Politics

Coronavirus, and the response to it, is going to change a lot of things about UK politics. Perhaps, the biggest shift will come in this country’s attitude to China. I write in the magazine this week that the desire for supply chain security, and particularly for medical goods, will lead to a national policy aim of manufacturing more here. In the same way that policy makers wanted to achieve ‘food security’ after World War Two, coronavirus will lead to a desire for ‘medical security’: that’ll mean the ability to produce medical equipment, vaccines and drugs here. When I asked one influential government figure what the most significant change brought about by

No one has modelled an economic lockdown before: no one knows what to expect. But the daily data is shocking, and points to a huge economic effect. In Britain, nearly 500,000 people applied for welfare (Universal Credit) over the last nine days. In America, the number of people applying for unemployment benefits surged to an unprecedented three million last week.  What has yet to be calculated (but urgently needs to be) is the human cost of all this We simply have not seen anything like this before, not even during the financial crash: the Covid crash has led to 3,283,000 claims – quadruple the previous record-high of around 700,000 in 1982. This

In his broadcast to the nation ten days ago, president Macron tub-thumped his war campaign on coronavirus. Six times he repeated the word ‘war’. Yesterday, he visited the front: Mulhouse in Alsace, on the Franco-German border, where France’s largest virus cluster is overwhelming the region’s hospitals. Live TV saw him, masked up, in an army field hospital, surrounded by soldiers in combat gear. From there he spoke again to the nation. France, he intoned, was at war in this region, a region scarred by past wars. By remaining united France would defeat the coronavirus enemy. And he launched military ‘Operation Résilience’ to take the combat further. Macron’s advisors have allegedly been

The statistics – all of them – have become utterly meaningless, regardless of how dramatically they are presented in our newspapers. We have not been testing with anything like enough numbers to give a true picture of the spread. And so the death rate – not the actual numbers – is also meaningless and ranges from a ludicrous rate to next to nothing. Complicating the picture still further is the growing suspicion that many of us have already had the virus, in late January, and perhaps did not realise it.  These known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, suggest to me that this crisis will diminish rather quicker than many are suggesting.

Double bubble at PMQs. With MPs leaving Westminster a week early, the Speaker ruled that two sessions of PMQs should rub up against each other. It was a full one-hour grilling. Boris adopted his ‘Britain in wartime’ pose. He heaped every questioner with praise and gave his answers with theatrical solemnity. Asked about testing-rates, he offered good news on their increasing frequency. ‘From 5,000 to 10,000 to 25,000.’ Trouble is, he said that last week.  Jeremy Corbyn complained that the healthcare supply association is so short of bio-hazard suits that it has to beg for donations on Twitter. Luckily Boris had just come from a meeting with someone in a

As the House of Commons rises for a premature Easter recess, coronavirus continues to dominate all parliamentary business. However, today also marks Jeremy Corbyn’s final day in parliament as Labour leader – he put in his last Prime Minister’s Questions opposition performance this lunchtime.  While many in Corbyn’s own party won’t be sad to see him go, Jacob Rees-Mogg appears to take a different view. The Leader of the House gave an unlikely tribute to the departing Labour leader: ‘I perhaps have a particular admiration for him which may surprise him. When I was first elected to parliament, there was a distinguished figure who sat at the far end of the opposition benches –