All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
No more commuting. An end to irritating conversations with slightly dull colleagues. The boss can’t monitor how much time you spend on Facebook anymore, and you have plenty of time to bake sourdough bread/try out online pilates/read the whole of Proust (delete as applicable). A few of us might even be able to carry on
12 min listen
The government has announced that self-isolating Britons will be paid £13 a day to stay at home. Will this help improve the beleaguered test and trace system? Cindy Yu speaks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews.
As Britain’s furlough scheme winds down, Germany’s is set to continue: Merkel’s government has announced that its enormously-expensive policy will stay in place until the end of next year. Hubertus Heil, the country’s finance minister, says furloughing offers ‘the stablest bridge over a deep economic valley’. Many in Britain are clamouring for Rishi Sunak to
It seems as though Layla Moran’s offer to make the Lib Dems ‘more radical than Labour’ has been decisively rejected. Her rival Ed Davey won over 60 per cent of the votes cast and is the party’s new leader after an interminable and dire leadership contest. After the result was announced, Davey got up and gave a
For many Lib Dems, this leadership election felt like an existential choice. The party is now on its fourth leader in almost as many years, while Brexit has left the party a polarising – and increasingly irrelevant – force in British politics. Sir Ed Davey made clear that he knows his party is facing serious problems during
Should we be spraying surfaces, and ourselves, with an off-the-shelf mosquito repellent to tackle the spread of Covid-19? The Ministry of Defence has revealed that it has been issuing soldiers with Mosi-guard natural, a spray derived from eucalyptus oil and manufactured by a small company called Citrefine, in Leeds, from the beginning of the Covid
The government always knew it would have to expend political capital to get its planning reforms through. Making it easier to build houses was never going to be popular with Tories in leafy areas. The benefit of an 80-seat majority was meant to be the ability to push through difficult but important changes. The problem
What’s the bottom line so far? The Democrats think they will win by making the race a referendum on Donald Trump (more the person than the policies, though they hate both). They are effectively trying to run Joe Biden as a generic Democrat. The Republicans think the path to victory is to make the race
From 1940 to 1944, the Vichy regime set aside France’s 150-year-old rousing national anthem La Marseillaise for Maréchal nous voilà, a sycophantic hymn to France’s collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain. Pétain in the southern zone and the occupying German forces in the north brutally punished any singing of La Marseillaise. During the Second World War, Land of
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The government reversed its position on masks in schools late yesterday evening, announcing that secondary school pupils in local lockdown areas would be mandated to wear face coverings in communal areas. Could masks in offices be next? John Connolly speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth about why the government keeps changing its mind.
Within the next year or two, I could go bankrupt. My mistake: to join a government-backed affordable housing scheme and purchase a one-bedroom flat in east London. For the past four years, it has been my pride and joy — not to mention my savings, my pension and my financial future. I was grateful for
One of the reasons the Red Wall fell so decisively in favour of the Tories was that Labour failed to understand Brexit voters. That at least is a common theory put forward as to why Boris decisively trounced Corbyn last December. And it certainly seems to tally up with what some current Labour MPs make of
Has anyone who is recommending the use of masks in schools ever spent any significant amount of time working with young people? It seems unlikely. Children simply will not wear their masks correctly, if at all. Girls will constantly be adjusting them; boys will be flicking them across the room and pulling each others’ elastic
There’s a new trend emerging when it comes to Covid-19 policy: where Scotland leads, England follows. In recent weeks, decisions taken by Nicola Sturgeon have – eventually – been adopted by the UK government for England: first, the U-turn on how A-level and GCSE results would be attributed, and today another U-turn on face masks in schools.
