Boris johnson

The UK-EU trade deal has now been operating for a month, and the lengthy queues at ports and empty supermarket shelves predicted by some (the ‘cliff edge’ we heard so much of) have failed to materialise. But equally, it is clear that businesses were not fully prepared for new trade arrangements and that EU trade rules on agri-food products are extremely restrictive.  The last month has also confirmed that the Northern Ireland Protocol is unworkable. If unchecked, it will seriously harm the province’s economy. The UK government needs to be ready to take radical unilateral action, if necessary, to alter it. But what else have we learnt about the deal? Here

At some point in the next few months, life will return to something approaching normality. When that happens, the UK will have to confront all the problems that Covid has left behind: bruised public finances, long NHS waiting list and the rest. But the problem that Boris Johnson is most worried about, as I write in the Times today, is the effect on children of having been out of school for so long. This pandemic has probably wiped out a decade of progress in narrowing the attainment gap. There would undoubtedly be resistance from the education sector The government is hoping that small group tutoring can help make up much of the

The progress of the vaccine programme — and the falling death toll — will reopen the debate in the Tory party about how quickly restrictions should be eased, as I say in the magazine this week. This will be tricky for Boris Johnson. He is inclined to go slowly to ensure that this is the last lockdown; just look at how he is now talking about a national tier system, not a local one, to avoid once more over-promising and under-delivering. But Tory MPs see the fast pace of vaccination as meaning that it will soon be safe to open up again. One long-time ally of the Prime Minister admits that

Wednesday’s very upbeat Downing Street coronavirus briefing underlined the optimism that Boris Johnson feels about the way the Covid crisis could work out for him. The Prime Minister was celebrating the UK passing the ten million mark for the number of people who have received their first dose of the vaccine, and thanked the NHS for the programme, which he described as ‘the most colossal in the history of our National Health Service’. He also very pointedly thanked the Vaccine Taskforce, which the Prime Minister sees as another vindication of his approach to the pandemic. For Johnson, the first part of the coronavirus crisis was bruising and the government made

If Keir Starmer has a strategy, it’s this: to paint his party as more competent than the Tories while keeping his head down on almost everything else. The aim of this is to ensure Labour can crawl across the line come the next election, winning a majority with a bit of help from the SNP. There’s a big problem with this approach though: it’s the same one that failed to work for Ed Miliband. To beat it, Boris Johnson need do little more than recycle the Tories’ 2015 campaign, which depicted Miliband in Salmond’s pocket, substituting Sturgeon in his place. The other problem with the ‘do as little as possible’ strategy is that it will almost certainly result

There is no question about it, at least if you want to evaluate things objectively: the UK has handled Covid vaccine rollout well (at least so far) and the EU has dealt with it badly. For a Remainer like me, this raises a difficult question: does this prove that Brexit was a good idea after all? Compared to the EU27, the UK has been able to act nimbly in vaccine negotiations. While Brussels has been held up by various delays and supply issues, these have not affected the UK. This is thanks in large part to the fact that its contract with AstraZeneca was signed three months before the EU

Boris Johnson is in Scotland today and once again this counts as news. This is intolerable to everyone. Intolerable to Unionists because a prime ministerial appearance in Scotland should be as routine as a prime ministerial appearance in the Cotswolds. It should not count as a newsworthy moment. And it is intolerable to Scottish nationalists because, well, because everything is intolerable to Scottish nationalists. The Prime Minister’s visit can hardly be deemed ‘essential travel’ in the current circumstances even if it is also essential that Scotland never becomes a no-go area for Johnson or, indeed, other cabinet ministers. Making it seem such, chipping away at Johnson’s legitimacy, is one small

If there’s one lesson you’d think Boris Johnson might have learned from his handling of the pandemic so far, it would surely be that it is too risky to set a date by which things will start returning to normal. And yet this evening the Prime Minister found himself talking about a date for schools returning, despite the timetable repeatedly slipping. Of course – as Johnson himself made clear at the Downing Street coronavirus briefing – 8 March is the earliest by which schools might start to return, rather than his deadline for anything happening. Johnson was asked whether he was once again being too optimistic by talking about this

Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Simon Stevens held a very sombre press conference in Downing Street this evening to mark the awful milestone of more than 100,000 UK deaths in this pandemic. The Prime Minister offered his ‘deepest condolences to everyone who has lost a loved one’, and promised that ‘when we have come through this crisis, we will come together as a nation to remember everyone we lost, and to honour the selfless heroism of all those on the front line who gave their lives to save others’. He also pledged that ‘we will make sure that we learn the lessons and reflect and prepare’. This was the closest