Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
11 min listen
Boris Johnson gave an unambiguous defence of Dominic Cummings at today’s press conference. In so doing, the government is gambling that this is a storm they can weather. On the podcast, Kate Andrews discusses their thinking with Katy Balls and James Forsyth.
The rule of modern politics, let’s call it Trump’s first law, is that if you are being attacked for apparently breaking the rules, the best defence is to double down and insist that it is in fact you and your colleagues who have acted with the utmost integrity – and anyone who suggests otherwise is a knave or a fool. Such was how the prime minister defended his chief aide Dominic Cummings – who as I said just now in the daily Downing Street press conference breached not just one but at least three lockdown rules (don’t leave the house if someone in it has Covid-19 symptoms, don’t spend hours
It’s not often a politician calls a press conference to sneer openly at the voters but Boris Johnson has always done things his own way. The Prime Minister’s performance this afternoon was a careful, considered declaration of contempt at all those chumps stupid enough to obey the rules he laid down for them. They thought those regulations applied to everyone, regardless of position or connections? What rubes. Addressing Dominic Cummings’ freewheeling interpretation of lockdown guidelines, the Prime Minister said: ’I believe that in every respect he has acted responsibly, legally and with integrity, and with the overriding aim to stopping the spread of the virus and saving lives.’ I don’t
It’s become a common sight to see SNP politicians complaining about journalistic bias against them. Just last week the BBC’s Sarah Smith was in the firing line for suggesting Nicola Sturgeon was ‘enjoying the opportunity’ to set lockdown policy in Scotland different to the rest of the United Kingdom. However, Mr S wonders if the latest STV offering may be more to their taste. This afternoon STV released a video of children thanking the First Minister for keeping them safe. In the somewhat bizarre video, various young children are filming taking part in a joint message of thanks set to soft piano music: The children of Scotland would like to say thank you
Oh dear. For some time there have been reports of tension between Downing Street and the Civil Service. Now it seems that the latest row over Dominic Cummings has brought things to a head. After Boris Johnson used today’s press conference to provide a full throttled defence of his aide amid allegations that he had breached lockdown guidelines, it appears to have all got a bit too much for one civil servant. Minutes after the press conference came to an end, this tweet was emitted from the official UK Civil Service account: It ought to come as no surprise that it has since been deleted…
Despite calls from a growing number of Tory MPs for Dominic Cummings to go over allegations that he breached lockdown guidance, Boris Johnson used today’s press conference to give his senior aide his full backing. In unambiguous terms, the Prime Minister began proceedings by telling the public he had held lengthy discussions with Cummings over the past 48 hours and concluded he had no case to answer to. Of Cummings’s decision to travel 260 miles from London to Durham to self isolate so that he and his family had childcare nearby, Johnson said his adviser had simply ‘followed the instincts of every father and every parent and I do not mark him
The Dominic Cummings story is deeply disturbing. No, not the fact that Cummings and his wife, Mary Wakefield, took what they considered to be essential steps to ensure the welfare of their young child, but the fury and the bile that have been heaped upon them for doing so. It really is something. For the entire weekend the media and the Twitterati have been raging against two parents who were ill, or at risk of falling ill, and who did what they thought was best for their kid in this situation: drove from London to Durham so that family members could assist with childcare if necessary. In a more morally
Grant Shapps – Dominic Cummings won’t resign A media storm has been battering the government this morning after it emerged that the Prime Minister’s key adviser Dominic Cummings could have breached the government’s strict advice against travel during the lockdown. In March, Cummings and his family left London to self-isolate in his native Durham, in order to be near to close relatives should he and his wife be unable to look after their 4 year old son. Cummings and the government insist that he did nothing wrong. The Transport Secretary Grant Shapps defended Cummings’ decision and denied that his job was on the line: GS: Mr Cummings decided that the
As a lawyer, I am firmly against the politicisation of law. It is important to remember that we who serve justice do so for everyone – not merely for people we like or to advance political causes. ‘Lockdown’ has so far been three different legal regimes, and for ease, I’ll restrict myself here to the first one. Under that, we all had the power in reg. 6(1) to leave the house whenever we had a “reasonable excuse”. What it said was “During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse”. What that means is: provided we had a reasonable excuse, we could leave
Dominic Cummings’s role in government no longer looks sustainable, as members of the cabinet and Tory MPs turn against him – and in the words of one very senior member of the government, it is “only a matter of time” until the prime minister asks him to go. The problem for Cummings – and the prime minister – is summed up in a Tweet by the former minister Caroline Nokes: “My inbox is rammed with very angry constituents and I do not blame them.” Nokes is typical, according to ministers and MPs. Like all prime ministers, Boris Johnson risks deep harm to his own authority and popularity if he ignores
Every evening, at around 5 o’clock, a minister walks through the large panelled doors to Downing Street’s state dining room and delivers the daily coronavirus briefing. The conference always begins in the same way – ‘I’d like to update you on the latest daily figures’. The minister in question then proceeds to tell us just how many tests have been carried out over the last 24 hours and the number of positive cases discovered. We are left to conclude that the remaining tests must have come back as negative, that no infection was detected. However, there is a third category of result: void tests. These are tests that proved inconclusive, either because the
15 min listen
The government has come out in defence of Dominic Cummings’s decision to travel to Durham during lockdown. On the podcast, two Spectator writers give their opposing views on whether or not he made the right decision.
