All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It has been a remarkable week. Boris Johnson’s refusal to sack Dominic Cummings for what the vast majority of Britons consider a flagrant breach of lockdown rules has caused his personal ratings to tumble. According to YouGov his party has seen a 15 per cent lead over Labour collapse to just 6 per cent in
If China imposes its proposed new draconian security law for Hong Kong on the territory, where would that leave the independent judiciary? So far, genuine independence has been maintained, and Geoffrey Ma, the Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal (CFA), has spoken up for proper legal values. But he retires soon, and Beijing,
Nicola Sturgeon – England’s care home deaths are under-reported Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has argued that the reason for Scotland’s relatively high rate of Covid-19 deaths in care homes could be because the figures for England and Wales are artificially low: NS: It’s often put to me that the death rate for… care homes
The old division of leaver and remainer will not serve the best interests of the country as we go forward. That truth might be emotionally hard to accept, but it will remain true. We need now to adapt to the real challenges the future holds. One of the most pressing is our future relationship with
Two weeks ago I wrote here about a study by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, which found that between 40 and 60 per cent of people who had never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid 19 – nevertheless seemed to develop an immune response to the disease in
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MPs are returning to parliament next week, marking an end of the hybrid model that saw most MPs Zooming into parliamentary debates. On the podcast, John Connolly talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about the challenges in a socially distanced House of Commons. Get a month’s free trial of The Spectator and a free
The last week has shown that Boris Johnson’s majority of 80 isn’t as big as it first appeared, I say in the Times on Saturday. Despite Boris Johnson throwing his full political weight behind Dominic Cummings, forty plus Tories still called for the PM’s senior adviser to go. The problem for No. 10 is that
‘This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,’ said President Donald Trump in his inauguration speech on January 20, 2017. Three and a half years later, in the early summer of 2020, a bout of heavy riots has broken out, like a virus spreading, in cities across America. Minneapolis rioted for days on
It may be the ultimate Kissinger Dilemma: Donald Trump versus the platform that helped make Donald Trump president. Contemplating war between Iraq and Iran, Henry Kissinger is said to have mused: ‘It’s a pity they can’t both lose.’ It’s a pity Trump and Twitter can’t both lose their current skirmish. On Wednesday, the social media
Coronavirus is obscuring much about the future of the EU – and Britain’s relationship with it. Not everyone is joining the dots, but business is. And this means the decision for a no-deal Brexit is being taken outside of the official negotiations. Nissan unveiled its global restructuring this week after making a £5 billion net
Power does not corrupt. It reveals. It was once said of Abraham Lincoln: ‘Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.
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Cindy Yu talks to Kate Andrews and Katy Balls about Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s announcements on phasing out the furlough scheme.
A dose of economic reality was administered to the public on Friday evening when Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced how the furlough scheme will be rolled back. But far from a short or sharp shock, Sunak unveiled a plan that scales the scheme back gradually over the next five months, as the government continues to pay 80
Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can’t still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped at a petrol station on a drive to Durham. If
One of the striking things about the government’s further easing of the lockdown is that it has focused on socialising rather than further attempts to get economic activity going again. At first blush, this is a surprising move. The blow that the public finances have taken from coronavirus means that it is imperative economic activity
Fifty years on from the Equal Pay Act, the world looks very different for women now than it did then. Women run their own small businesses, lead corporate firms, and last December a woman wrote herself a cheque for £341m, the highest corporate executive pay pack in UK history. A gender pay gap that was once
Was Emily Maitlis right or wrong to offer her views on the Dominic Cummings’s row? The BBC decided she overstepped the mark. But while the corporation’s investigation was concluded within a few hours of the programme being broadcast, this isn’t a debate that will go away any time soon. And the fallout from this row
Coronavirus is grim news for all major economies and Germany is no exception. The country’s economic output decreased by 2.2 per cent during the first quarter of the year, the sharpest fall since the 2008 crash and the second biggest since German reunification in 1990. A double-digit dip in the second quarter, when the full
Kazik Staszewski, a grizzled 57-year-old, does not look like the kind of singer who would top the charts. Nor does his recent accordion-heavy song ‘Your Pain Is Better Than Mine’ sound like the kind of song that sells. Nonetheless, the song took Poland by storm, topping the Radio Three charts and racking up millions of
When Tony Wang, general manager of Twitter in the UK, described the company as the ‘free speech wing of the free speech party’ he was expressing an ideal that would soon collapse. This was in 2012, long before the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was anything other than a flippant punchline in The Simpsons.
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Freddy Gray talks to Andy Ngo, editor at large of the Post Millennial, about the riots unfolding in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd.
Finally we are getting a clue to the most vital statistic of the Covid-19 epidemic: how many people in Britain have had to disease – and who therefore might be expected to have some kind of immunity to it? Today, the ONS published the results of antibody tests on a randomised sample of nearly 19,000
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Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance refused to give their opinions on the Dominic Cummings affair at today’s press conference; while Durham police indicated that they will not be investigating the Barnard Castle trip any further, after announcing that it might have been a minor breach. Downing Street says it’s ‘case closed’ – is it really?
It would have to close down its factories. Thousands of job would be lost. Suppliers would be abandoned, and the local economy would be shattered for a generation. It was sometimes a little hard to work out why a few hardcore Remainers cared quite so much about Nissan. Its range of mid-market, family SUVs were not
Danny Kruger, formerly Johnson’s political secretary and now the MP for Devizes, has – perhaps inadvertently – done the country some small service. In a note sent to newly-elected Tory MPs, Mr Kruger has reportedly advised his colleagues that ‘calling for Dominic Cummings to go is basically declaring no confidence in [the] prime minister.’ Well,
The idea of short-termism being a disease that especially afflicts the British economy is a recurring theme. We are regularly told that UK investors are too often looking for a quick buck unlike in, for example, Germany where they take a longer-term strategic view. Less attention is paid to the idea that this condition has
I wonder if Matt Hancock, or anyone else who has been developing the track and trace system for coronavirus, has set themselves this little test: get a blank sheet of paper and write down the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the people you sat next to on your last tube, train or bus journey,
Sally Challen killed her husband, Richard, with a hammer in 2010. She was convicted of murder and given a life sentence but on appeal the conviction was replaced with one for manslaughter. A psychiatric report had concluded Challen was suffering from an ‘adjustment disorder’. The judge, Mr Justice Edis, said the killing came after ‘years
The Newsnight team were rapped on the knuckles by the BBC yesterday, after presenter Emily Maitlis opened Tuesday’s show with a monologue saying Dominic Cummings had broken the rules with his lockdown trip to Durham. The corporation ruled that the introduction ‘did not meet our standards of due impartiality’. Safe to say, those working on
Dominic Cummings may have committed a minor breach of lockdown restrictions during a trip to Barnard Castle, an investigation by Durham police has concluded. The force has said that the journey ‘might have been a minor breach of the regulations that would have warranted police intervention’. The statement released earlier today says that while his trip up from London
A big question hangs over British universities. With open days cancelled, visa offices and language testing centres closed, incomes dented and long-haul travel unreliable, just how many international students will enrol this September and what will vice-chancellors do to survive without them? As students from the global south scramble home, governments in English-speaking countries, which
The UK has made a strategic choice to get ‘off the trajectory of ever-increasing dependence’ on China, I reveal in the magazine this week. This is important as the UK was about to go over the precipice in terms of dependence on China with the decision to allow Huawei to construct a lasting part of