Boris

Poor Sir Keir Starmer. He’s having a bad pandemic. The Labour leader was absent again at PMQs. His gifted and charismatic deputy, Angela Rayner, got another chance to display her credentials as his replacement. Rayner, with her necklace of white beads, looked like a duchess launching a battleship. She and Boris flirted constantly, which may not be a good thing. Teasingly he said he knew that she coveted Sir Keir’s job. ‘And I wish her well.’ When she got up she leaned so far across the despatch box that she seemed ready to clamber over it When she got up she leaned so far across the despatch box that she

Boris Johnson latest Covid press conference was slightly confusing. The Prime Minister spent nearly an hour saying nothing particularly new. He warned that there was ‘considerable pressure’ on the NHS at the moment and unveiled daily priority lateral flow testing for 100,000 essential workers so that key services, including healthcare, don’t seize up due to staff absences. But while he accepted that hospitals were feeling the heat, he also insisted that there was no data suggesting that a lockdown was necessary or helpful. Indeed, he argued:  ‘We have a chance to ride out this Omicron wave without shutting down our country once again. We can keep our schools and our

The political and economic new year is all about surging Covid and a surging cost of living. The list of what families in particular will contend with in the coming weeks is enough to induce tears of exasperation. Take schools for starters. Staff absences, largely caused by coronavirus, were 8 per cent at the end of last term. On the Department for Education’s own projections, the Omicron surge means these absences will rise to between 9 per cent and 13 per cent at the beginning of this term, and it is not inconceivable the upward path in absences will peak at between 20 per cent and 25 per cent. The

When asked what went wrong in North Shropshire, Boris Johnson gave a fascinating answer: journalists. Apparently, they have been reporting the wrong kind of stuff. He told Sam Coates of Sky News: Basically, what’s been going wrong, Sam, is that in the last few weeks some things have been going well. But what the people have been hearing is just a constant litany of stuff about politics and politicians. Stuff that isn’t about them. And isn’t about the things that we can do to make life better. The job of the government is to make people like you, Sam, interested in the booster rollout. And in skills. And in housing. And in everything

What was the point of tonight’s Covid press conference? Boris Johnson didn’t have anything big to announce, other than a very dubious-looking new lectern telling people to ‘Get Boosted N0w’, with the 0 in the ‘now’ looking a lot like a Hula Hoop. His purported focus was on the doubling rate of Omicron, and to announce today’s record high number of positive tests (78,000). A cynic might argue that calling a press conference on the vaccination programme is distracting from the self-inflicted political mess Boris is currently wallowing through. Given people are already queuing round the block for their booster jabs, it doesn’t seem as though the message about Getting Boosted Now really

This evening feels eerily familiar to anyone who remembers the meaningful votes of Theresa May’s premiership. The Tory rebellion on the Covid measures is bigger than expected; the rebels are claiming to be the mainstream of the parliamentary party; the cabinet ministers loyalists to the PM are blaming the whips office; there are mutterings about how long this can go on for. There is, of course, one crucial difference: thanks to Labour, Boris Johnson won tonight’s vote. But it is clear that if he wants to tighten restrictions further, he will be reliant on Starmer’s party’s support in doing so. Relying on the opposition to get their business through is

Is Boris Johnson really deploying a ‘diversionary tactic’ in announcing vaccine passports on the day he has had to perform a volte-face over a Christmas party in Downing Street? After watching his press conference tonight, I’m not so sure, though not because of the explanation the Prime Minister himself offered. He was asked about this accusation, which was first levelled by one of his own MPs, William Wragg, at PMQs. Johnson’s response was to ask journalists to imagine what it would have been like if today’s political row had forced a delay of the ‘Plan B’ measures to contain the spread of Covid this winter. It will be trickier still

French president Emmanuel Macron is reported in this week’s Canard Enchaîné – the French equivalent to Private Eye – to have called Boris Johnson a ‘gougnafier’. Gougnafier is an intriguing term with many linguistic roots. It is a nightmarish word to translate. Can you find one word in English to convey someone both rude and useless? That is what gougnafier means. A gougnafier is a boor. A cock-up artist. Someone vulgar. Someone lacking manners. This wasn’t merely a drive-by insult. It was a carefully judged expression of contempt. What does this presidential insult say about the degradation of the Anglo-French relationship to Cold War? Doubtless British and French journalists will

