Politics

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

Sunday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Two big gaps in Boris Johnson’s lockdown statement

There were three messages in Boris Johnson’s address to the nation, and quite a lot of important gaps. The messages were: Because the Covid-19 epidemic has been tempered but not eliminated, lockdown continues – though will be modified very gradually; It would be a jolly good thing if a few more of us could return to work, especially on construction sites and in factories, so long as that can be done in a way that does not imperil health; The pace at which lockdown is modified, and whether it is modified at all, is in the collective hands of the British people, and will be wholly determined by whether we

James Ball

The R-number – and the danger of false certainty

Not much about Boris Johnson’s Sunday night television address was clear. The one definite new measure – one which will shape coverage for weeks to come – is the UK’s new ‘COVID Alert Level’, a five-stage measure that the prime minister said would be determined primarily by ‘the R’ – the rate at which the virus grows. There’s just one problem with that. It’s a figure few people think we have any real ability to track day-to-day. In making its decisions, the government has very little scope for error: it knows lockdown comes at a huge economic toll. But it also knows that spotting a rise in cases just a

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris sets out the shape of an exit strategy

18 min listen

It’s been six weeks since the Prime Minister first sat down to give the statement to the British public that began lockdown. Today, as James Forsyth first reported in The Spectator two weeks ago, Boris Johnson announced that the lockdown isn’t over yet. From Wednesday onwards, the one form of exercise a day rule will be removed so that, social distancing provided, people will be able to spend time outside even when they are not exercising or shopping. But not much else has changed, and in his statement, Boris Johnson sets out why. The ‘R’ number simply isn’t sufficiently low enough. A new metric for judging the risk to the population with

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris Johnson sets out coronavirus roadmap for easing lockdown

Boris Johnson used his address to the nation on Sunday night to confirm that there will be no immediate end to lockdown. The Prime Minister described coronavirus as the ‘most vicious threat this country has faced’ in his lifetime and praised the public for adhering to social distancing – describing such measures as the only way to defeat the virus. However, he said there was still a long way to go and that a significant relaxation of lockdown was not yet possible as it would risk a second peak of infections. Instead, Johnson presented a roadmap to an eventual return of some form of normality. He reiterated his government’s five

The Spectator

Full Text: Prime Minister’s ‘roadmap’ to ease lockdown

Here is the full transcript of the Prime Minister’s address to the nation: ‘It is now almost two months since the people of this country began to put up with restrictions on their freedom – your freedom – of a kind that we have never seen before in peace or war. And you have shown the good sense to support those rules overwhelmingly. You have put up with all the hardships of that programme of social distancing. Because you understand that as things stand, and as the experience of every other country has shown, it’s the only way to defeat the coronavirus – the most vicious threat this country has

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Stay at home message is still ‘very important’, says Robert Jenrick

Robert Jenrick – Staying at home still ‘very important’ Sophy Ridge began this morning interviewing Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick. The Prime Minister will address the nation at 7pm tonight, updating the government’s Covid-19 strategy, and it is anticipated that he will outline a vision for the end of the lockdown. The official message will change from ‘stay at home’ to the more open-ended ‘stay alert’. Jenrick said that this did not mean the public should expect to see enormous changes in the near future: RJ: Staying at home will still be a very important part of our message to the public. But people will also need to go to work,

Saturday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Tory nerves ahead of the Prime Minister’s lockdown address

When Boris Johnson addresses the nation on Sunday night to unveil his roadmap for easing lockdown in the coming weeks and months, it isn’t just the public he needs to bring with him – he also needs to convince his parliamentary party. Over the past week there has been a shift in mood in the Tory Party with a rising number of MPs growing anxious over what they perceive as the slow pace of lockdown easing. As one MP puts it: ‘People have started to get skittish.’ When Johnson returned to work following his hospitalisation over coronavirus there had been a hope among the party’s libertarian right that this would mean

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

A remainer’s despair at the #FBPE brigade

As a remainer, I always found it far too harsh when eurosceptic pundits occasionally compared some of my fellow voters to Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender. Now I’m less convinced that this comparison is always as unfair as I once thought.  Last week, I offered some thoughts on ‘Why the #FBPE hashtag failed – and the general lessons from that failure.’ It was intended as a discussion of the ways in which the Follow Back Pro Europe meme on Twitter backfired. It was a somewhat nerdy, technical discussion, focusing on how FBPE accounts actually just ended up talking to each other – and, in the process, failed to convince the other side to

Friday

John Lee John Lee

Ten reasons to end the lockdown now

Writing in this magazine a month ago, I applauded the government’s stated aim of trying to follow the science in dealing with Covid. Such promises are easier made than kept. Following science means understanding science. It means engaging with rival interpretations of the limited data in order to tease out what is most important in what we don’t know. Instead, the government in the UK (and many other places) seems uninterested in alternative viewpoints. The chosen narrative – that lockdown has saved countless lives – has been doggedly followed by all spokespeople. No doubt is allowed. We have been seeing the groupthink response to a perceived external threat that Jonathan

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The government’s black-box approach to lockdown

17 min listen

What is Boris Johnson going to say in his speech on Sunday? Wales’s first minister Mark Drakeford gave us a clue this morning when he announced that the Welsh lockdown will continue for at least another three weeks. Meanwhile, No. 10 has been trying to dampen speculation that the PM will announce substantial relaxations to the lockdown. Katy Balls, Fraser Nelson and John Connolly discuss the growing concern among Tory backbenchers over the government’s handling of the exit strategy. 

