Politics Archives

Wednesday

14 Apr 2021

Steerpike

Trudeau claims Britain faces ‘very serious third wave’

Steerpike was surprised to learn this morning that the UK is facing a ‘very serious third wave’ – not from the newspapers or an ashen faced epidemiologist but rather the unlikely form of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Amid calls in Canada to loosen lockdown restrictions, the embattled leader referenced Britain in his parliament yesterday as an example as to why there should not be faster liberalisation. Sporting a hideous beard, the premier best known for ethics scandals and blackface pictures told members of the Canadian House of Commons: I think it’s really important that we work from facts and understanding of the science around things. We know for example that the UK is ahead

Steerpike

The remorseless rise of Jeffrey Archer’s mafia

Much ink was spilled during the Cameron years about CCHQ’s A-list efforts to get more top talent from a range of diverse backgrounds into the Tory parliamentary party. But now it belatedly transpires one man foresaw the future and was nursing his own crop of rising stars before it was fashionable – onetime MP turned novelist Jeffrey Archer. The octogenarian author popped up on Times Radio on Sunday to offer his thoughts on the issues of the day. Mr S was interested to hear Archer telling host Gloria De Piero that no less than six of the members of the organising committee of his 2000 London mayoral bid – which ended somewhat ignominiously after he was

Simon Wood

Covid and the lockdown effect: a look at the evidence

What forces Covid into reverse? To many, the obvious answer is lockdown. Cases were surging right up until the start of the three lockdowns, we’re told. It’s often said that all else failed. The Prime Minister said on Tuesday that lockdown, far more than vaccines, explains the fall in hospitalisations, deaths and infections. But how sure are we that only lockdown caused these falls — in the first, second and third wave? Or were other interventions, plus people’s spontaneous reactions to rising cases, enough to get R below one? In a peer-reviewed paper now published in Biometrics, I find that, in all three cases, Covid-19 levels were probably falling before

Nick Tyrone

Will Boris the liberal ever return?

During his time in City Hall, Boris Johnson managed to be all things to all people. He called for an amnesty for 400,000 illegal immigrants. He backed the London living wage but also managed to keep the City happy. His opponents on the left found it difficult to attack him as a result. But if his success back then was a result of his liberal tendencies and his ability to be ‘carefree’, the pandemic appears to have changed Boris’s political convictions. He could pay a big price if he fails to find his old self again. As Prime Minister, Boris’s liberal side has barely reared its head. Of course, a big reason for this is

Steerpike

Claudia Webbe calls for her own abolition

Pity the poor people of Leicester East. Having only got just rid of the scandal plagued Keith Vaz at the last election, long suffering constituents there have now found themselves lumped with his replacement Claudia Webbe. The latter was suspended as a Labour MP after just nine months following allegations of harassment, with her trial beginning last month. A former Ken Livingstone apparatchik, Webbe has a penchant for demonstrably untrue tweets such as her claim a fortnight ago that the colonisation of Africa had been ‘hidden from you all your life’ when it has in fact been a staple of the national curriculum for key stage 3 for years. Webbe certainly seems afflicted by

Tuesday

13 Apr 2021

Cindy Yu

Why is Boris talking down vaccines?

10 min listen

Boris Johnson today said that the fall in coronavirus hospitalisations and deaths ‘has not been achieved by the vaccination programme’. After pubs, restaurants and shops reopened yesterday, why is the PM talking down vaccines? Cindy Yu speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman.

Kate Andrews

Is the UK taking advantage of its vaccine success?