Throughout the Covid crisis, the international response to the disease has rested on a simple assumption: that none of us have any resistance to it, being caused by a novel virus. Therefore, if allowed to let rip through the population, the virus would exponentially spread until around 60 – 70 per cent of us had
‘Don’t be a fatty in your 50s’, that was the advice Boris Johnson had for his colleagues following his recovery from coronavirus. It seems he’s taken that comment to heart – the PM has signed up a new PT to help him shift the pounds. The Evening Standard reports that celebrity trainer Harry Jameson has been spotted alongside the
The latest U-turn – this time on face masks in schools – comes less than a week before hundreds of thousands of teachers, including myself, return to the classroom. But is the announcement that secondary school pupils may have to wear masks as they make their way around schools really a smart idea? I’m not
By the time I was 15, I had put two rugby players in hospital. I broke the arm of one and knocked the other unconscious. Both were legitimate tackles, I was just better developed: bigger, stronger and more aggressive than my opponents. I got my comeuppance in New Zealand when, as a 19-year-old, I launched
Dominic Raab has visited Israel for his first trip as Foreign Secretary. By all accounts, he was made very welcome, despite the UK’s craven abstention at the UN over extending an arms embargo on Iran, a country where they arrest our ambassador, burn our flag and chat ‘Death to Britain’. Quite the dilemma we faced
Diversity and inclusion is, apparently, ‘mission critical’ to the Ministry of Defence. That’s right, up there with keeping our troops safe or even, believe it or not, defence of the realm. Which is why the MoD is now looking for a new director of diversity and inclusion. In fact, the role is so ‘mission critical’ that the successful candidate
It was way back in 2003 that the journalist Peter Hitchens first declared the Conservative party to be ‘useless’. Peter’s thesis was that the Tories had become incapable of fighting effectively for any significant conservative cause, and were in any case usually unwilling even to try and therefore should be disbanded. In a series of
Some in Westminster have been missing Dominic Cummings. It turns out he had an operation in late July, which he delayed a year ago when Boris Johnson persuaded him to become his chief aide, and has been convalescing in the north of England since. He returns to normal duties at No. 10 on Monday. Whitehall source tells
15 min listen
Reports on Sunday suggested the BBC was going to drop ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from its Last Night of the Proms schedule because of the songs’ associations with slavery and colonialism. Boris Johnson hit back at the broadcaster today, however, calling for an end to ‘this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness’.
Can I make a confession? I’m not really interested in the Last Night of the Proms. I don’t think I’ve ever watched it. I don’t really know the words to ‘Rule Britannia’. Or the other one. Does that mean I hate Britain and all it stands for? Does it mean I am callously indifferent to
If the Proms director, David Pickard, thought he’d get away with fiddling with Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms, boy, he knows better now. Yesterday, the Proms publicity people put out a statement deploring social media commentary about its plans and explaining: ‘The Proms will reinvent the Last Night
John McDonnell, Corbyn’s right hand man for four and a half years, was full of praise when asked about the official opposition’s handling of the Covid crisis. ‘Keir’s got this exactly right’ the ex-shadow chancellor told John Pienaar. But many of Corbyn’s loyal supporters didn’t agree; sparking an internal Labour argument between the party’s warring
Boris Johnson’s approach to the culture war is to wait for the other side to overreach – talk of taking down Churchill’s statue, no singing of Rule Britannia at the Proms – then pile in. So, today he has waded into the row about the BBC’s decision to only have instrumental versions of Rule Britannia and Land
In news that should surprise nobody, the German government says there is a ‘certain likelihood’ Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition figure who fell ill while on a domestic flight last week and was evacuated to Germany on the weekend, was poisoned. According to doctors treating him, Navalny was poisoned by an unknown substance from ‘within
Just how many people have died of Covid-19, as opposed to having died with the virus? It is a poignant question, especially after it was revealed that Public Health England had been counting a Covid death as anyone who died after testing positive for the virus, even if they swiftly recovered and went on to
The BBC has announced plans to invest £100 million pounds in ‘diversity’ for its television output. Bravo. I’m a great believer in diversity. A thriving, vibrant democracy needs as much diversity as possible in public discourse – a plurality of voices, of outlook and of background. But I suspect that the BBC is thinking of
It appears nothing and no-one is safe from being accused of racism nowadays: statues, bra names and even Covid-19. Referring to evidence that coronavirus disproportionately affects black, Asian and minority ethnic communities (BAME), as well as men and those who are obese, Tory peer Lord Bethall has said: ‘This disease is racist, fattist and sexist and
Days after the UAE and Israel announced a deal, Israelis were already talking about trips to Dubai and all the great five star hotels the Gulf offers. At the same time, the country has been speculating about which states will be next in line to make peace. This sense of a coming era of peacemaking is