Politics

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

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Work times may be staggered, says Transport Secretary

Grant Shapps – Raw mortality figures don’t tell the whole story Sophy Ridge’s first guest this morning was the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. There have been over 28,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19, now that the government is including figures from care homes and the wider community. Ridge confronted Shapps with comparisons of known mortality figures in other countries, pointing out that the UK was poised to become second only to the United States in the total number of deaths. Shapps argued that there is not enough data available at this stage to say whether the UK is faring objectively worse than other countries: SR: The objective of this government is

Bob Seely MP

In defence of the Isle of Wight’s suitability for tracking and tracing

A reply by the Isle of Wight’s MP to Freddy Gray’s: Is the Isle of Wight really the best place to launch a tracing app? Dear Freddy, You have written disparagingly about the Isle of Wight, its tech and a little bit about its identity. You said the internet was ‘rubbish’ and that we live in the 1980s. I would like to challenge that. The internet really does work here. I am aware there’s black hole of sorts in Seaview, where you sometimes stay. However, that is atypical of the Island. I have had Sky’s Adam Boulton, no less, congratulate me on the quality of my connection and I live

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

The poetry of ‘Ambulances’

The visible face of this virus, for most of us, is the ambulances. All else that we see – empty streets, spaced out queues, face masks, rainbows in windows – is secondary. Only the ambulances tell of the disease itself. They are the eerily siren-less blue flashing tips of the iceberg. So I am surprised that Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Ambulances’ has not, as far as I know, been identified as the text of the moment. I suppose it’s bleaker than one might like – uplifting poems are generally preferred at such a time. In fact I saw that another Larkin poem, ‘The Mower’ has been placed on a list of

Saturday

Gus Carter Gus Carter

New polling: Public braced for higher unemployment and no Christmas parties

One of the great Cameron legacies has been an era of very low unemployment. In his biography, the former PM cited two defining moments of his teenage years; the first was getting caught smoking weed at Eton and the second was reading the 1982 IEA pamphlet ‘What cost unemployment?’. While Cameron avoided many of the radical policies that emanated from the free market think tank, he did adopt one of the central tenets of the paper: that those in work should be better off than the unemployed. By the time he left office in the wake of the 2016 referendum, UK unemployment sat at just 5 per cent. When Boris Johnson

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Diane Abbott’s platform sharing paradox

How do you share a platform without sharing a platform? Step forward Diane Abbott, Schrödinger’s anti-racist, to explain this feat of quantum Corbynism. On Wednesday, the former shadow home secretary and colleague Bell Ribeiro-Addy participated in a virtual meeting of the continuity Corbyn group ‘Don’t Leave, Organise’. Also taking part were expelled Labour members Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker as well as prominent anti-Zionist activists and others who have sought to minimise the extent of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The Jewish Chronicle reports that one participant said Ken Livingstone, who claimed Hitler ‘was supporting Zionism’, had been ‘expelled from the party for saying in truth a historical statement’. This EHRC investigation

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Could ‘Boris Bonds’ be the answer to Britain’s coronavirus recession?

Do Alan Clark’s diaries have a lesson for us about Boris Johnson’s ability to continually defy the odds? In his entry of 7 April, 1982, Clark wrote about the whiff of mutiny in the air among Tory grandees towards Margaret Thatcher at the time of the Falklands War: ‘It is monstrous that senior Tories should be behaving in this way. It is only on occasions such as this that the implacable hatred in which certain established figures hold the Prime Minister can be detected…If by some miracle the expedition succeeds they know, and dread, that she will be established for ever as a national hero…The greater the humiliation…the greater the likelihood of a

Friday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Matt Hancock’s good news day

After weeks of speculation over whether Matt Hancock would meet his target of 100,000 daily tests by the end of the month, the Health Secretary today had good news. He told viewers that not only had the target been met – it had been done with over 20,000 tests to spare: 122,346 tests in total were carried out yesterday. In his comments at the press conference, Hancock appeared at times to be giving an acceptance speech at an awards ceremony. He thanked the multiple government figures, outside organisations and health workers who had made this feat possible. Given the heat Hancock has received in recent weeks both in the media and

Steerpike Steerpike

How did Matt Hancock hit his 100,000 test target?

Matt Hancock has announced that the government has managed to meet its 100,000 coronavirus tests a day target. The Health Secretary confirmed at a Downing Street press conference that on 30 April, Public Health England carried out 122,347 tests – suggesting the government not only reached its target in time, but also over-delivered. But look at the small print and there were barely 73,191 people tested yesterday. There is another mysterious second category, now introduced, that takes the figure over 100,000. Here’s the graph: So what’s the trick? The Health Service Journal reports that to reach the testing target, the government has begun to count home-testing kits which have been posted

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The fall of Margaret Thatcher: a Whodunnit

46 min listen

Charles Moore recently published Herself Alone, the final volume of an authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher. When writing, he realised that the story is half-tragedy, half-Whodunnit. Many of those involved in her fall had a motive. This podcast is a narrative of the events leading up to Mrs Thatcher’s fall, voiced by Charles Moore and Kate Ehrman, who assisted with all three volumes of the biography.

