What’s the point of the ‘amber plus’ list?

A row is brewing with France over the government’s decision to put the country on an ‘amber plus’ list, where restrictions on quarantine are tighter. But the reasoning for this has been ill-communicated by the government – is the measure worth the trouble? On the podcast, Katy Balls summarises the reasons for a backlash succinctly:

‘It’s frustrating not just for those who’ve booked holidays to France… but also to the travel industry, because obviously they’re trying to play by a set of rules that you think you understand, and then all of a sudden a new category exists’

We also discuss Keir Starmer’s call for the government to move the August 16 date – when double-jabbed people will no longer have to isolate if they are pinged – forward. James Forsyth explains why that is unlikely to happen:

‘There is a nervousness in government that they don’t quite understand why the numbers have dropped as sharply as they have, and so they are wary about acting on anything that takes those drops in numbers for granted’