All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It is worth taking a moment to stand back and applaud Sarah Gilbert and the Oxford vaccine team’s achievement. The data released this evening by Public Health England shows that a single dose of both the Oxford /AstraZeneca vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine cuts the risk of hospitalisation by 80 per cent in the over-80s,
Matt Hancock had good news for today’s press conference: the Health Secretary said the effectiveness of vaccines was beginning to show in the data. While hospitalisations are falling across the board, they are falling the fastest among the priority groups that have received the vaccine. Deputy Chief Medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said that both the
The eyes of the world have been on Britain’s vaccination programme in recent months, as the UK government embarked on a dramatic push to get our population inoculated by prioritising first doses. During this time, the naysayers have been plentiful – with some UK commentators and plenty of politicians abroad keen to cast doubt over
Does it really matter if someone who was a newspaper editor, columnist and journalism professor has now admitted to being an unapologetic supporter for the ‘physical force’ carried out by the IRA? In short, yes it does, very much. You might not have heard of Roy Greenslade until the story this weekend that the former
Nicolas Sarkozy, 66, President of France from 2007 to 2012, currently a valued member of Emmanuel Macron’s informal council of advisors, was today sentenced to a year in prison for bribery and corruption in a case with roots in his murky relationship with the late Muammar Gaddafi, the not much missed brotherly leader of Libya.
Wales often gets left out when people write and think about the Union. People denounce Brexit as an ‘English’ project despite the Principality voting Leave. Now Scotland is (finally) stealing the headlines with the Salmond scandal, and Northern Ireland looks like it will soon be centre-stage as Unionist opposition to the Government’s Northern Irish Protocol
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In the first public appearance since Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump has spoken to CPAC, the annual conservative conference. Freddy Gray reviews his speech with Kate Andrews.
The contracts were badly drafted. The orders were late. Too few resources were made available for the scale of the task, and the regulators dithered and delayed. Even the most fanatical federalists such as Guy Verhofstadt have admitted the EU’s vaccine programme was little short of a catastrophe. But hey, what does that matter? Ursula
We mustn’t abandon the railways to market forces, many on the left asserted when British Rail was broken up and privatised in the 1990s. They needn’t have worried. A quarter of a century on and we have yet to see a market force take to the tracks. Wasn’t the whole purpose of privatisation supposed to
Belleek is the most westerly point in the United Kingdom. It’s a small village, right on Northern Ireland’s frontier where Country Fermanagh reaches out towards the Atlantic. The final destination for many motorists driving across a now invisible border are the beaches of County Donegal. It is the place we learned this weekend where journalist
How worried should we be about the news that P1, one of the two Brazilian variants of Sars-CoV-2, has been found in six people who travelled from Brazil to Britain before the hotel quarantine rules came into force, and that one of these people has yet to be traced? Variant P1 is of concern not
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Contact tracers are trying to find a person infected with the Brazilian variant of coronavirus, after they incorrectly returned their testing form. How serious is the new strain’s arrival, and could it have been stopped with a stricter quarantine policy? Isabel Hardman speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.
