All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Oh dear. It seems the Prime Minister needs to have a quiet word with his father. Stanley Johnson, 79, has decided to wade into yet another national debate, this time telling ITV’s Phillip Schofield: ‘Of course I’ll go to a pub if I need to go to a pub.’ Given that his son has warned against all
The Brexit culture wars are back. On Saturday, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘Brexit means coronavirus vaccine will be slower to reach the UK.’ As usual with such pieces, the words ‘if’ and ‘could’ do more heavy lifting than Atlas. The gist of the article’s argument is that leaving the European Medicines Agency (EMA)
The coronavirus is altering American life as we have never seen before. New York City’s restaurants and bars can now only offer take-out and delivery service. Night clubs, movie theatres, and gyms in Los Angeles are closed until further notice. The same orders are being issued by the authorities in Chicago and Washington, DC. The Centers for Disease Control have recommended Americans cancel
When we look at all of the interventions, we looked at the ones that had the biggest impact first. School closures is definitely a bit lower down the list than some of the ones that we’ve announced. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t do anything, it would have an effect. But it has all sorts of
Below is a transcript of Boris Johnson’s statement on the coronavirus this evening. Good afternoon everybody, thank you very much for coming. I wanted to bring everyone up to date with the national fight back against the new coronavirus and the decisions that we’ve just taken in COBR for the whole of the UK. As we
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In a dramatic escalation of government advice, Boris Johnson, the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser have said that those with anyone in their household with a fever or a new continuous cough should self-isolate for a fortnight. They also urged even those without any symptoms to avoid non-essential social contact – so
We’re all worried about older people right now. But I’m worried about the young too. I fear they lack the social nous and moral muscle to deal with a crisis as profound as the Covid-19 pandemic. I fear that the cult of fragility is so widespread among the youth that some will struggle to rise
What’s new in the world of coronavirus research this week? The most eye-catching study comes from the University of Maryland School of Medicine revealing a possible relationship between coronavirus outbreaks and meteorology. While the paper is not yet peer-reviewed and its authors admit that it’s ‘speculative’ and must be read with extreme caution, it notes
The hashtag #torygenocide was trending on Twitter all day Sunday. This is because seemingly rational people have got it into their heads that Boris Johnson is using the Covid-19 outbreak to orchestrate a social cull in the UK. There is a debate over the wisdom of the strategy the government has been advised to take
So there I was being non-partisan by praising the Labour party for its generally mature response to the coronavirus crisis when clearly I should have been putting this down to Jeremy Corbyn’s erratic level of engagement with major events rather than a deliberate strategy. Because it turns out that shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth’s wise mixture of
A little over a month ago, the Foreign Office was airlifting Brits out of quarantined Wuhan. But now with Europe and America grappling with the virus on home turf, the tables have turned. Planes leaving Heathrow and ultimately bound to China are packed full of anxious Chinese. Disappointed with the West’s coronavirus strategy, they believe
Institutional racism is rife at Cambridge university – that was the assumption behind the university’s ‘reverse-mentoring’ scheme which was launched to much fanfare last summer. The idea was simple enough: senior academics who were white would be educated about racism by their BAME colleagues. But the news that the scheme may be scrapped after its
I’ve been writing a diary for 26 years and 2020 is shaping up to be a vintage one. I thought 2019 would be hard to beat, what with Brexit, Greta and Labour’s implosion, but this year I’ve been feeling like Samuel Pepys as the 21st century answer to the bubonic plague sweeps the world. The
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When the government announced that anyone with a cough or a temperature had to stay home for a week, it was framed by the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser as a policy designed to slow the peak of the coming coronavirus epidemic. And it should help to do that. But there was
Bernie Sanders needs a wing and a prayer to overtake Joe Biden in the delegate count. Last week’s resounding defeat in Michigan, a state that represents the working-class voter Democrats must pick off from Donald Trump if they hope to reclaim the White House in November, was a bad omen for the Sanders campaign and
We’ve just seen one of the worst weeks in stock market history, with the FTSE100 ending on Friday 17 per cent down and billions of pounds wiped off British share values. This has been spurred on not by the fear of Covid-19 itself, but by the reaction to the virus: when sentiment switches from confidence to
