All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
When the Office for National Statistics released the last antibody survey a fortnight ago, the results were underwhelming. After watching prevalence in the population shoot upwards for months, the figure had plateaued at 55 per cent. There were several reasons suggested for the stall, including the move to giving second doses and difficulties detecting fading
France’s vaccine rollout has had its difficulties in recent months. In early January, the Mail on Sunday reported the ‘French are at better at torching cars than giving Covid vaccinations’ after vandals burned 861 vehicles on New Year’s Eve – more than twice the number of people inoculated over the last five days of December.
He blew his stack. His mop almost came loose from his scalp. He wasn’t just jabbing his forefinger and tossing his arms around, he was throwing combinations and swinging at punch-bags. He almost did the Ali shuffle. At PMQs Boris delivered an amazingly combative performance. Last week he smouldered like Etna. This week the summit
Richard Dawkins is no longer a humanist. At least, not one that deserves to be honoured as such, according to the American Humanist Association (AHA), which excommunicated him from the Humanist of the Year award last week. The fatwa issued by the AHA, which generously includes ‘critical thinking’ in a list of its own Ten
Boris Johnson did not have a good Prime Minister’s Questions. It was never going to be a comfortable session, given the multiple rows about the funding of the Downing Street flat revamp and his reported comments about letting bodies ‘pile up’. But the way the Prime Minister approached it ensured both that the story will
Sometimes, political scandals are important for what they reveal about character. The row over the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat seems to me one such case. Boris for many years earned a quarter of a million pounds a year for his Telegraph column, on top of his various other jobs. He can be expected
God save Johnny Rotten. The former Sex Pistols frontman, real name John Lydon, gave a beautiful interview recently. It’s a moving portrait of his life now, caring full-time for his wife, Nora Forster, who is tragically suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. And it is also a reminder that, despite his newfound responsibilities – and despite being almost
Arlene Foster’s spell as leader of the Democratic Unionist party is over. Today, Foster announced that she is stepping down as party leader on 28 May, and resigning her position as First Minister by the end of June. Her resignation came after a letter, signed by three quarters of the party’s MLAs alongside some MPs, was submitted to
The row over the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat has stepped up a gear this morning after the Electoral Commission launched a formal investigation. Following initial enquiries to determine who originally paid £58,000 towards the cost of the lavish refurbishment of the Prime Minister and his fiancée Carrie Symonds’s flat, the commission has concluded there are
As Flatgate rumbles on, it appears the government has adopted a new communications approach to a controversy involving the Prime Minister’s spouse: send for Michael Gove’s wife. The Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine popped up on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning to firefight the situation – an interesting choice given her love of incendiary quotes in her
Michael Gove was deployed to the Commons on Monday afternoon to answers questions on the ministerial code, an hour-long appearance in which he was (inevitably) asked about that day’s Daily Mail splash: ‘Boris: Let the bodies pile high in their thousands’. An awkward question for any minister to handle, you might think, but the oleaginous
A political storm has swept France in recent days. It follows the publication of an open letter by twenty retired generals to Emmanuel Macron. In their declaration, originally published on an obscure website and then reproduced in conservative magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, the officers warned that Islamist terrorism was pushing France towards civil war. The reaction
In recent weeks there has been a lot of new-found optimism in Britain with regards to Covid: case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths have dramatically fallen and the vaccine roll out continues at pace. The virus has now been overtaken as the main cause of death in England and Wales for the first time since autumn.
To what extent will our pandemic lifestyles stick? With ‘work from home’ guidance in place for the best part of a year now, it’s has been assumed that trends towards flexible working are accelerating. Until the guidance formally shifts and employees have complete freedom to return to work, no one is quite sure what the demand
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Reports today suggest that the Conservative Party initially covered the costs of the Downing Street refurbishment. Will Conservative members, and the public at large, care? Katy Balls speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman.
The discovery by Czech intelligence services that a bombing of an ammunitions and weapons depot in 2014 that killed two people was carried out by the same Russian agents responsible for Sergei Skripal’s poisoning in 2018 is the latest act in the ongoing drama between the Kremlin and the West – one that has been
Almost a month has passed since the now infamous ‘sofa-gate’ incident where, during a meeting with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan, Ursula von der Leyen was not provided with a chair. Instead she was forced to sit on a nearby sofa. And yet it is this event – rather than Europe’s ongoing vaccine woes – that seems
The Oscars are in trouble. People are switching off in their millions. A paltry 9.85m Americans tuned in to the 93rd Oscars on Sunday evening. Film and TV execs will be tearing their hair out. They go to all that trouble to put on a night of glamour and back-slapping and the little people don’t
India’s Covid situation is dire: hospitals have run out of beds (some hospitals are treating patients in cars), people are turning to the black market for drugs and oxygen cylinders, and mass cremations are taking place in car parks. The official daily death toll is around 2000, but the likely reality is much, much higher.
