All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Captain Sir Tom Moore was a lovely man and an inspiration to centenarians everywhere. Actually, forget centenarians; if the rest of us could be so chipper and nicely turned out at half his age, we’d be doing well. I was oddly moved to hear of his death, though not, I fear, to the point of
Ursula von der Leyen’s threat to impose a ‘vaccine border’ in Ireland may have taken the world by surprise but was her erratic behaviour really so unprecedented? Having found herself at the helm of an organisation that has worked tirelessly to remove borders and preserve the free movement of people, she decided it was time
Why are academic disputes so vicious? Because the stakes are so small – or so the saying goes. The same could probably be said of parish council meetings. Though they make up a small and vital part of our democratic life, these local bodies also have a rather unfortunate habit of being dominated by petty
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It’s been weeks since the idea of a quarantine system was floated, yet nothing has been forthcoming on that front. Isabel Hardman asks James Forsyth and Katy Balls – what’s the hold up in government?
Quotas are unpopular, especially in the liberal Netherlands. But next week its parliament is expected to impose a quota system to ensure major businesses employ more women at the highest levels. A law is being tabled in parliament which would force listed companies to have at least a third of women (or, indeed, a third
The progress of the vaccine programme — and the falling death toll — will reopen the debate in the Tory party about how quickly restrictions should be eased, as I say in the magazine this week. This will be tricky for Boris Johnson. He is inclined to go slowly to ensure that this is the last
What to make of the news this morning that Oxford University is to ask for volunteers to take part in a trial to ‘mix and match’ the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines? Researchers will ask for 820 volunteers, all over 50 years old, who will be given two shots of a vaccine, two weeks apart. Some
Was China involved in the coup in Myanmar? It seems unlikely, but that does not mean Beijing is blameless. As satisfying as it might be to point the finger at an omnipotent and scheming superpower, the reality is rather more complicated. After all, for all the shenanigans associated with China’s wolf-warrior diplomacy, Beijing is not as reckless
Suppose you explain to someone spouting racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory ideas that they are prejudiced. You may begin by giving them the benefit of the doubt. You tell them you are sure they do not realise how badly they are behaving. You assume they are decent people at heart who have merely made a
Oh dear. Rishi Sunak is the subject of criticism from lockdown supporters everywhere this morning over a Telegraph front page detailing the Chancellor’s apparent concerns that scientists are moving the goal posts on when lockdown ought to end. Treasury sources are keen to play down the report – but the aspect that has Mr S’s
If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say that Nicola Sturgeon has had a ‘good pandemic’, I’d be living in my very own Scottish castle by now. Imposing restrictions one step ahead of Boris Johnson seems to have become Sturgeon’s go-to formula. But if the First Minister has been praised for her initial
Wednesday’s very upbeat Downing Street coronavirus briefing underlined the optimism that Boris Johnson feels about the way the Covid crisis could work out for him. The Prime Minister was celebrating the UK passing the ten million mark for the number of people who have received their first dose of the vaccine, and thanked the NHS
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At PMQs today, Keir Starmer denied Boris Johnson’s claims that he wanted the UK to remain in the EU’s vaccine procurement scheme. Could a successful domestic rollout, away from the bloc’s programme, be seen by the public as an upside of Brexit and cause the opposition problems? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel Hardman and James
It’s a different game at PMQs. With fewer than 40 members present, the debates feel more like a committee meeting than a full-throated parliamentary session. It’s bad for democracy if the highlight of the parliamentary week looks so static and uninspiring. When the weather cheers up they should move to a secure location outdoors, (like
As more good news about vaccine efficacy rolls in, questions are already starting to be asked about what it means for the Prime Minister’s lockdown timetable. Boris Johnson has committed to publishing his ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown — but news from the last few days may be influencing what that roadmap looks like, especially the
Almost a year after the statistics were first published, the country remains horrified by the daily total of Covid 19-related deaths. Meanwhile, we are rather less apt to notice other statistics related to harm and death, which may be an unintended by-product of the fight against Covid-19. The Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) latest figures for the
I’m not a great fan of economic modelling. Remember, for example, the Treasury’s infamous claim that unemployment would rise by between 500,000 and 800,000 within two years of a vote for Brexit (i.e. before we had actually left). In the event, unemployment fell in 2018 to reach the lowest level since the mid-1970s. Yet having
At PMQs today, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer clashed over the latter’s support in the past for the European Medicines Agency – which as Mr S pointed out, appeared to involve Keir Starmer potentially misleading the House of Commons. It now sounds though like the pair’s argument continued outside the Chamber. The Sun reports that
Boris Johnson had a pretty easy ride at Prime Minister’s Questions today, despite Keir Starmer raising two policy problems that the government is really struggling to stay on top of. The Labour leader asked his first three questions on the quarantine policy, pushing Johnson for much tougher rules, and then turned to the cladding scandal.
