All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
At the tail end of last week, news emerged that no groups of more than six people were to be allowed to gather together. Certain activities were to be excluded from the so-called ‘rule of six’ — and as soon as it was announced on Monday that various rural pastimes were exempt, the press had a
Chris Grayling recently went down in history as the one of the only men able to lose a rigged election. The former Transport Secretary had been lined up by No. 10 to chair the intelligence and security committee, but ended up being rejected by his fellow committee members when his Tory colleague, Julian Lewis, decided to
That the European Union takes to the moral high ground on international law when it suits it is hardly new. Nor is its infringement of international treaties, even when they are its own. For six months now, the European Union has been in breach of its fundamental international treaty: the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. Brussels has
Could Britain be heading for a second lockdown? Boris Johnson says his government is doing ‘everything in our power’ to prevent one, but failed to rule it out if coronavirus cases don’t stop rising. Yet even if the Prime Minister does end up ordering Britain back indoors, it’s worth asking whether he has the political capital to carry
The more the SNP decries the Internal Market Bill, the more I warm to it. Initially, I considered it sensible enough but wholly insufficient given the constitutional threat facing the United Kingdom. (Less keen on the law-breaking bit, mind.) But now Mike Russell, SNP constitution minister and professional hysteric, says the Bill will ‘undercut the
Today has not been a good day for the government. The government’s decision last week to be so explicit that the Northern Ireland clauses of its Internal Market Bill would break international law in a ‘specific and limited way’ has caused all sorts of problems. First, it created a Tory backbench rebellion on the issue.
12 min listen
The government’s Internal Market Bill won’t reach the House of Lords until after the October EU Council, James Forsyth tells Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson on the podcast today. This means that the bill won’t become law anytime soon, and provides the government leverage for a deal in that Council. So was this a ploy
As the government comes under fire over its Brexit tactics, testing capacity and coronavirus guidelines, Boris Johnson was this afternoon summoned before the liaison committee to answer questions on all of the above. Although dialogue remained civil between the PM and the panel – made up of select committee chairs – there were signs that Johnson might prefer to
Sir Keir Starmer did a Greta at PMQs today. Without their leader, Labour invited Angela Rayner to duff up Boris in public. On her feet she announced that this would be ‘the Battle of Britain’. And she believed that ‘the whole country’ would be watching. It was more like a game of hop-scotch between two flirtatious teenagers. The air
The British Medical Association is the latest organisation to fall victim to gender identity ideology. At the BMA’s annual representative meeting, medics called on the government to let anyone change their legal sex on the basis of a ‘witnessed, sworn statement’. But in the midst of a pandemic, is this really a matter worthy of being listed
It was easy to criticise Westminster for caving into Extinction Rebellion’s demands for a ‘citizen’s assembly’ on climate change when it agreed to convene just such a body at the end of last year. By appeasing the group’s law-breaking, so the argument went, parliament was emboldening XR and other direct action groups to block streets, spraypaint buildings,
Boris Johnson faced a new opponent at Prime Minister’s Questions today – Angela Rayner. With Sir Keir Starmer stuck at home waiting for the results of a family member’s coronavirus test (which has since come back as negative), Labour’s deputy took to the despatch box. Her performance led to a notably different approach by Johnson, the PM was
Some bright spark at the National Institute for Healthcare Excellence wants all alcohol intake by expectant mothers to be recorded, regardless of whether they consent. This would reveal whether a mother had consumed a single drink during the first week of pregnancy – a time when they may not even have realised they were expecting. There is
Coronavirus cases dropped after we locked down, therefore lockdown worked. But is that right? I’m not convinced. And now it seems the government may be considering imposing another lockdown in response to the latest surge in cases. Doing so would be a mistake. The ‘Rule of Six’, introduced this week, is only likely to add to
Imagine a world where Covid-19 has been eliminated. To be certain this is true, the government conducts regular tests at random. The number of positive results should be zero, right? Wrong. There will always be a proportion of cases tested that come back with a false positive test result. Thankfully, for Covid-19, the false positive
It ought to be a good day at the office (at last!) for Robert Buckland, the Secretary of State who has outraged the legal profession. He spent most of last weekend on the media rack defending the government’s position that it might break international law to defy an agreement with the EU that it had
