Coronavirus

Saturday

Debbie Hayton

We must never abandon children during lockdown again

Schools are far more than mere exam factories. Across the UK, teachers in 32,000 schools and colleges care for children on over half the days in any given year. Or we did until the lockdown in March 2020. Since then, children have missed the best part of two full terms. And while they were out of our sight, some were at risk. Six year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, for example, may have been rescued from the terrible abuse he suffered had his teachers been able to see him every day. But while most children have returned to class now that Covid restrictions are ending, some are still absent. News of anecdotal cases

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Is it really such a shock that some people drink at work?

Thirteen years ago we shared an office building with a large international bank. A common lift connected both businesses to the underground car park. Here I once overheard one of the bank employees describing our offices: ‘And you know what else they have up there…’ He spoke in the kind of wide-eyed, aghast tone you might have expected if he were about to reveal an opium den or a branch of Stringfellows: ‘They’ve got a bar.’ This was true. In the evenings after work, while the bankers downstairs were soberly hard at work destroying the world economy, there were people only yards above them shamelessly chatting over a beer. If

The Spectator

After Omicron: there’s no longer a case for restrictions on liberty

Covid-19 is in decline in Britain, with Omicron cases now falling as fast as they rose. The booster programme — which covers 95 per cent of pensioners — has helped fend off the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed. This gives Boris Johnson the chance to say that his plan worked, that Britain benefited from having the highest booster protection in Europe and that we can now repair the damage of a two-year crisis. The great recovery can begin — or it could if Johnson were able to lead. His bizarre decision to self-isolate last week — he was under no obligation to do so — gave the impression that he

Toby Young Toby Young

I got Covid (again) – is it time I got jabbed?

I got Covid a couple of weeks ago. Second time for me, which was annoying because I’d told Caroline that natural immunity provided better protection than the vaccines. She’s the only member of our household who’s been jabbed and began to feel quite smug as we all tested positive, one after another. It didn’t matter how much data I presented her with showing how quickly vaccine effectiveness against Omicron wanes, not least because I couldn’t prove I’d got Omicron. As far as she was concerned, I’d lost the argument. While I was ill I read the following sentence in an article by Ed West, which put the wind up me:

Wednesday

Michael Simmons

Omicron is on its way out

Omicron peaked in England in early January, according to figures just released by the ONS. The estimates from the weekly infection survey show that cases in the UK peaked at around four million before falling. In the week ending 15 January, 1 in 20 had Covid in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and 1 in 25 in Wales. We shouldn’t be surprised by this We shouldn’t be surprised by this — this is how Omicron seems to go world over. As in Gauteng, as in South Africa, as in Lambeth, as in London and now in the UK: it falls almost as fast as it rises. Quite simply, the variant is so infectious that it quickly

Thursday

Douglas Murray

I tempted fate – and got Covid

Well, I did warn you. As I typed my column last week on the imminent end of Covid I said I knew that I was tempting fate. The main fear I had in mind was that the moment the magazine hit the newsstands some wild new strain of the virus would break out, wipe out half of humanity and lead to quite a cross letters page the following week. Fate had a more minimalist plan. Having dodged Covid for two years, it took me writing a column predicting the end of the virus for the fates to eye me up and snicker: ‘Now we’ve got him.’ The day after I

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The truth about that No. 10 party

People seem surprised and a little doubting that the Prime Minister is incapable of remembering if he attended a party in his own back garden in May 2020. It does not come as much of a shock to me, seeing as he has difficulty remembering how many children he has. Beneath that albino mop resides a brain comprising plasma in a perpetual turbulent flux, like you get in one of those tokamaks used in the pursuit of nuclear fusion energy. Except Boris’s brain does not have the correct-strength magnets to hold it all in place, just a skull. As a consequence he possesses no judgment and nothing in the way

Steve James

Why should I be sacked for refusing the Covid vaccine?

A few months ago, Sajid Javid was asked how he could justify sacking unvaccinated care home workers if they had been infected with Covid and had natural immunity. The Health Secretary replied as if such people were plainly idiots. ‘If they haven’t taken a vaccine — despite all the effort that’s been made to persuade them, encourage them, provide them with information, introduce them to trusted voices — then at some point you have to move on.’ By ‘move on’ he meant thousands of them should be fired. NHS staff are next in line: we have until 1 April to get jabbed or get out. On a recent visit to

The Spectator

Now Boris must make another admission: lockdown was a mistake

On 20 May 2020, the Metropolitan Police issued a statement on social media which summed up the conditions in the country. ‘Have you been enjoying the hottest day of the year so far?’ it asked. ‘You can relax, have a picnic, exercise or play sport, as long as you are: on your own, with people you live with or just you and one other person.’ To do otherwise, it didn’t have to say, would be a criminal offence. In 10 Downing Street, however, Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary sent out a very different message to more than 100 staff members. ‘Make the most of the lovely weather,’ it said, and

The Spectator

Letters: Unfair care costs will turn the red wall blue

Take care Sir: Your editorial (‘Counting the costs’, 8 January) makes valid points regarding the funding of social care. The good people of the north in the red-wall seats will be rightly appalled. A couple who have worked hard and made their own way onto the property ladder must wonder what they have voted for. They sit on a property worth £100,000 to £200,000. If they need a care home, they will see their children’s legacy disappear into the hole of care costs while knowing that they are subsidising the same care costs of millionaires. This is deeply unfair and, I daresay, anti-Conservative. There should be no care costs on

