All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Brits are still waiting for their coronavirus track and trace app. Meanwhile, Germany’s version is up and running. But although Germany appears to have beaten Britain again when it comes to tackling the threat of coronavirus, not all Germans are happy with the new app. The app’s launch coincides with the further easing of lockdown
Trade talks between the UK and the EU are in a better place than they have been at any point since they started back in March, I say in the magazine this week. The two sides’ decision to commit to an intensified set of negotiations between now and August, some of which will involve face-to-face
Bolton is a peculiar and stubborn man – you can tell that from his moustache. He’s also a greedy hack. Earlier this year, when all his old neocon NeverTrump allies were begging for him to testify in the president’s impeachment trial, he decided to stay quiet. He wanted to keep his powder dry for his
Will the UK agree a trade deal with the US? Such an agreement has long been cited by Leave campaigners as a prize for Brexit Britain. When Donald Trump became President it was seen to increase the chances of such a deal being struck. While Barack Obama had suggested the UK would be at the ‘back of
At least we now know where Rishi Sunak is getting all the money from. The Bank of England has today unveiled the latest round of what should probably be called Covid rather then Quantitative Easing. It will print another £100 billion which in the roundabout way these things work will find itself in the Treasury’s
Scenes of disorder in Glasgow city centre on Wednesday may be a glimpse of the future as the radical right grows emboldened by recent race-related unrest. So far six men have been arrested on suspicion of what Police Scotland described as ‘minor public order offences’ and Scotland’s justice minister Humza Yousaf has described the behaviour as
Donald Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton has made a series of bombshell revelations in a new tell-all biography. Claims that the White House does not want aired in public, with Trump’s administration launching a legal bid to block the book’s publication. However the volume, which is supposed to be released next week, has been leaked in its entirety to the
Clashes between Indian and Chinese troops are shocking but nothing new. For almost twenty days, in the autumn of 1962, a handful of Indian soldiers surrounded by Chinese troops weathered incessant assaults, before being overrun in Walong, in the Namti plains; the Eastern most corner of India. No support came in 1962, from the shocked Indian
It’s hard to argue that English football is chronically racist. Unlike in many boardrooms up and down Britain, there are no all-white teams in the Premier League. The number of black players has doubled since the Premier League started twenty years ago. Yet instead of letting the players – black and white – do the
There’s no spinning it: if the U.S. presidential election were held today, it is highly unlikely Donald Trump would win a second term. And that’s saying nothing of the damning revelations emerging from John Bolton’s book about his former boss, whom he says ‘remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House’. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll
There is a crisis brewing in Scottish education. Not the long-running crisis of attainment gaps, falling exam performance and limited external oversight. The emerging crisis is about getting children inside the classroom in the first place. Scotland’s schools have been closed for 90 days now in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and are not due
A testy, ill-tempered PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer began by welcoming the anti-viral breakthrough achieved by British scientists. He got an instant slap-down. ‘I’m glad he’s finally paying tribute to the efforts of this country in tackling the coronavirus,’ said Boris, finding Sir Keir guilty of anti-British sentiment. The PM was road-testing a new jingoistic approach
Oh dear. It seems Matt Hancock has forgotten his own rules. Shortly before PMQs this afternoon, the Health Secretary was spotted slapping a chum on the back in a blatant breach of the two-metre distancing regulations. Less than a minute later, Hancock again disregarded his ministry’s own guidance when he leaned in to have a
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At Prime Minister’s Questions, Boris Johnson cornered Keir Starmer on the Labour party’s ambivalent position on schools reopening. After a bumpy start to the week, is the Prime Minister’s luck turning? Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson about this, the 1922 committee meeting, and Westminster reopening.
When those words and phrases of the year lists come out there is bound to be a place in them for ‘the new normal’. It is a phrase that invites us to expect that short-term shifts in how things are will become new long-term equilibriums. A socially-distanced lifestyle; governments being able to borrow vast sums
It would not have been obvious to those drafting the Conservative manifesto last autumn that they were planting a very large bomb beneath the government. After all, the triple lock had already featured in three general election campaigns and had yet to cause the public finances a problem. But the very special circumstances of the
Boris Johnson’s ministerial Jaguar was involved in a pile-up outside parliament earlier this afternoon. It seems a protester on Parliament Square tried to halt the PM’s cavalcade as he was leaving via Carriage Gates after PMQs. According to the Mail‘s John Stevens, No. 10 is saying that there are currently no reports of any injuries.