UK GDP ever so slightly edged up in February, growing 0.4 per cent according to today’s update from the Office for National Statistics. No surprises here: there were no changes to lockdown restrictions between January and February, which gave the economy little room for manoeuvre. The ONS has revised January’s GDP fall from 2.9 to 2.2 per cent: still a contraction, but another good indicator that businesses have significantly adapted to lockdown rules, which has meant that this winter’s lockdown didn’t plunge GDP down to record levels as it did last spring. Still, February serves as another reminder that – despite spectacular market innovation – there is a ceiling on

Bruce Anderson

David Cameron has done nothing wrong

To paraphrase the old adage, truth can still be pulling on its boots when a misconception is already half way around the world. This is what has happened over the David Cameron/ Greensill affair. There is only one antidote to that: the facts. David Cameron’s statement sets these out clearly. There is to be an inquiry, which is likely to recommend procedural changes. It should also become clear that Cameron has nothing to fear from what has happened. To see why, it’s first worth delving back to 2010, when the Tories had just returned to office. In the early days of the coalition government, there was much discussion about the future of the civil service. Francis Maude, the

Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon defends her Covid border

For some time now, Scots living in England have been placed in an unfortunate position by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP. Since November last year, the Scottish government has barred people from moving between Scotland and England for non-essential reasons, effectively creating a cross-border travel ban. The move has been particularly painful for those with family or friends stuck on the wrong side of the border. You might have thought then that today would have brought them some welcome reprieve, as Nicola Sturgeon used a press conference to announce that travel restrictions will be lifted across Scotland from Friday, to allow people to socialise outdoors. Unfortunately though, the Scottish First

Gus Carter

The shoddy cynicism of Cameron’s lobbying

Call me naively cynical, but when reports of David Cameron’s lobbying larks emerged, I gave a little shrug. ‘Ex-politician uses contacts to make money’ sounds like a description of our political culture rather than a hard-hitting news headline. Perhaps it is a little grubbier when a former prime minister is caught lining his pockets — but only because those pockets are supposed to have been cut by a higher class of tailor. Cameron used his heaving address book to press ministers on behalf of Greensill Capital, a company involved in the game of contractual jiggery pokery called ‘supply chain finance’ (which sounds suspiciously like corporate rent seeking). But he was

Kate Andrews

Why is Boris talking down Britain’s vaccine success again?

A few months ago, the Prime Minister was describing the jabs as the ‘scientific cavalry’ that was on its way to save us from our Covid – and lockdown – woes. But now the cavalry has arrived in the form of a vaccine rollout of unqualified success, the rhetoric has changed. The vaccine is no longer enough, according to Boris. Today we’ve seen another worrying shift in the PM’s words. In an interview with the BBC, Johnson broke the link between the UK’s ability to reopen and its vaccination programme success: The reductions in these numbers, in hospitalisations and in deaths and in infections, has not been achieved by the

Annabel Denham

Why the High Street won’t be another Covid casualty

Can the High Street recover from the Covid crisis? Even before lockdown, around 14 shops were shutting every day, and 2019 was the worst year for sales in a quarter of a century. After months of enforced closure, shops have finally reopened. But with mandatory face masks, social distancing and roped-off fitting rooms – and no indoor cafes, or restaurants to punctuate a day of retail therapy – shopping will be vastly inferior to the pre-Covid experience. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to be bullish on the future of the high street – and too many commentators are being needlessly gloomy on its prospects. For a start, households have accumulated significant savings during lockdown. By December 2020, Britain’s

Isabel Hardman

What lessons can be learnt from Britain’s vaccine success?

The NHS vaccination programme has reached its latest big milestone of offering a jab to everyone in the top nine priority groups three days ahead of schedule. Everyone in government and the health service is celebrating. Boris Johnson has been busy thanking ‘everyone involved in the vaccine rollout which has already saved many thousands of lives’, while NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens has said: ‘Thanks to our NHS nurses, doctors, pharmacists, operational managers and thousands of other staff and volunteers, the NHS Covid vaccination programme is without a doubt the most successful in our history. It’s one of our tickets out of this pandemic and offers real hope for the

Matthew Lynn

What happened to the great Brexit trade chaos?