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why Covid cuts are off the cards

How will the UK recover after lockdown? Although social distancing is expected to continue for months, talk has turned to how the government will deal with its coronavirus debts. The Treasury is seeking to raise £180 billion over the next three months to meet its pledges – putting the UK on course to see its budget deficit rise to a level never seen before in peacetime. Some estimates put borrowing this financial year at over £300 billion, far outpacing the years following the financial crash. This has led a number of public figures to predict a return to the Cameron and Osborne era with mass cuts in the years ahead. However, when Boris Johnson was

Robert Peston Robert Peston

How the lockdown could be relaxed

We’ll get a fairly detailed plan from the PM next week encouraging businesses to start operating again, public transport to increase its shrunken capacity, and children to return to school. But there’ll be no firm date for any of that to happen – only a condition that even such modest returns to normal life must not risk a dangerous resumption of rapid viral spread. The transport and schools stuff is hardest, because social distancing on a train or on the London Underground is not going to be easy to organise, and keeping young children far enough apart to prevent infection will also be tricky. But maybe employees will be encouraged back to

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

The way out: what is the Prime Minister’s exit strategy?

37 min listen

James Forsyth writes in this week’s cover piece that the government ‘is going to go South Korean on the virus’. In other words, test, track, and trace. But as James points out, this raises the obvious question of why we weren’t doing this already. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to James and the Economist‘s Adrian Wooldridge. Adrian argues that the West is too slow at learning the lessons of elsewhere in the world, a costly mistake as Asian states like Singapore offer instructive lessons in governance. As this global pandemic lays bare the differences of national approaches, it’s a timely discussion. On this episode, Cindy also speaks to Owen Matthews about

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris Johnson sets the bar for any lockdown easing

The Prime Minister used his appearance at the daily government press conference to confirm that the UK is past the peak of coronavirus infections. However, those hoping for a rapid easing of the lockdown are to be left disappointed. Johnson spoke of the need to avoid a second peak and promised a menu of options to be unveiled next week. He said that this would still not include specific dates as any easing will depend on infection data. As James says in this week’s Spectator cover piece, data will be crucial to informing these decisions. The underlying principle that will guide these decisions: the rate of infection – also known as the ‘R’ rate. Johnson said that the country’s virus reproduction rate

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Lockdown sceptics might be wrong, but let’s still listen to them

Does Laura Perrins want me dead? The conservative commentator is coruscating about the government’s Covid-19 response. She abhors the lockdown and demands it be lifted immediately. ‘This lockdown and the extension on the 7th is the biggest error in British politics since WW1,’ she says. I am in the ‘at high risk’ group three times over and would quite like to go on living, if you don’t mind.  I follow Perrins on Twitter because, although we agree on almost nothing, I like to hear what the co-editor of the Conservative Woman thinks about the affairs of the day. In recent weeks, however, my finger has hovered indignantly over the ‘unfollow’ button as she

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Can a South Korean approach help Britain defeat coronavirus?

The government now has a plan for how it intends to get out of this crisis. It is, as I say in the magazine this week, to drive the coronavirus transmission rate down as low as possible and then stay on top of it through a ‘track, trace and test’ approach. In other words, the government is going to go South Korean on the virus. For this approach to work, you need accurate data – something which has been sorely lacking to date. But the hope in Whitehall is that clarity is on the way. The Office for National Statistics is undertaking a mass random testing programme that should provide the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

We crave certainty over Covid-19. There isn’t any

One of the strangest developments to have occurred during this very strange time is that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, may have attended a meeting of some people. Worse, various politicians are suggesting that he may have actually said something at this meeting. Very senior people are insisting that if Mr Cummings did say something at this meeting, even if we have no idea as to what it was he said (‘Can you fetch the Gummy Bears please, Mary, I think this going to be a long one’ or ‘Sorry, Zoom is on the blink again’), then he shouldn’t have done so. The Prime Minister’s special adviser attending

Shanker Singham

China’s coronavirus cover-up shows it can’t be trusted

‘Hide your capacities, bide your time’, China’s former leader, Deng Xiaoping, famously once said. Few in the West understood what he meant then. But they understand it today. The coronavirus outbreak has brought home the reality that China does not play by global rules. It’s time for countries committed to open, liberal democracy, free trade and free markets to accept the reality that China is not a partner but a strategic competitor. The coronavirus cover-up of the emergence of the disease might even have included lax standards in laboratories as the US Embassy had complained of. These are the actions you would expect from the Chinese Communist Party, a crony