As Europe weighs what course to take in the face of Beijing’s growing belligerence, it has become increasingly clear that the decision depends on Berlin. Germany is China’s most important counterpart on the continent. Unfortunately for Europe, it is equally clear that Germany’s economic entanglement with China has become so extensive that reversing it is
Robert Buckland was touring the Westminster studios this morning, batting away questions over the Internal Market Bill and touting his new sentencing white paper. What he probably wasn’t expecting was yet another flurry of questions about a story that’s now more than two weeks old. Cue Kay Burley and her seemingly never-ending obsession with Tony Abbott,
Lots of excitement in Westminster circles this morning over the four ‘senior American congressmen’ who have written a stern letter to Boris Johnson wading into the latest row over the Withdrawal Agreement and Ireland. The four US lawmakers have warned that a US-UK trade deal would be imperilled by any action the government might take
After the Hong Kong protests, America’s Black Lives Matter protests were like manna from heaven for Beijing. Now Chinese politicians could point the finger at the US as its own house was in disarray. Take just one example, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying: But China’s own problems with race leave the country open to allegations of hypocrisy. It wasn’t
Significant further restrictions on our freedom to mix with people, in social or work settings, could be introduced in a fortnight, if the ‘rule of six’ does not lead to behavioural change and a flattening of the coronavirus infection rate. I have spoken to members of the government and to its scientific advisers, and am
The object of a slanderer is to blacken the name of his target so thoroughly everything she says and does reinforces his slander. She can have no independent life or complexity. No one is free to say, although I disapprove of her views on X, I admire her for speaking out on Y. No quarter
Washington DC Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned that if Joe Biden wins the November elections, an incoming Democratic administration would revive the Iran Deal ‘on day one’ and ‘return what would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars to a theocratic, corrupt regime’. In an exclusive interview at the State Department, Pompeo also
It’s that time of year again. It gets darker sooner, the leaves are falling off the trees and a tell-all book has been published. ‘A diary of an MPs wife: inside and outside power’ is Hugo Swire’s wife Sasha’s account of life as a member of the Cameron set. The book – of which excerpts
Why does the BBC do it? Needlessly antagonise that rapidly diminishing section of the population which still has a vaguely nice memory of the organisation? The latest move in their ‘stuff the elderly’ campaign is to drop Sue Barker from A Question of Sport – an enormously admired presenter and easily the best host the programme
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President Trump is continuing to rail again mail-in voting, alleging that millions of unsolicited ballots could be heading into American postboxes. Is there anything corrupt about the postal voting system, and does it hurt or help the democratic process? Freddy Gray speaks to Marcus Roberts, director of international projects at polling company YouGov.
The monumental accords being signed in Washington between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain represent a new era in Israeli peacemaking. These agreements are being signed with Gulf states and they are a result of shared interests. At the top of the list of Israeli concerns is the Iranian threat. But Turkey’s increasingly aggressive stance in
14 min listen
Amid reports of local testing shortages, Matt Hancock told MPs today that the system is facing an ‘enormous challenge’ after a ‘sharp rise’ in demand. While the government has pledged to deliver 500,000 tests a day by the end of October, just 220,000 are currently being processed. Can the government fix the problem? Katy Balls
Should we be looking at confirmed cases of Covid-19 to give us a guide as to how the epidemic is progressing – or at the number of people reporting symptoms? Over the past few months attempts to track the virus have been hampered by a very inconvenient fact: the number of tests being performed has
Despite experiencing the largest economic contraction in over 300 years, UK unemployment figures haven’t budged for months. The furlough scheme seems to have proved successful in shielding many jobs from getting the immediate axe, while those who were made redundant often didn’t appear in the official figures as they were not immediately looking for work. But
Much hope is being pinned to a vaccine as our route out of this Covid nightmare. But even if one is developed, would enough of the population be willing to take it? Amidst a growing movement of ‘vaccine scepticism’ online, there are signs that many people would take a lot of convincing to get themselves
Having won that 80 seat majority for his party in December, it is really quite an achievement by Boris Johnson that so many Tory MPs want to talk to me about whether he’ll stand down – willingly or not – next year. There is even talk that no-confidence letters are already sitting in Graham Brady’s bottom
Last night’s second reading of the Internal Market Bill passed with a comfortable 77 votes for the government. In truth, this was always going to happen. A second reading vote confirms merely the principle of a bill so the real question was over the size of any potential rebellion rather than the future of the
