IT, a £10 billion flop that was scrapped after the public accounts committee blasted the project, saying that ‘the biggest IT project in the world’ had become ‘the biggest disaster’. The history of Westminster web projects is littered with costly mistakes. So it’s not a particularly good sign when
The British state needs rewiring
‘Covid-19 has been perhaps the biggest test of governments worldwide since the 1940s,’ declares the government’s command paper on the virus. The fact that the following paragraph proposes ‘a rapid re-engineering of government’s structures and institutions’ is telling. It is an implicit admission that the British government machine is, in several important areas, failing this test. The argument about whether the UK has the worst death toll in Europe risks descending into statistical absurdity. Until excess mortality figures are known, it won’t be possible to come to a verdict. But it’s hard to argue that the UK has done much better than France, Spain and Italy. We have clearly done
The MP demanding a new approach to China
Six years ago, Neil O’Brien was working for George Osborne when the then chancellor was enthusing about a ‘new golden era’ in Sino-British relations. But now O’Brien, who became the Conservative MP for Harborough in 2017, is one of the founders of the new China Research Group, a group of Tory MPs who are pushing for the government to take a tougher line with Beijing. His best-case scenario is one where the UK and its allies ‘manage to restrain some of the worst behaviours of the Chinese government’. O’Brien’s change of heart sums up the shift in Tory thinking on China. The party has moved away from pushing for the
Wednesday
The coronavirus crash could be even worse than we feared
Just how bad will the Covid economic hit be? Today’s figures for the first quarter of 2020 show Britain’s economy shrunk by two per cent, but that takes into account just a few days of lockdown (and suggests that the recession started some time before). The March figure is more like it: despite only formally being in lockdown for eight days in March, the UK economy contracted 5.8 per cent that month alone. As Capital Economics puts it ‘in just one month the economy has tumbled by as much as it did in the year and a half after the global financial crisis.’ Yet some responses to today’s figures reveal a worrying degree of
Who will challenge the Sunak succession?
At times such as these, politicians like to say that ‘this is not the time for politics’. Which is not true, of course, because politics never stops, and especially not the politics of personal advancement. Just as sharks must always swim forwards to stay alive, politicians must always be thinking about the next thing, the next job, and the next leader. Here is a question that arises from the current state of politics, the government’s handling of the pandemic, and the general condition of the nation: who will face Rishi Sunak in the next Conservative leadership contest? I have no idea when that contest will come and I make absolutely
Boris’s sloppy PMQs performances are becoming a problem
A former prime minister once told me that PMQs in the Commons is an event that can only be enjoyed in retrospect, after the final whistle has blown. Even if exchanges with the opposition leader had gone well, there remained the possibility of being tripped up by a minor party leader, an opposition backbencher or a member of the ‘awkward squad’ on your own side. Tony Blair disliked it so much that one of his first acts as PM was to cut the sessions from two a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) to just one: a half-hour joust on a Wednesday. His prime motivation for doing so was that he knew
PMQs: Starmer’s swipes leave Boris unbowed
Keir Starmer is a very rum package. His body and his manner seem to belong to different organisms. His physique is martial, sturdy, invincible. The square jaw, the trunk-like neck, the unsettlingly symmetrical face, the blue but eerily lifeless eyes. But his personality has no trace of manliness at all. He seems grannyish, nervy, over-delicate, like an unobtrusive footman who finds himself lord of the manor following a paternity test. There’s something about him that doesn’t ring true. His voice is like the creak of a door in a chapel of rest. But he’s an effective debater. He enjoys using statistics to inflict horrors on his opponent. Today, he unleashed
Boris on the ropes over care homes
15 min listen
Keir Starmer trips up Boris Johnson at PMQs
The majority of today’s PMQs face-off between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer concerned the government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in care homes, after the Office for National Statistics reported yesterday that over 8,000 care home residents have died of Covid-19 – a figure that is expected to rise in the coming weeks. Boris Johnson’s weakest moments in the session were when Starmer criticised the policy of moving elderly patients from hospitals to care homes at the beginning of the crisis, before they received a negative coronavirus test. The leader of the Labour party quoted a cardiologist who claimed that suspected coronavirus cases were discharged from hospitals into care homes