Plans for a News UK channel to rival the BBC appear to be dead in the water. Last year it was reported that Rupert Murdoch was planning to expand his news empire by launching a new channel in the UK that would take inspiration from Fox News in the US. Alas it’s not to be. The company’s Chief Executive Rebekah
In January 2016, $400m (£290m) was flown by the United States to Tehran in the dead of night. Loaded on to wooden pallets on an unmarked plane, it was the first in a series of instalments to satisfy an unfulfilled American-Iranian arms deal signed in 1979, before the Shah was replaced in the revolution. On
One of the reasons the row isn’t fading about Tory sleaze allegations and the Prime Minister’s conduct is that there are so many different facets to it. Each row has its own faction within the Conservative party and indeed within No. 10, and so far there is scant evidence that any of these factions are
Sir Vince Cable is talking about Brexit and damaged bicycle wheels. ‘The metaphor I like to use when talking about the economic consequences of Brexit is a slow puncture,’ the 77-year-old explains from his home in Twickenham, South West London. ‘Because effectively we’re losing access to Britain’s largest market of goods and services.’ ‘I was
Today, for the third time in as many months, MPs will vote on an amendment to prevent the costs of removing cladding and fixing other fire safety defects being passed on to residents. For some time now, thousands of British homeowners have been left fearing for their lives and facing ruinous bills after fire safety
Pity the poor people of Hartlepool. Next week’s parliamentary by election has seen an army of activists pouring in to the Red Wall seat, with Labour desperate to cling on to a seat that last went blue in the days of Supermac. CCHQ have been playing down chances of a Tory gain but one Labour insider
It’s hard not to agree with those who believe that Boris Johnson, forced into the second Covid-19 lockdown, did say the words: ‘No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.’ The allegation seems particularly convincing because it was reported in the Daily Mail, whose political team is one of the most plugged
It’s not hard to see why politicians like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson want to talk about climate change. First of all, it looks good to the electorate. Caring about the planet (or at least being seen to care about the planet) is one of the things that marks you out as ‘a good person’.
Last year, after the cancellation of exams and the ensuing A Level results fiasco, which saw thousands of students downgraded by an algorithm, the Government promised this would never happen again. They asked students to put their faith in a system that had failed them once before, and guaranteed that lessons would be learnt. Yet,
It’s been almost a year since Boris Johnson said he would not wait to ‘fix the problem of social care that every government has flunked for the last 30 years’. With a green paper detailing the government’s plan finally due, we’ll soon learn whether the Prime Minister is as good as his word. We’ll also
Of course Boris Johnson raged, King Lear-like, that he was prepared to ‘let the bodies pile high in their thousands’ if the alternative was subjecting the country to a third lockdown more dispiriting than either of its dreary, even grim, predecessors. I say ‘of course he said it’ not just because at least three different
The SNP tabled an urgent question in Westminster today, asking for an update on the ministerial code in light of recent allegations of impropriety – something of course their comrades in Holyrood would know all about. A potentially tricky outing for the government beckoned but up stepped Michael Gove, master of the sticky wicket, to
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Simon Case dodged questions from MPs about his lockdown leak inquiry at a select committee appearance this afternoon, and refused to go into details about how Boris Johnson paid for the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat, saying the PM would make the ‘relevant declarations’. Why did Case stonewall the committee? Katy Balls speaks to
I understand that CCHQ (Conservative Campaign Headquarters) made a payment to the Cabinet Office to cover the initial costs of refurbishing the Prime Minister’s home in Downing Street, and the PM is now repaying CCHQ. There is an audit trail and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case knows about it. This is presumably why he told MPs
This afternoon’s urgent question on allegations of Tory sleaze could have been a rather explosive affair. Instead, it was used by members of all parties to produce a series of rather rubbish slogans for the local and devolved assembly elections next month. The Conservatives wanted to deflect attention from their problems by complaining about a