Politics

It seems the government reset isn’t going exactly to plan. Michael Gove, Boris Johnson’s trouble-shooter, was due to appear on Radio 4’s Today programme in the coveted 8:10 a.m slot this morning to explain how he has finally solved the long-running cladding crisis as part of his housing brief.  But what should have been a moment of triumph turned into an episode of farce. For, in scenes straight out of W1A, the Minister for Levelling Up appears to be unable to, er, go up a level, as he spent more than half an hour trapped in one of the Corporation’s lifts. An embarrassed BBC presenter Nick Robinson was forced to explain the unfolding drama live on

Could free lateral flow tests be on the way out? The Sunday Times says said so on its front page but Nadhim Zahawi has denied it outright. It’s clear there’s a split in government over this. Officials quoted in the Sunday Times article say the country needs to realise Covid is here to stay, and to accept that vaccines have blunted most of its force. David Spiegelhalter, one of the most respected statisticians who has been commenting on the pandemic, has said Britain is ‘certainly not going to see a big rise in intensive care admissions and deaths’. Given that deaths are running at 150 a day (and Sage forecast suggested

One of the many things Priti Patel brought with her to the Home Office was a renewed focus on the ‘war on drugs’. Since her appointment in 2019, the Witham MP has made her distaste for substance abuse clear, accompanying police on house raids, deporting foreign dealers, declaring war on ‘county lines’ gangs and threatening ‘tough action’ on laughing gas. But is all that being let down by Dominic Raab and his colleagues over at the Ministry of Justice? For the number of drug incidents in Britain’s prisons have skyrocketed by more than 350 per cent over the last seven years, with MOJ figures published this week showing the total recorded in Britain’s prisons has

Since becoming Health Secretary there has been one big question Sajid Javid cannot answer: how can he justify firing a worker who has recovered from Covid, has antibodies and doesn’t want the vaccine? Javid first did this with unjabbed care home workers and now plans to fire unjabbed NHS doctors. Today he met one of them — and it didn’t go well. Javid’s answer? He didn’t have one During a visit to King’s College Hospital in south London, Javid was on camera talking to NHS staff asking them what they thought about his plans for compulsory vaccination. He presumably expected them to agree. But then along comes Steve James, an intensive care doctor who