Politics

Before he went into isolation, Boris Johnson had remarked to Downing Street aides that he was keen to get back to the agenda on which he had been elected. But as I say in the magazine this week, this virus has now so changed the landscape that there will be no simple return to the world before coronavirus. One normally understated Downing Street figure predicts it will ‘change things for a generation’. The question for the government is whether it wishes to attempt to return to what went before or to try and combine its various agendas – levelling-up, Brexit and net zero – in its post-Corona reconstruction job. Currently, all the signs

One of the problems with the political news cycle, whether in normal times or now, is that politicians believe that making an announcement about a policy problem is all they need to do to tick it off their to-do list. The more complex the problem, the more tempting it is to make an announcement that sounds as though you are taking it seriously, but which doesn’t do anything to address even one aspect of what’s really going on. One of the classic long-term examples of this is social care, which no political party in the past two decades has done enough to address, beyond making announcements about what they might

Following Tuesday’s bleak headlines over the effect the coronavirus lockdown could have on the economy, the Chancellor attempted to strike an optimistic note in the daily government press conference. With the OBR projection suggesting three months of lockdown followed by a partial easing could lead to the UK economy shrinking by 35 per cent, Sunak said that while the prediction was worrying the figures were in some ways unsurprising as these are unprecedented times. However, the Chancellor stressed that it was simply ‘a possible scenario’ and it ‘may not even be the most likely’.  Sunak said the important takeaway is that the economy would likely ‘bounce back quickly’ once measures are lifted. He said