James Ball

Can we trust Neil Ferguson’s computer code?

Newspapers aren’t the place to debate expert advice on a crisis. Advisors advise, ministers decide. We should keep politics out of science. These three cries – and numerous variations upon them – have become common refrains as the UK’s increasingly fractious debate on the lockdown, the science behind it, and the best way to lift its various restrictions rolls on. At first, they sound completely reasonable and unarguable: people are stepping up to the plate to help the government make life-or-death decisions in a time of crisis. That’s an admirable thing to do. What’s more, they’re doing it with years of expertise in their field behind them. Of course we

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Johnson’s honeymoon is well and truly over

When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions. This has been a week in which pretty much everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong in the government’s epic battle against Covid-19. Britain suddenly has the most recorded Covid deaths in Europe and the second-most in the world; fiascos surrounding getting PPE to frontline health workers have got worse with the discovery that a planeload of supplies, dubbed ‘Air Jenrick’ after the Communities Secretary, is largely comprised of duff stuff that cannot be used; the care home epidemic continues to intensify; the number of tests being carried out has fallen back; it has become increasingly

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Starmer’s Telegraph splash is a perfect piece of politics

The Daily Telegraph is considered the voice of the Conservative grassroots – so today’s splash will have driven a sliver of ice into minister’ veins. Here is the new leader of the opposition, a knight of the realm no less, urging the government to get a grip of the Covid-19 outbreak in care homes. ‘We owe so much to the generation of VE Day,’ he says. ‘We must do everything we can to care for and support them through the current crisis.’ On the day we remember the end of hostilities in Europe, Sir Keir Starmer has planted his tanks boldly on the Tories’ lawn. We should be wary of reading

Steven Fielding

Boris Johnson should be wary of comparisons with Churchill

Despite his carefully-crafted bumbling image, Boris Johnson is anything but daft. When vying to replace the apparently rootless Tory moderniser David Cameron as Conservative party leader he knew what to do: write a book praising Winston Churchill. 95 per cent of Conservative members regard the wartime Prime Minster favourably. Johnson lost out to Theresa May in 2016 thanks to Michael Gove’s treachery. But during the Brexit referendum campaign he returned to familiar territory by drawing lurid parallels between the European Union and Nazi Germany, if only to imply that by leading the Leave campaign he was our modern-day Churchill. And when the Conservative leadership become vacant again last year he

Thursday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Covid-19 is not under control in care homes and hospitals

What worried cabinet ministers today was the disclosure to them that the rate of transmission of Covid-19 is not properly under control in either hospitals or care homes. In the community, R – the rate of transmission – is probably as low as 0.5/0.6, which means its savage progress through the population has been arrested. But in the very places where the frail and sick are supposed to be shielded, too many people are still being newly infected. Ministers were especially shocked to learn that some hospitals are really struggling to manage the rate of spread of illness. That is why Dominic Raab announced today that for the UK as

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why is the ‘R’ number going back up?

11 min listen

In his evidence given to MPs today, Professor John Edmonds, one of the government’s scientists on Sage, said he thought that the ‘R’ number had gone up in recent days. So why has this happened, despite the last three weeks of lockdown?

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Can we rely on a V-shaped recovery?

Can the UK expect a V-shape recovery? The Bank of England has this morning published data revealing very deep V, suggesting a complete economic recovery in a matter of months: a 25 per cent plunge in growth in Q2, followed by a 14 per cent and 11 per cent boom in Q3 and Q4. That would be the sharpest collapse in 200 years followed by the sharpest recovery in 300 years: more of a bungee jump than a V. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s an ‘illustrative scenario’ rather than a forecast. It’s not just lockdown: living with the virus takes a big economic toll The

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Boris and Cummings’ words are coming back to bite

Unlike many of his critics, I do not particularly think of Dominic Cummings as a Keyser Soze figure, a devilish master of the black arts whose influence has assumed mythical dimensions. Nor do I even consider him a Rasputin-type advisor, corrupting the government and leading it astray for reasons, well, for reasons that are never quite or fully explained. So I am not vexed, far less appalled, that the prime minister’s chief advisor sometimes sits in on the meetings of advisory committees. Indeed, it might be just as surprising – and just as surely fodder for his critics – if he, or one of his colleagues, did not attend some