There have been an enormous number of positive attributes on display during the lockdown. Family members keeping an eye on each other. Neighbours looking after each other more. But there have been ugly attributes about as well. None uglier than the sort of tell-tale attitude that makes you realise how the secret police could always rely on a certain portion of the populace in any country. Everyone has their own anecdotes. A friend who lives in the countryside told me that someone she knew said to her, ‘Are you aware that this is your second walk of the day?’ That sort of thing. The people who have reported on others
Grant Shapps had hoped to spend today’s government press conference discussing extra funding for public transport as a result of coronavirus adjustments. Instead, the Transport Secretary spent it fielding questions about Dominic Cummings. After the Guardian and Mirror reported that the senior No. 10 aide travelled 260 miles to be near relatives so his family had childcare support nearby as they self-isolated with coronavirus, Cummings has been accused of flouting government advice with the SNP’s Ian Blackford calling for him to resign. A snap YouGov poll released this afternoon says that 52 per cent of those surveyed believe Cummings broke the rules and should go. However, it’s clear from today’s press conference that the Prime
We should always avoid misusing history to underpin exaggeration. Covid 19 is not Nazi Germany. However many qualities Boris has, he is not Winston Churchill. But this virus will pass. British politics will then enter a new phase. Oddly enough, there are parallels between likely developments during that future phase and the course of events in 1944/45. There are lessons which the Tory party ought to learn. These divide into three categories: history, vision and personalities. In 1945, the Tories lost the battle of history, partly because their foremost historian, Churchill, had been a critic of the 1930s governments. Leaving the complexities of appeasement to one side, Labour’s record on
Here’s the nub of Boris Johnson’s Dominic Cummings problem: ‘It’s one rule for Dominic Cummings and one rule for the rest of us.’ That’s what the anonymous member of the public who dobbed him in to the cops told the Guardian. The words could have come out of Cummings’ own mouth for they are the standard cry of populist punterhood whenever a politician or celebrity is exposed as a hypocrite or gets special treatment. Cummings understands popular anger at elites better than almost anyone in Westminster. He built a Brexit strategy and election campaign on it, both of which kindled public contempt for privileged Remainers using their wealth and connections
Most aspects of this present emergency are complex and resist easy solutions. Only a handful are elementary but one of these, and quite obviously so, is the Dominic Cummings affair. He must go and he must go now. There is no alternative, no other way out, no means by which this ship can be saved. The only question is the number of casualties Cummings will take with him. Judged by the cabinet’s performance on social media this weekend, the answer to that question is also simple: all of them. It cannot be stressed too often that the government’s authority during this crisis is moral much more than it is legal.
The question is, does Dominic Cumming’s four-year-old son possess preternatural resilience – a bit like the infant John the Baptist who went off into the desert as a boy. Or does he, like my own children at that age, need a bit of feeding, occasional supervision to stop him playing with matches and a bath at bedtime? If the former, and the child can fend for himself at this tender age, then it would indeed have been wrong for Mr Cummings and his wife Mary Wakefield (of this parish) to have taken themselves off to Durham, where his family lives, where his sister and nieces were volunteering to take care
Dominic Cummings isn’t resigning – or, at least, not by choice. That much is crystal clear from No. 10’s statement that ‘Mr Cummings believes he behaved reasonably and legally’. But it is striking that there is no endorsement from Boris Johnson or the government saying that it was appropriate for him to drive 250 miles with his spouse, who had Covid-19 symptoms, rather than quarantining for 14 days in their London home. The bigger issue is about the tension between the public and private responsibilities of powerful officials So the debate about whether he should quit will rage for a bit. It seems to me, the competing arguments are these: his defence is
15 min listen
Keir Starmer is off to a good start in his first 50 days as Labour leader. But has he done enough to start bringing back former Labour voters?