The Week

Leading article

Track and trace should not be our only exit strategy

The concept of the state tracking our every movement is anathema to this magazine and, we assume, to its liberal former editor now resident in Downing Street. Nevertheless, such is the impasse over coronavirus that it is right the government should attempt to exit lockdown via the application of a voluntary ‘track and trace’ on

Portrait of the week

Diary

Can London’s theatres survive this crisis?

Never have I stared at my own face so much. Not because I want to, it’s just always there now, ever present in one part of the screen I’m compelled to look at as I talk to the person who requested a Zoom, or a Teams, or a FaceTime. It feels apt, in an existential

Ancient and modern

Cicero would have been quick to end the lockdown

The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus) of the people be the supreme law’. No surprise there: he had just returned from his sick bed. But as he knows very well, that injunction was military: salus meant ‘security, safety’. The consuls must

Barometer

How many books are in the average home?

Admitting defeat 8 May is celebrated as VE Day, but it is also a date which marks a significant English military defeat. It was the day in 1429 when the Earl of Salisbury’s forces were driven from Orleans by Joan of Arc, an event which provoked an English retreat from the Loire Valley and marked

Letters

Letters: The toilet paper stockpile that lasted 80 years

The case for small homes Sir: Your editorial rightly highlights what must be one of the government’s priorities once the worst of this crisis abates (‘Call that care?’, 2 May). I have been the owner and manager of a small, five-bedroom care home for nearly 30 years and, having had a majority of privately funded