Once again, Health Secretary Matt Hancock took to the TV studios to update the public on the response to the coronavirus outbreak. The UK has now seen 1,140 people testing positive for the virus, including the Health Minister Nadine Dorries, and the number of related deaths has risen to 21. Hancock told Sophy Ridge that
After a weekend of opposition party criticism and anonymous briefings over the government’s coronavirus strategy, Matt Hancock appeared on the Andrew Marr show in a bid to set the record straight. With the number of UK fatalities now at 21, the Health Secretary attempted to reassure members of the public that the government was doing everything in
It is a sign of our extraordinary times that the main trade association for shops – the British Retail Consortium – is sending out an urgent message to customers: “buy less”. More specifically, they have urged people not to buy more than they need. The national panic buying and stockpiling has emptied shelves in supermarkets
In the past week, the Boris Bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland has changed into a Tory Tunnel and been ridiculed by a leading think tank. The Prime Minister’s plans for the bridge may have morphed but they have not disappeared, as the Fraser of Allander Institute would like to see. The respected policy shop looked at
There cannot be many positive aspects to the coronavirus outbreak, but I wonder if it carries one for stock markets. We had been told repeatedly, before all this, that the markets badly needed a ‘correction’ after their uniquely long bull run. If they were now sliding because of a banking or commercial event, confidence might
People over 70 will be instructed by the government to stay in strict isolation at home or in care homes for four months, under a ‘wartime-style’ mobilisation effort by the government likely to be enforced within the next 20 days. It is part of a series of measures being prepared by the prime minister, health
As coronavirus sweeps across the country, I am sure people will be reassured to know that the NHS is doing everything it can to address the pandemic, at such times when a health service’s resources are likely to be overstretched. So it must come as exactly no comfort to see what one section of the
The BBC could scarcely have chosen a less auspicious time to release as its flagship Spring drama an adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s contentious, race-baiting Noughts + Crosses. For one thing, it is under increasing pressure to demonstrate that it is not purely the propaganda arm of the liberal, metropolitan elite. For another, a dystopian fantasy
As more and more other countries go into lockdown or opt for mass school closures, there is going to be political controversy over this government’s approach to coronavirus. The political consensus on the handling of the virus is already beginning to fray. But it is worth trying to understand why the UK isn’t doing what
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Fraser Nelson talks to Mervyn King about the limits of economics, where the number crunching in 2016 went wrong, and the sort of Brexit we should have.
The glaring difference between the EU and British negotiating goals has been brought into plain sight. In readiness for the upcoming Barnier-Frost negotiations, the French senate produced for the French government a set of requirements that Michel Barnier should work to in the negotiations. Those recommendations, which it published on 6 March, are extremely hardline.
It is not often these days that one gets a chance to praise the Labour party. Even with Jeremy Corbyn soon on his way out, the party has learned nothing from its election drubbing and seems determined instead to make the same mistakes. But it has, somewhat remarkably perhaps, covered itself in glory this week. And it
There are three dimensions to a UK budget: the political theatre, its underlying economics, and the measures themselves. My view is that the new Chancellor’s Budget speech was the most effective financial statement of any Chancellor since Nigel Lawson, for whom I worked as a Special Adviser. Rishi Sunak had a command of the economics,
I understand a bit more than I did about what the prime minister, the chief medical officer Chris Whitty and the chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance are trying to achieve with their Covid-19 policy, what that policy actually is, what they actually know about the illness and – importantly – what they don’t know.
The government has bowed to the inevitable and announced that May’s local and Mayoral elections have been postponed. With the Chief Scientific Advisor saying that the coronavirus peak is 10 to 14 weeks away, it was hard to see how you could have had an election campaign within that period. As I said in the
A small victory for common sense was chalked up this morning when actors’ union Equity apologised for denouncing the anti-woke actor Laurence Fox. After Fox’s appearance on Question Time in January – in which he scandalously suggested that maybe Britain isn’t a rotten, racist country that had driven out the wonderful Meghan Markle – the