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: No. 10’s garden party, Djokovic’s visa row and France’s vaccine protests

Home Boris Johnson admitted to attending evening drinks for about 40 staff in the garden of 10 Downing Street on 20 May 2020, when lockdown regulations made social gatherings illegal. ‘We thought it would be nice to make the most of the lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the No. 10 garden this evening,’ said an email from the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds. ‘Please join us from 6 p.m. and bring your own booze!’ Mr Johnson said that he had been talking to Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, about how people could be helped with soaring energy bills. Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary

Wednesday

James Forsyth

It’s getting worse for Boris

Talking to Tory MPs this morning, it is clear that the mood today is even worse than yesterday. Even one of those MPs closest to Boris Johnson thinks that it is now 50/50 whether enough letters go in to force a no confidence vote. Ironically, the improving Covid numbers are changing the calculus for some Tory MPs about a contest. A few weeks ago, even the most ardent Boris critics didn’t think you could have a no confidence vote, given the situation with the soaring Omicron variant. But now it is somewhat in retreat, and that restrictions are likely to go on 26 January giving hostile MPs the chance to do so. PMQs today

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson is running out of road

There has been no good news for Boris Johnson today. After an email leaked on Monday evening showing that the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary Martin Reynolds invited over 100 staff to a drinks party in the No. 10 garden in May 2020, the Prime Minister has come under fire from his own side. Downing Street has refused to deny reports that both Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie were present at the event. Instead, all No. 10 will say is that Sue Gray’s inquiry into alleged Covid rule breaking at various Downing Street parties is ongoing.  The atmosphere in the Commons has been notably muted. The Tory benches were rather quiet when

Saturday

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson

Masks in schools: how convincing is the government’s evidence?

Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in classrooms before and saw that they made a difference’. He suggested it was quite a significant study. ‘If you just think it through, with a respiratory disease that is aerosol-transmitted, if you are asymptomatic but wearing a mask, you’re much, much less likely to infect other people.’ The government has now published an ‘Evidence Summary’

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Sajid Javid confronted by unjabbed NHS doctor

Since becoming Health Secretary there has been one big question Sajid Javid cannot answer: how can he justify firing a worker who has recovered from Covid, has antibodies and doesn’t want the vaccine? Javid first did this with unjabbed care home workers and now plans to fire unjabbed NHS doctors. Today he met one of them — and it didn’t go well. Javid’s answer? He didn’t have one During a visit to King’s College Hospital in south London, Javid was on camera talking to NHS staff asking them what they thought about his plans for compulsory vaccination. He presumably expected them to agree. But then along comes Steve James, an intensive care doctor who

Thursday

Philip Thomas

Why the Omicron wave won’t overwhelm the NHS

Barely six weeks after it was first discovered in Britain, the Omicron variant has changed everything. Cases have soared far beyond records made in the first wave. Hospital admissions are surging and pupils are once again wearing masks in school. Modellers have produced terrifying figures — up to 25,000 hospitalisations a day, more than five times the last peak. It looks like a Covid groundhog day, a doom loop we seem unable to escape. Last summer, just before the end of lockdown, I wrote in this magazine about a ‘third wave’ of infections which could be just as big as the first. But my model also pointed to something else:

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Rip it up: the vaccine passport experiment needs to end

Flying anywhere right now is difficult, but for those of us who are jabbed, it is at least possible. So just after Christmas I set off for America to see my family in Connecticut, armed with the NHS app technology which we were once assured would never be used as a vaccine passport. It’s now precisely that. I tapped my phone to summon my travel credentials en route to Heathrow, but to my astonishment my vaccination status wasn’t there: ‘No Covid-19 records found.’ My ‘passport’ had been suspended. My crime, it turned out, was to have caught Omicron in mid-December. I’d had a positive result on a lateral flow test

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

How to wrongfoot an anti-vaxxer

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a good, informative feature assessing some of the bogus arguments flying around in this pandemic. But it was not what I was looking for. Since undergraduate days I’ve been fascinated by the category of mental imbalance we call paranoia, believing its milder manifestations to be present to some degree in all of us. Mass paranoia is plainly a strand in the anti-vax movement, and I’ve been listening to a powerful BBC Radio 4 and podcast series researched and presented by Jon Ronson, Things Fell Apart. Ronson looks into the rise of

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The time has come to get on with our lives

If anyone had any doubts about the wisdom of tempting fate then they probably haven’t considered the case of Betty White and People magazine. Assuming that some Spectator readers are not also subscribers to People, I should inform you that the cover for the current issue features the last of The Golden Girls. ‘Betty White turns 100!’ sings the headline, with the subtitle ‘Funny never gets old’. But while funny may not get old, the issue soon did. White died a few days shy of her 100th birthday, just as People magazine hit the newsstands. It sits there still, the worst example of a cover tempting fate since November 2016,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My dog and the NHS have a lot in common

We are considering privatising or selling off our dog, Jessie. She seemed a rather wonderful idea when we got her nine years ago. But since then she has become a hideously bloated, entitled creature who almost by herself determines how we live our lives. In winter she is particularly tyrannical — she has three walks a day, and with darkness falling at four o’clock that means almost every hour of daylight is spent servicing her needs. We cannot go out by ourselves without ensuring she will not be unduly inconvenienced, and as she has grown older so the costs of keeping her have spiralled — and will continue to spiral.