Politics

Greenpeace has been responsible for many a fatuous stunt over the years, but its latest video has a point. It shows an animated Boris Johnson making a speech outside 10 Downing Street, boasting about his government’s environmental achievements, like banning plastic straws. Meanwhile, plastic waste starts to rain out of the sky, engulfing the Prime Minister as well as all of Downing Street, the Cabinet Office and much of the Foreign Office, too. This immense pile, we are told, is the quantity of plastic waste which we are dumping daily on developing countries. I’ll take Greenpeace’s word for it that the size of the pile is accurate. But whether our

Oh dear. Labour’s unofficial collector of titles Angela Rayner popped up in the Commons today to attack the government over its supposed ‘Covid cronyism’. Ministers such as Priti Patel have been accused of improperly helping to secure PPE contracts last year.  Unfortunately for Rayner her opponent at the dispatch box was none other than the redoubtable Penny Mordaunt. Mordaunt savaged Rayner’s claims in a brutal exchange: I would suggest to [Ms Rayner] that an Essex MP is perfectly entitled to forward an offer of help from the Essex Chamber of Commerce to help in a pandemic. MPs do it all the time, it’s part of our job, but [Ms Rayner] already knows

The prospect of the final easing of lockdown restrictions in England going ahead precisely as planned on 21 June is close to nil, according to ministers and officials. ‘It is clear some social distancing will have to be retained, not everything we’ve set out for 21 June is likely to happen,’ said a government adviser. ‘But it is also possible some of the easing we’ve done today will have to be reversed.’  Neither he nor a minister would be drawn on precisely which parts of the planned unlocking may have to be delayed, or which aspects of unlocking that’s already happened would need rolling back. Even 10 per cent less