The next Northern Ireland assembly election must take place by 5 May next year. The MLAs voted in then will decide whether or not to continue the Northern Ireland protocol, which requires the UK authorities to apply EU rules on various goods entering Northern Ireland. If a majority voted against (that is all that would be needed
Last night, the BBC showed witnesses giving stomach-turning testimony about organised rape and torture inflicted upon Uyghurs in China’s far west region of Xinjiang. Victims and former guards, now abroad and willing to talk, spoke of electric batons inserted into women’s genitalia, gang rape by police, an organised rape in front of 100 other women
Yesterday Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny achieved his martyrdom, with a panelled courtroom packed with journalists and Western diplomats standing in for Golgotha. A Moscow judge turned an outstanding two year, eight month suspended sentence for fraud into a prison term on the grounds that Navalny had missed probation hearings — dismissing as frivolous his
The Times is changing its style of describing people. ‘We will no longer be according people courtesy titles at the second mention on Times news pages,’ say the paper’s new rules. Thus Lord Adonis would become, on second mention, ‘Adonis’, and ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby’ would dwindle to ‘Welby’. Until
Oh dear. Sir Keir Starmer was in a particularly prickly mood this afternoon, as he faced Boris Johnson at PMQs, and the pair clashed over border closures. But the Labour leader appeared most riled when the Prime Minister pointed out that Starmer had fought for Britain to stay in the European Medicines Agency – a move
It might be a bit late, but the supply will come on tap eventually. France’s Sanofi has partnered with Pfizer to start manufacturing its vaccine. BioNTech has just bought a factory in Marburg, Germany from Switzerland’s drugs giant Novartis to retrofit into a vaccine plant. With plenty of money being splashed around, production will arrive
How does Labour plan to win back the Red Wall? A leaked internal Labour strategy document gives one answer: it says the party must make ‘use of the flag’. This sounds like a sensible way to woo those voters put off by Jeremy Corbyn. But the deranged backlash from some Labour activists suggests that not everyone agrees. It
The bishop of Manchester has warned that many Church of England churches are unlikely to survive the pandemic. The normal trickle of church closures (around 25 per year) is set to become a steady stream in the next few years. ‘I suspect the pace (of closures) will increase as a result of Covid’, the Right Rev David Walker has said. It
Despite its evident distaste for fair elections, the Kremlin is highly sensitive to public opinion — Vladimir Putin even has his own secret service polling agency, which he uses to weigh up policy decisions and gauge his popularity. The Kremlin combines these tools with state-of-the-art propaganda to promote Putin’s cult of personality, which naturally imposes
Ever since the Oxford-AstraZeneca team announced the results of its Phase 3 trials last November, there has been a suspicion among some that their vaccine is the poor relation of the messenger RNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. It might be cheap compared with the others, it might be easy to store and transport,
Alexei Navalny, the man Putin tried to poison, has been sent to prison for two years and eight months — conveniently keeping him out of the way until long after September’s parliamentary elections. It’s fair to say this was no great surprise. The trial was typically stage-managed, Navalny locked in a glass box during the day-long
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Another day, another dig from across the channel on the UK’s vaccine reliability. Isabel Hardman talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about how this rhetoric could backfire.
Countries around the world are in a race against time to vaccinate their populations against Covid-19. But there is one particular region which appears to have a growing problem with vaccine scepticism: Central and Eastern Europe. As a British expat living in the Czech Republic, I have noticed the lack of eagerness with which many