The ports would reek from the smell of rotting fish. Factories would close en masse as orders got snarled up in red tape. There would be chaos at the borders as deliveries were blocked, and services would hit a wall of ‘non-tariff barriers’ that would make it impossible for British firms to sell them across Europe. We have heard a lot over the last few weeks about how much disruption our departure from the European Union was causing for exporters, and there were lots of stories about firms that might go out of business or would have to move production to France or Poland. Membership of the single market, despite

Steven Fielding

Starmer could regret breaking with Corbyn’s grassroots politics

Labour’s recovery under Keir Starmer has, for the moment, stalled. Most surveys suggest voters are less inclined than they once were to see him as ‘prime ministerial’ and his party as ready for government. It is too early to say if this is due to the pandemic looking like it is finally under Conservative ministers’ control or to inherent problems with Starmer’s own pitch to the public. But it confirms that after Labour’s appalling 2019 general election result, if Starmer ever ends up in Number 10 it’ll be close to an electoral miracle. During his first year as leader Starmer has tried to find ways of winning back voters who

Steerpike

Now even Nick Clegg turns on Brussels

The last four months have not been a happy time for those in power in Brussels. The unedifying squabbles over vaccine procurement and the sluggish delays to its subsequent roll out have prompted criticism across the continent, with the World Health Organisation calling it ‘unacceptably slow.’ Unsurprisingly, a Bloomberg poll out yesterday found that almost two-thirds of adults believe that being outside the EU helped the UK’s vaccination program to succeed. Now it appears Ursula von der Leyen and her colleagues have even lost their core support. No less a bonafide Eurocrat than Sir Nick Clegg – a former European Commission staffer prior to his Lib Dem leadership – popped up on LBC radio

Christopher Snowdon

The problem with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s war on obesity

With his little round spectacles and earnest expression, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is the Penfold to Jamie Oliver’s Dangermouse. Both men have been largely forced out of the restaurant business due to public indifference and now spend their time writing endless cook books and lobbying the government for tougher laws on food that is deemed high in salt, sugar and fat. This is a dangerous game for chefs to play since they use a great deal of salt, sugar and fat at work, but Oliver’s been getting away with it for the last twenty years and neither he nor Fearnley-Whittingstall do much cheffing these days in any case. Jamie’s restaurant empire has

Monday

12 Apr 2021

David Patrikarakos

Israel’s shadow war with Iran explodes into ‘nuclear terrorism’

If time flows at an even pace, then history does not. Joe Biden may still be new in the job, but he finds himself at the centre of a war between Israel and Iran in everything but name. After a comparative lull, events are not so much accelerating as whirling around the president, drawing him inexorably in. Last night, Iranian officials reported that the Natanz uranium enrichment plant – a lynchpin of its nuclear programme – had been the victim of what they described as ‘nuclear terrorism’. According to US officials quoted in the New York Times, an explosion destroyed the independent power system that supplied the centrifuges for enriching

Matthew Parris

Shirley Williams: a woman apart

Shirley Williams, the Liberal Democrat politician, died peacefully at her home this morning, aged 90. In 2009, our columnist Matthew Parris reviewed her autobiography, Climbing the Bookshelves, for the magazine: Anticipate the demise of Gordon Brown. Imagine Labour’s search for a leader with voter-appeal. Picture a younger Shirley Williams, but with the experience and affection she already commands. Wouldn’t she be a powerful contender? Couldn’t a new Shirley Williams, updated for the 21st century and reinserted into the Labour Party, give the rest a run for their money? Lady Williams’s style of politics has weathered better than that of any of her erstwhile Labour contemporaries. She’s just the sort of thing they need. Climbing

Steerpike

Watch: Boris and Starmer tributes to Philip

This afternoon the House of Commons will sit for up to seven and a half hours of tributes to Prince Philip. After a minute’s silence and Speaker Lindsay Hoyle describing him as the ‘father of the nation’ Boris Johnson led the way for the party leaders. During his ten minute’s speech Johnson told the Commons that the Duke was a ‘model of selflessness’ who ‘made this country a better place.’ Sporting a new post lockdown haircut Johnson riffed on the funeral arrangements the late Duke planned himself: It is fitting that on Saturday his Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh will be conveyed to his final resting place in a