All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
You would think Nicola Sturgeon had enough on her hands, what with overseeing a sluggish vaccine rollout, being under investigation by the Scottish parliament and hosting her own daily TV show on the BBC during the pandemic. Yet the leader of Scotland’s nationalist party has waded into the debate on trans rights and gender identity
France is having a torrid pandemic with a succession of failures, from PPE equipment to vaccine invention, a stalled vaccination programme and now interminable and frustrating hesitation over a third lockdown. But we, and the French, should focus on the many things they do get right. Traducing Mark Antony’s speech to the Romans, it is
Germany’s vaccine committee has advised the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine only be given to under-65s. The announcement marks a major twist in a week of muddled vaccine reports. On Tuesday, the German newspaper Handelsblatt suggested that German officials believed the Oxford vaccine was only 8 per cent effective for the over-65 groups (no evidence has been produced to support the
Imperial College’s React study was in the news again this morning. The latest instalment swabbed 167,642 people between 6 and 22 January and found that 2,282 of them tested positive. A weighted average suggested that 1.57 per cent of the population had the virus between those dates. The study concluded: ‘Prevalence remained high throughout, but
Another day, another Covid advertising fail for the government. Fresh from discontinuing a radio ad suggesting joggers and dog-walkers are ‘highly likely’ to have coronavirus, a ‘stay home, save lives’ poster has been pulled. The advert, which showed women cleaning and caring for children while a man lounged on a sofa, sparked accusations of sexism. ‘It has been withdrawn and
Boris Johnson is in Scotland today and once again this counts as news. This is intolerable to everyone. Intolerable to Unionists because a prime ministerial appearance in Scotland should be as routine as a prime ministerial appearance in the Cotswolds. It should not count as a newsworthy moment. And it is intolerable to Scottish nationalists
It’s pretty clear that the EU has not exactly behaved well in recent weeks, during its row with AstraZeneca over the Oxford vaccine. First the German press pushed out an unsubstantiated claim that the vaccine had extremely low efficacy rates among the elderly. Then the EU threatened to introduce an export ban to prevent other
The EU rejects ‘the logic of first-come first-serve,’ said the EU’s health commissioner Stella Kyriakides. ‘That may work at the neighbourhood butcher’s but not in contracts, and not in our advanced purchase agreements’. Contract law is an area of law I know well. And it is not a political comment to say the commissioner is
Just how did Rishi Sunak think it would play when he thanked ‘mums everywhere’ for ‘juggling childcare and work’ in the Commons on Tuesday? Grateful thanks? A few more #dishyrishi plaudits and calls for him to be the next PM? The Chancellor’s vote of thanks for the nation’s mothers in response to a question about
What did you do this week? I spent it drenched in sweat, launching a vicious assault on Wall Street hedge funds which cost them $5 billion (£3.7 billion). And I didn’t even have to put my trousers on. Along with thousands of other degenerates, I bought shares in GameStop, a struggling US video game store
German politics is backing Brussels in the ongoing dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca over Covid vaccine shipments. The European Union alleges that the pharma firm, which is producing the Oxford-developed vaccine, is planning to supply the UK faster and while failing to fulfil its contract with Brussels. A meeting on Wednesday between officials and representatives from the Cambridge-based
If there’s one lesson you’d think Boris Johnson might have learned from his handling of the pandemic so far, it would surely be that it is too risky to set a date by which things will start returning to normal. And yet this evening the Prime Minister found himself talking about a date for schools
It was a day of awful numbers. And even more gruesome cliches. The Labour leader started it. ‘Yesterday we passed the tragic milestone of 100,000 deaths,’ said Sir Keir Starmer. Then he informed us that, ‘this is not just a statistic.’ He explained that each dead person has connections to other individuals who remain alive.
