Coronavirus

Thursday

Katy Balls

The government debate over June 21

The roadmap out of lockdown is the signature document of Boris Johnson’s new team in No. 10. It’s intended to be cautious, detailed and based on a new mantra of under-promising and over-delivering. It’s meant to strike a contrast with the chaos that came in the early stage of the pandemic by projecting an image of competence and calm. So far, so good. Each stage — including Monday’s easing — has proceeded as planned. The vaccine rollout has been the fastest in Europe (although the Prime Minister still complains, in private, that it could have gone faster) and is now credited by ministers as a large part of the reason

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Indian variant goes up, Santander goes down and pubs reopen

Home The government made noises about having to delay the lifting of coronavirus restrictions on 21 June in some parts on account of the Indian variant, which appeared more transmissible. ‘The race between our vaccine programme and the virus may be about to become a great deal tighter,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said on television. The gap between first and second coronavirus vaccinations would be cut from 12 weeks to eight for over-fifties and the clinically vulnerable. The army was sent to help with testing in Bolton and Blackburn. By the beginning of the week, 37 per cent of the adult population had received both doses of coronavirus vaccination;

The Spectator

Why Britain must unlock on 21 June

The scare over the Indian variant of coronavirus this week is a taste of what to expect over the next few weeks, months or even years. Like all RNA viruses, Covid-19 mutates and has done so thousands of times already. New strains supplant old ones and, for a while, questions will be raised when one mutation comes to dominate. Is it more lethal? Is there a chance it could evade vaccines? Every time so far, there has been no significant reason to doubt the efficacy of the vaccines. So the government’s timetable for lifting Covid restrictions holds firm. How far should Britain go to try to fend off new variants?

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Hancock tries to calm holiday confusion

The government is sounding increasingly upbeat about the prospect of sticking to the roadmap. At this evening’s coronavirus press briefing, professor Jonathan Van-Tam said the Indian variant was probably no higher than 50 per cent more transmissible than the Kent strain, at least according to initial assessments. Meanwhile, Dr Jenny Harries said there was currently no evidence to suggest that the variant was driving up hospital numbers. But Matt Hancock was keen to remind viewers that 14 June is when the final decision will be taken on whether to stick to 21 June as the unlocking date. The Health Secretary also had to deal with the ongoing confusion over the amber list. He had

Matthew Lynn

Inflation is the biggest threat to Boris

The vaccines are rolling out. Lockdown is easing, the EU has been forgotten about, and the Labour party has returned to its traditional pastime of plotting furiously against its leader. No one is even talking about wallpaper anymore. Things could hardly be going better for Boris Johnson, and that has been reflected in local election results and in the polls. There is one looming threat, however. The return of inflation. In truth, rising prices have been destroying governments for a hundred years, and it would be complacent to imagine this one will be the exception. President Biden has embarked on a tax, spend and borrowing spree the like of which

Friday

Kate Andrews

Can Boris keep his roadmap on track?

Boris Johnson’s favourite phrase since he released his roadmap out of lockdown has been ‘cautious but irreversible’. These are the three words that supposedly describe the UK’s six-month timeline to freedom since it went into lockdown at the start of the year.  But the phrase was notably absent from tonight’s press conference. Instead, the Prime Minister warned that the rise of the Indian variant B1617.2 could pose a ‘serious disruption to our progress, and could make it more difficult to move to step 4 in June.’ The government’s worries, as Johnson laid out tonight, are what he described as ‘important unknowns’. The key question is to what extent the virus is more

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Could the Indian variant slow unlocking?

So is the ‘irreversible’ lifting of lockdown really irreversible after all? There is a grim echo of what happened last year in the sudden panic over the Indian variant of SARS-CoV-2. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that he ‘rules nothing out’, following a meeting of the Sage committee over how to respond to the variant. Next month’s proposed reopening of society must now look in doubt. Monday’s relaxation, which will allow indoor hospitality for the first time this year, will for the moment go ahead, but we have seen how quickly these things can change — and with what little notice. Is the Indian variant really more transmissible, or vaccine-evading,

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The pandemic’s transatlantic divide in executive salaries

‘Consider a temporary cut in executive salaries’ was the Confederation of British Industry’s advice to members at the start of the pandemic. Back then I was gripped by fears of a backlash against capitalism: top pay cuts would indeed be wise, I wrote, not least because ‘sacrifice now is sensible insurance’. Looking at last week’s election results, I needn’t have been concerned about a second coming of socialism. But I’m one of many advocates for responsible capitalism who have long worried about growing disparities between executive and average pay — the key multiple having risen from 50 to 120 over the past two decades — that rarely reflect underlying performance.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Scotland votes, Queen speaks and Israel-Palestine crisis escalates

Home A new complexion of British politics was revealed by the capture of Hartlepool by Jill Mortimer for the Conservatives in a by-election, with 15,529 to the Labour candidate’s 8,589. Since its formation in 1974, the constituency had been Labour. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said his party had ‘lost the trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool’. The Conservative Ben Houchen was re-elected as mayor of the Tees Valley with 72.8 per cent of the vote. Of 143 English council seats, the Conservatives now control 63, 13 more than before, with 2,345 councillors; Labour lost control of eight councils to end up with 44, and 1,345

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘This was a horrible pandemic – but it wasn’t the big one’: Michael Lewis interviewed

Michael Lewis’s new book, The Premonition, is a superhero story — though one in which the superheroes don’t, in the end, win. It’s the true story of a group of far-sighted, tough-minded scientists who, in January last year, saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in the USA, and the politicians who wouldn’t listen to them. And at the heart of the book is the terrible discovery, as true here as it is in the States: we imagine that, come disaster, the people we elect will look after us. We’re told they’re well prepared. But when it comes down to it, they protect not us but themselves. The villain of Lewis’s book

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

When will the economy recover to pre-pandemic levels?