When Rishi Sunak takes to the Despatch Box on Wednesday it will be against a backdrop of colossal national debt, the recent rise in government bond yields and the ongoing Coronavirus crisis. The British state owes £2.1 trillion, ten times the size of the entire economy of an independent Scotland. Yet some concerns over the
What qualifies Roy Greenslade to lecture students on media ethics? It certainly doesn’t appear to be his own attitude towards telling the truth. When he taught me at City, Greenslade liked to hold forth on the vices of the tabloid press. He was quieter on his own red top past, neglecting to often mention his rise
Nigel Farage is in some ways a victim of his own success. It was the political threat he posed during the coalition era that more than anything else caused David Cameron to pledge to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership if he won a majority. It is safe to say that without his persistence,
Young, polished and confident, Germany’s health minister became the country’s most popular politician in 2020. A darling of the conservative right, Jens Spahn, was even tipped as a candidate to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor. At the peak of his popularity last November, surveys indicated approval from nearly two-thirds of all Germans. He seemed to
‘Do you miss me yet,’ Donald Trump asked the crowd in his opening remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference this afternoon: the most important annual conference for the Republican party. The former president was given the keynote address at CPAC, with anticipation that he might have a big announcement to make about his future
The government is starting to have an opinion poll problem, but it has nothing to do with any great threat from Keir Starmer or the Labour party. While the Tory ratings have gone from high to low 40s and Boris Johnson is not as extraordinarily popular as he was in January last year before the
Rishi Sunak kept his Budget cards close to his chest this morning as he toured the studios for both BBC One’s The Andrew Marr show and Sky News’ Ridge on Sunday. The Chancellor batted away questions about spending and possible tax hikes, repeating over and over again that it’s only ‘appropriate’ to wait until the
There are two groups in the Jewish community – mainstream Jews who, while still religious, do their best to assimilate into the wider community and the Chareidi, ultra-orthodox Jews who tend to shun British society. Those two groups are now locked in a struggle for the future of the Jewish community. For over 100 years,
In the latest episode of ‘Americans Do the Funniest Things,’ it has emerged that The Simpsons is to replace the white voice actor for the character of Dr. Julius Hibbert with a black actor. Hibbert, for those who don’t know him, is a mainstay of the show — a family doctor recognised by his white
Rishi Sunak – Government will do ‘whatever it takes’ to protect people and businesses Ahead of the Budget this Wednesday, both Andrew Marr and Sophy Ridge were joined by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak. With the government’s roadmap for ending the lockdown having been published last week, all eyes are now on Sunak
There is no getting around the fact that these are awkward times for fiscal conservatives, such as myself. It has never been harder to make the case for lower taxes. We have the largest national debt for half a century as we come out of the worst recession for three hundred years, with zero political
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Freddy Gray, Amber Athey and Matt McDonald discuss 2021’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, ahead of Donald Trump’s appearance tomorrow.
We already know much of what will be in Rishi Sunak’s Budget next week. Another £30bn for Covid-relief measures: furlough scheme into the summer, stamp duty holiday and the uplift in universal credit (which is also expected to be time-limited, despite pressure from the opposition to make a permanent adjustment). But this year’s spending splurges
Sixty-eight days out from the next Scottish Parliament election might seem an ill-advised time to change the leader of Scottish Labour. This morning, Glasgow MSP Anas Sarwar was unveiled as the winner of a low-key internal election, defeating Labour’s Holyrood health spokeswoman Monica Lennon by 58 per cent to 42 per cent. The leadership was
A dark cloud hangs over the Al Hol Camp where Shamima Begum is being held in North-Eastern Syria. She is said to be ‘angry and upset’ at the decision of the Supreme Court to not allow her to return to the UK to contest the loss of her citizenship. This bleak picture stands in stark
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Katy Balls, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson discuss Alex Salmond’s appearance before the Holyrood inquiry into how the Scottish government handled complaints of sexual misconduct made against him.
Every year, one match during the Six Nations – either in the heart of Cardiff or the depths of West London – sets the heart rate of Welsh rugby fans to dangerous levels. When Wales face England this weekend there is no doubt that millions west of Offa’s Dyke will be captivated by one of
The decades since the Islamic revolution have weighed heavy on the people of Iran. Living in fear, under extreme levels of surveillance and oppression, ordinary citizens have seen their quality of life plummet and their horizons shrink, as their country became an international pariah. Those who dared to protest have been brutally repressed by regime
Are Black people and Asians the same? Are they different from other ethnic minorities? What about Jews? And who do we include when we talk about Asians? Korean, Thai and Chinese people, or those from Afghanistan, Pakistan and India? Does ‘Asian’ refer to a set of skin colours or geographical locations? And what exactly is
When The Spectator went to High Court in Edinburgh to seek clarification over the Alex Salmond case, we did not act out of chumminess or a conviction that he was telling the truth. We are not natural allies of his. We are not sure if his explosive claims are correct, but we are sure that they should be scrutinised by a free
Was Winston Churchill a racist? For students like me who attended Churchill College, Cambridge, it’s a question which barely even merits an answer: of course he wasn’t. But some Cambridge academics appear to take a different approach when it comes to assessing the record of Britain’s most famous prime minister. Churchill College recently announced a