Throughout the pandemic, Britain has taken a relatively relaxed approach to controlling its borders. Restrictions on travel have come and gone since last March, but, on the whole, Britain has always leaned towards openness. The government has trusted people to make sensible judgements and follow quarantine rules upon return. Now attitudes have shifted. This afternoon,
The EU is now insisting that AstraZeneca use vaccine produced at its UK site to make up for a shortfall in its supplies to the EU. This is likely to kick off a major row as the UK went to great trouble to ensure that it had first refusal on all the Oxford vaccine produced in
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In his statement to the Commons today, Boris Johnson suggested March 8 as a date for schools to return. This is earlier than some predictions but certainly later than many were expecting when schools were shut earlier this month. Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about what this tells us about when
England’s national lockdown is set to run on until at least March. Speaking in the Commons chamber this afternoon, Boris Johnson confirmed that the return of pupils to the classroom would be the first thing to be eased – and this would not happen in February as he had previously hoped. Addressing the House, Johnson said
Over the last two months our fight against Covid-19 appears to have changed dramatically. The emergence of novel variants in the UK, South Africa and Brazil has generated plenty of headlines and concern. We shouldn’t panic. But one thing is clear: if we don’t act now, we could come to regret it. In the UK,
Boris Johnson had a very difficult backdrop to today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, having marked 100,000 deaths in the coronavirus pandemic last night. But, strangely, he didn’t have a particularly difficult session in the Commons. Sir Keir Starmer did, as you might expect, lead on the death toll, asking the Prime Minister repeatedly why he thought
Since the first buildings with dangerous cladding were discovered in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, one question has hung continuously over all efforts to make them safe: who is going to pay? Now, after three and a half years of stilted progress, the government appears to be on the verge of answering that
Something has gone badly wrong with the EU’s rollout of the Covid vaccine. Yet in its response to this debacle, Brussels seems determined to double down, engaging in behaviour of the pettiest kind as it blames everyone but itself for what has happened. ‘The companies must deliver’, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU commission’s president said
Tree planting is one of those motherhood-and-apple pie policies that it’s quite hard to argue with. We have a climate crisis, and a dreadful decline in biodiversity, and more trees will help with that. They will restore our denuded landscape to something more natural, and they’re good for our mental health. Only a curmudgeon could
Images of Dutch rioters throwing stones and fireworks at police, looting shops and facing water cannon have been published all around the world. This is not the typical image of a nation that likes to think of itself as nuchter and normaal — sober and sensible — in contrast to other parts of Europe, it sees
Yesterday’s extraordinary row over the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has just become even stranger. The German government spent much of Tuesday rubbishing reports they had found the jab to be only 8 per cent effective among the over 65s. A claim that was published by the Düsseldorf-based financial paper Handelsblatt following a tip-off from anonymous sources within the German government. Instead, according
‘It’s like being in church’, said my teenage son. It was a bit — two bursts of prayer, a religious song, a long sermon, and a general air of community-reverence, inclusive piety. We were watching Biden’s inauguration last week, grateful for a mid-afternoon break from other screens. These are quasi-religious events — I knew that.
How should we remember the Holocaust? In the next decade or so, many of the last living Holocaust survivors will pass away. It will then fall to us later generations to confront what Hannah Arendt called ‘the abyss that opened up before us’ by telling their stories. In doing so, we aim to guard against
What sex are you? It’s a simple question and one that most of those filling out this year’s census will answer quickly before moving on. But for others, the decision to ask this – rather than allow people to state what gender they think they are – is one laced with controversy. This shouldn’t be the
In New York society, you’re nobody until somebody hates you. By which maxim Jared and Ivanka Kushner will be extremely high-profile indeed. Expelled from the White House after four years, President Trump’s shoe-designer turned special advisor daughter and her real-estate mogul husband find themselves in need of a job and, perhaps more pressingly, somewhere to
Labour had an urgent question about schools reopening in the Commons this afternoon, but once again it wasn’t the Opposition that really increased pressure on the government but Conservative backbenchers. They are getting increasingly agitated by the prospect of classrooms remaining empty for many weeks longer than ministers had originally suggested, and were keen to
There never has been a clearer case made out for the utility of law and lawyers than the so-called Salmond Inquiry in the Scottish Parliament. The ‘Committee on the Scottish government handling of harassment complaints’ to give it its correct title, has thus far failed to unearth the truth about the machinations within the Scottish
Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Simon Stevens held a very sombre press conference in Downing Street this evening to mark the awful milestone of more than 100,000 UK deaths in this pandemic. The Prime Minister offered his ‘deepest condolences to everyone who has lost a loved one’, and promised that ‘when we have come through
With Sir Keir Starmer struggling to make a mark and the Tories maintaining a poll lead, there’s been a concerted effort of late among those on the Left to take on Rishi Sunak. Labour brains view the Chancellor as the government’s biggest electoral asset – particularly among swing voters. That perhaps goes some way to explain
The New Year Honours list included an OBE for Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. Recognised for her services to universities and the higher education sector, Stock’s achievement was something that should have been celebrated by fellow academics. Instead, hundreds of her peers wrote an open letter denouncing her and
Angela Merkel is known for her competency, yet even Mutti’s defenders would struggle to use that word to describe Germany’s rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. German firm BioNTech won the race to develop a vaccine, but this has not prevented crippling supply shortages, which has forced states including North Rhine-Westphalia, in the west of the country, to suspend jabs.