Boris Johnson promised to ‘fix social care once and for all’ as he became Prime Minister on the steps of No. 10. On the basis of today’s social care white paper, he doesn’t think it’s particularly badly broken. Care minister Gillian Keegan launched the document in the Commons this afternoon, telling MPs that while this set out a 10-year ‘vision’, ‘today’s white paper is an important step on our journey to giving more people the dignified care that we want for our loved ones’. Those words — ‘important step’ — suggest that ministers don’t think this is the sum total of their proposals to fix social care, which is just

Boris Johnson is relying heavily on the booster programme to protect Britain from any additional threat posed by the Omicron variant. The Prime Minister made that very clear at this afternoon’s Covid press conference in Downing Street, opening by saying that ‘there is one thing we already know for sure: right now, our single best defence against Omicron is to get vaccinated and get boosted’. Temporary vaccination centres were going to pop up ‘like Christmas trees’, he said. He also seemed committed, if not to boosterism in the form of unbridled optimism about how the next few months would go, then at least to a reluctance to tell people to change

No prime minister since Tony Blair enjoys being in power as much as Boris. The notion that he might be kicked out by a nameless gang of cabinet lightweights is fanciful. But it makes for grabby headlines. Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer can sense that his star is on the rise. And he’s improving. At PMQs he asked shorter questions and delivered a couple of nifty satirical thrusts that inspired his MPs. Early on, he tilted his head towards the Tory benches which were better attended than last Wednesday. ‘I see they’ve turned up this week.’ Cue howls of mirth from Labour. Moments later, he lobbed this banger at Boris. ‘I

The Tory position in the polls is weakening. Partly this is because of the vaccine bounce wearing off and a fortnight or so of sleaze stories. But, as I write in the Times today, ministers thinks that there’s another issue harming the government: small boats. ‘The sleaze is bad, but the issue that causes me most trouble with my constituents is the boats,’ says one cabinet member. Johnson himself has long been concerned about this problem. He worries about the sense of disorder that the small boats convey: he thinks they make a mockery of ‘taking back control’ of the borders. A long-serving No. 10 aide says that ‘other than Covid, no issue

Does Boris Johnson really believe, as he told COP26 a few days ago, we’re at ‘one minute to midnight’ on the man-made climate change doomsday clock, and that ‘if we don’t get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow’? I ask only because in 2013 he used his Daily Telegraph column to write:  As a species, we human beings have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands – when the reality is that everything, or almost everything, depends on the behaviour and caprice of the gigantic

As the COP26 summit gets underway, a diplomatic Brexit row is escalating on the sidelines of the conference over fish. After France threatened to block British boats from its ports and increase checks on vessels over a disagreement on fishing licences, the UK warned it could retaliate if France goes through with it. Suggestions from the French over the weekend that a solution in the form of ‘practical operational measures’ had been found were quickly shot down by the UK side. With a French election looming, Macron can be expected to do more not less of this This morning, Liz Truss doubled down – using a morning media round to say the UK is

The Tory party has reached a fork in the road, I say in the Times today. One path involves sticking to the spending plans, hoping to cut taxes before the next election and getting rid of the new perception of them as tax raisers. The other drags them into ever more spending, led by big increases in public sector pay, and ends with them going to the country as a high-tax party. In his Budget speech and his address to Tory MPs, Rishi Sunak made clear that his preference was for the former approach, which should cut taxes before the country goes to the polls again. But sticking to even the spending

The joint health and science super-committee’s report into ‘lessons learned’ on the UK’s coronavirus response may not want to ‘point fingers of blame’ for the grotesque failures, but my goodness it leaves the reader angry and upset. It confirms so much that we knew anyway, namely: 1) The early consensus among ministers, officials and scientists was that ‘herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome’. 2) That this led to lockdown being delayed, at a cost of thousands of lives. 3) That there was a ‘serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach to stopping the spread of the virus as adopted

One of the themes of Conservative conference was that the government has dropped plans for a radical reform of the planning system, which was designed to get more houses built in the south east. Both Boris Johnson and the new party chairman Oliver Dowden were keen to stress this point. But, I say in the Times today, this is a mistake. The Tories are the party of the property-owning democracy, and live and die by this The Tories have been spooked by the Chesham and Amersham by-election where the Liberal Democrats ran hard against planning reform and took the seat on a 25 per cent swing from the Tories. Boris Johnson