New growth figures were released this morning show that the economy contracted 1.5 per cent in Q1 this year and remains 8.7 per cent smaller than it was in Q4 2019 (the last quarter not to be impacted by the pandemic). Alongside this update, the Office for National Statistics also released its latest set of monthly figures, which saw GDP rise by 2.1 per cent in March — the biggest boost since August last year — taking the economy to 5.9 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. That GDP fell by just 1.5 per cent overall once again illustrates the extent to which businesses have developed a resilience to lockdowns. The first

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Were fears of a third wave overblown?

So, the third wave is officially no more. New modelling by SPI-M, the government’s committee on modelling for pandemics, has, at a stroke, eradicated the predicted surge in new infections, hospital admissions and deaths which it had pencilled in for the autumn or winter as a result of lockdown being eased.  Previous modelling published in April suggested that we could end up with 20,000 in hospital — higher than during the first peak last April. Now the third wave is looking less like the swell off Newquay during an Atlantic storm and a little more like a ripple on the Serpentine. The central predictions for the next peak in hospitalisations,

Monday

Kate Andrews

Hugging gets the green light

The next stage of the roadmap is set to go ahead. At tonight’s No. 10 press conference, Boris Johnson announced from next Monday, 17 May, groups of up to six (or two households) can meet indoors, while up to 30 people will be able to meet up outside. Face coverings in school classrooms will be scrapped, and there will no longer be a cap on the number of people attending a funeral. Indoor hospitality can reopen, including restaurants and pubs, while hotels, cinemas and theatres can also open their doors, albeit with social distancing still in place. The one-metre plus rule means that while many may start to feel like

Friday

Kate Andrews

Does the UK’s ‘green list’ for travel make sense?

International travel is back on the menu, in theory. From 17 May the ‘stay in the UK’ restrictions are lifting and residents can legally leave the country once again. But the number of destinations where you won’t have to quarantine on return is limited, and travelling anywhere will require jumping through several hoops. At today’s No. 10 press conference, Grant Shapps revealed the first 12 countries that will be placed on the ‘green list’, which includes Portugal, Iceland and Israel. It’s a return to the traffic light system and most countries are ranked ‘amber’, which will require a ten day quarantine at home upon return. ‘Red’ countries will still require hotel quarantine,

Terence Kealey

In defence of Biden’s Covid-19 patent waiver

For a man who is regularly derided by Republicans, president Joe Biden has racked up a fine number of achievements. He made his latest on 5 May, when he threw his support behind waiving the Covid-19 patents, overturning decades of American protection of its industries’ intellectual property rights. His words packed a punch: the Frankfurt-listed shares in BioNTech promptly lost 14 per cent, while Moderna and Novavax closed three to six per cent down in New York. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry was quick to denounce the measure, as Jeremy Levin, chair of the biotech trade association Bio, asserted that ‘securing vaccines rapidly will not be the result.’ But, in fact, that’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: von der Leyen’s vaccine amnesia

How well has the EU dealt with the pandemic? According to Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc’s performance has been world beating. In an address yesterday, the Commission president lauded her own performance while claiming that the EU had proven its detractors wrong. During her so-called ‘state of the union’, she said: We all heard the nagging questions, especially in the first months of this pandemic: aren’t nation states better equipped to fight this crisis? Isn’t our union of 27 too slow to react? And our processes too cumbersome and our stakeholders too diverse? Today I am here to say: Europe has proven these claims wrong…Most importantly we decided to procure vaccines

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Will Britain’s economic recovery break records?

It’s been a good week for seeing the vaccine factor at work. We’ve had multiple real-world updates on the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against new variants of Covid-19 (this bodes well for the UK, which was the first country in the world to use the vaccine to protect its most vulnerable residents). And today we’ve had a revised economic forecast from the Bank of England, suggesting the UK’s impressive vaccine rollout could translate into the strongest growth since records began in 1949. The Bank of England now predicts that the economy will expand by more than 7 per cent in 2021, up from its forecast of 5 per cent in February. Its

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The problem with Britain’s mental health

Experts tell us that we are facing a mental health ‘time bomb’ in the UK, partly as a consequence of Covid restrictions and partly because we have a Conservative government which has as its apparent main priority a malevolent desire to see people go insane and, hopefully, kill themselves. I am paraphrasing the experts here, all of whom hate the Tories and want more money spent on their area of expertise, i.e. mental health. In January the Daily Mail quoted still more experts telling us that this mental health time bomb was actually ‘ticking’, in an ominous manner, suggesting to me that this was a very old make of time

Niall Ferguson

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

‘There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the… the, eh, trappings of the loser,’ says one of the officers in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. ‘We might easily go fascist after we win.’ Americans have long been haunted by the notion of the osmosis of war. Throughout the First Cold War, a recurrent theme of liberal and conservative commentary was that there was a kind of convergence taking place, causing the United States to resemble — at least in some respects — its Soviet antagonist. That all nuclear superpowers would end up as slave states had been George

Jay Bhattacharya

The case for sending vaccines to India

Hospitals in Delhi are openly pleading for supplies of medical oxygen, a commodity so scarce that it is now being sold on the black market for almost ten times the normal cost. Makeshift crematoria are being set up around the city to cope with the surge in the number of deaths. Richer countries are asking why India, with 20 million Covid cases now recorded, is so reluctant to lock down again. It is a good question. The answer lies in the disastrous effects of lockdown for so much of India’s population. Closing any society has serious consequences, but the results were always going to be worse in the developing world.