Politics

What political opportunities Covid-19 has presented for Nicola Sturgeon. Day after day in recent weeks she has appeared at her press conference, presenting a picture of a Scotland where the disease has been all but eliminated – placed in contrast with England where, she says, the government is merely trying to contain the disease, and not very well at that. It is an image which, naturally, aides the cause of Scottish independence. To remind us of the game she is playing, she has several times pointedly raised, or failed to rule out, the threat of imposing quarantine on visitors from England. But is the image of a Covid death-free Scotland

As ministers work on plans to return all pupils in England to the classroom next month, the government is once again being criticised from all sides. Union leaders are questioning whether the current plan carried significant safety risks, while England’s children’s commissioner has made an intervention today warning that schools should be the last places to shut in future lockdowns – after pubs. This comes back to a Whitehall phrase I reported last week, the ‘schools or pubs dilemma’. Ministers have started to consider their arguments in the event that some things have to close in order for others to open as a result of the rate of infection being too high in No. 10’s view.

The sight of Donald Trump fumbling with charts during his interview on HBO this Monday has provided much ammunition for his enemies. The words ‘train wreck’ and ‘toe-curling’ have been used multiple times to describe how the President insisted that the US has one of the lowest death rates from Covid-19, while interviewer Jonathan Swan quoted figures suggesting the US has one of the worst rates. True, Trump looked ill-prepared, but was he fibbing, as many of his critics have implied? America cannot claim to have a lower death rate than comparable western countries – but neither does it come out especially badly The truth lies somewhere between what Trump

Where are we again? Oh yes: a newish Conservative prime minister has confounded his critics by winning a general election that most expected would lead to a hung parliament. The result has caused Labour to drop its leader and replace him with someone more reassuring and substantial. And before the Government can work on its main domestic agenda, a giant convulsion has reared its ugly head to turn the world of politics upside down. That’s right, we are in the autumn of 1992, in the aftermath of ‘Black Wednesday’. The pound has crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism, despite the Government imposing sky-high interest rates in a bid

As ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ kickstarts this month – giving customers 50 per cent off their meals (up to £10) at restaurants and pubs that have signed up to the scheme – the centrepiece of the Treasury’s Covid-19 policy package starts to wind down. From this month, employers will be asked to pay a small part of their employees’ wages: 5 per cent now, 10 per cent next month, and 20 per cent in October, before furlough officially comes to an end. A policy that was initially expected to have take-up from 10 per cent of businesses has become the crutch of more than one million businesses across the

It would be fair to say that Donald Trump did not have the most comfortable of times in an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan on Tuesday, when discussing the spread of coronavirus in the United States. After first remarking that the daily US death toll ‘is what it is’, the President was asked by Swan why the number of Covid cases in the US has been proportionally higher than in many other countries. Trump was insistent that this was because ‘we are so much better at testing than any other country in the world, we show more cases.’ The interview took a strange turn though when Swan pointed out that