Let’s play spot the difference. Here is a tweet posted on Tuesday afternoon by Professor Devi Sridhar, a member of the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 Advisory Group: Now, here is a tweeted posted by Professor Sridhar on Wednesday morning: The tweets are separated by 15 hours. What happened in that time to prompt Edinburgh University’s Chair
For the first time since Keir Starmer became Labour leader, Boris Johnson clearly bested him at PMQs. Johnson, backed up by Tory MPs who were determined to make as much noise as possible in the socially distanced chamber, pushed Starmer to explicitly declare that it was safe to return to schools. Starmer was reluctant to
Poor Alistair Carmichael. The Lib Dem MP was only standing up for beef farmers in his constituency, raising a problem with the UK labelling regulations. But it appears that Boris Johnson didn’t recognise the Orkney MP, lambasting him for his supposed support for an independent Scotland. Yes, that would be the same Alistair Carmichael who served as
Anders Tegnell is either a hero or villain, depending on whether you think Sweden’s approach to Covid-19 has saved the economy and respected individual freedom or whether you think it has needlessly cost lives. But is the country’s refusal to impose a lockdown a result of his wisdom and judgement – or was the Swedish
Emmanuel Macron never misses an historical opportunity to emblazon his banner. One is reminded of the nineteenth century diplomat Talleyrand whose ulterior motives were so notorious that on learning of the Frenchman’s death the Austrian statesman Metternich enquired nervously ‘What did he mean by that?’ Tomorrow, president Macron will be in London – exempted of
Since becoming the new Speaker of the Commons, the softly-spoken Lancastrian Lindsay Hoyle has sought to distance himself from the tenure of John Bercow. While the latter spent his days constructing long monologues and pontificating from the Speaker’s chair, Hoyle has instead focused on limiting his own contributions in the Chamber and attempting to be
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After the highly publicised campaign by the footballer Marcus Rashford, the government has U-turned on the question of free school meals in the summer. Was it inevitable, and what does this move mean for public spending? Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews about this as well as the Foreign Office merger and
We need to talk about Priti Patel. Specifically we need to talk about what happened to her last week. In an emotional statement in the House of Commons, Patel talked about some of the racist abuse she has experienced, from being called a ‘P**i’ in the school playground to being depicted as a cow with
By now, we ought to be seeing some evidence of increasing Covid-19 cases from the mass protests. The fact we are not raises very serious doubts about the coronavirus lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, many of which are still ongoing. One explanatory hypothesis is the weather – that outdoor protests in warmish weather might have decreased the infectious
No. 10’s screeching U-turn on food for low-income kids over the summer will not do the government or ministers serious harm with the wider public. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. First, the public. They are not on Twitter. This fact cannot be repeated enough around Westminster. In a finding that should be tattooed
Just how a big a deal is today’s announcement that the steroid anti-inflammatory drug Dexamethasone has been shown to be effective at lowering the death toll of Covid-19 patients? At first sight, this is a modest breakthrough. The drug was shown to reduce the death rate among patients on ventilators by a third and among
Lining up graphs of the UK’s growth figures last week and its employment figures this week, you would struggle to believe the data was from the same decade, let alone the same month. Despite the economy contracting by a quarter in March and April, unemployment figures haven’t budged: 3.9 per cent ending the month of
With Primark open, parents can once again buy cut-price school uniforms for their children. Whether those children will get to wear them before they grow out of them is an open question. The government has abandoned plans to get all primary school children back into the classroom before the end of term, and Matt Hancock
This lunchtime Boris Johnson performed a U-turn on free school meals over the summer holidays. Following a campaign led by the England striker Marcus Rashford calling for the free school meal voucher system for low-income families to be extended over the summer, a ‘Covid summer food fund’ is to be set up which will see those eligible get a six-week
The only silver lining of Churchill’s encasement is that he didn’t have to suffer the indignity of seeing thugs perform Nazi salutes in front of him. It’s a toss up whether this was more grotesque than the hoodies of the week before who threw bikes and bottles at police. Rightly, there was the proper police
When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary he was constantly irritated by how small the department’s budget was, and how the Department for International Development had so much more money than the Foreign Office. After the 2017 election, he used Theresa May’s weakened position to get some joint Foreign Office-DfID ministers appointed. But even this didn’t