Coronavirus

Wednesday

Toby Young

Ofcom shouldn’t be allowed to censor ‘harmful’ opinions

In my capacity as the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, I wrote to the chief executive of Ofcom, Dame Melanie Dawes, on 24 April to complain about its reprimand of Eamonn Holmes. According to the regulator, the breakfast television presenter had said something that ‘could have undermined people’s trust in the views being expressed by the authorities on the Coronavirus and the advice of mainstream sources of public health information’. Holmes’s sin, in Ofcom’s eyes, was to say on ITV’s This Morning that any theory running counter to the official government line – such as the one linking 5G masts and Covid-19 – deserved to be discussed in

John Keiger John Keiger

Inside the final act of the Brexit drama

The fourth round of official Brexit negotiations resumed on Tuesday, screen-to-screen. They will determine whether the stalemate can be broken and a trade deal sealed by the end of the transition date of 31 December. By mid-June, a high-level ‘stock-take’ between Boris Johnson and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will assess whether sufficient progress has been made to continue negotiations.  Such is not the case thus far, according to recent public utterances from Michel Barnier and David Frost, who has claimed ‘very little progress’. Just like in Endgame, Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy, a sense of hopelessness pervades the final scene of the drama. In the play – as with Brexit – the

Tuesday

James Ball

The UK isn’t taking the risk of contact tracing fraud seriously

Experts have a get-out clause of which politicians can only dream when they are speaking from the podium at press briefings. While ministers are expected to be able to answer questions on any matter, there and then, and have details at their fingertips, advisors can escape most tricky questions with a simple few words: that’s outside my area of expertise. That makes it all the more baffling that when asked by journalists about the risk of fraudsters exploiting the government’s new track and trace system, not one, but two deputy chief medical officers decided to comment and belittle the risks involved. Deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries was particularly sanguine.

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

America’s riots could be contagious

It’s kind of amazing. For weeks we have been arguing about the minute details of viral transmission. Can you be outside? How often can you be outside? Can you be with other people? How many? And how much distance should you keep from each other? Then masses of people gather in cities across the world for a protest and the authorities do nothing. It just goes ahead. The irony of protestors chanting ‘I can’t breathe’ as they raise the risk of catching and spreading a respiratory disease blows the mind. Granted, outdoor transmission is considerably rarer than indoor transmission – and, besides, most of these protesters are young and would

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The evidence on school re-openings is being ignored

One of the benefits of the UK exiting lockdown so slowly is supposedly that evidence from other countries can help mould our decisions. If liberalising parts of society in other countries doesn’t cause a Covid-19 flare-up, the UK can proceed with cautious optimism. If lockdown easing leads to a spike in infection rates, the UK can row back its plans before its too late, or put off making changes for a while longer. Around 50 per cent of people polled oppose the partial re-opening Based on this logic, the return of Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 to school today should be warmly embraced, as reports from Denmark over the

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The lethal combination of Brexit and Covid

The combination of Covid-19 and Brexit is a double whammy. The first was a haymaker that hit Britain from nowhere. The follow up will come when Britain, quite deliberately and with malice aforethought, winds up its fist and punches itself in the face. The economic impact of the virus will be accentuated by the UK leaving the EU without a deal or with a meagre free-trade agreement, warns a grim report, sponsored by the Best for Britain think tank. Business leaders do not generally get much sympathy. Watch any thriller made in the last two decades and as soon as the corporate executive appears on screen you can guess with

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The growing rebellion against quarantine for UK arrivals

The government’s most unpopular policy on its own benches is its plan to make almost everyone arriving in this country quarantine for 14 days. Among backbenchers and the outer cabinet this policy is disliked with an increasing intensity. ‘Colleagues absolutely hate it’, one cabinet minister tells me. Some backbenchers dislike it because it will hit their own constituencies particularly hard – airlines and airports will lay off more staff because of it. Others dislike the ‘Britain is closed for business’ message it sends out. While for a growing number of ministers it has become a focus of their resentment at how policy is made with their minimal involvement – cabinet

Saturday

Ross Clark

Immunity to coronavirus may be far more widespread than thought

Two weeks ago I wrote here about a study by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, which found that between 40 and 60 per cent of people who had never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid 19 – nevertheless seemed to develop an immune response to the disease in their T Cells. They appeared to have a cross-reactive immunity which had been gained through exposure to other coronaviruses – those which cause the common cold. Now comes another study providing more evidence of the same phenomenon from a team at the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. Nine of 18

Friday

Constantin Eckner

Can Germany spend its way out of the corona crisis?

Coronavirus is grim news for all major economies and Germany is no exception. The country’s economic output decreased by 2.2 per cent during the first quarter of the year, the sharpest fall since the 2008 crash and the second biggest since German reunification in 1990. A double-digit dip in the second quarter, when the full impact of the lockdown restrictions introduced in March become more visible, seems likely. But while Germany is not alone in facing up to grim economic statistics, it is using its economic clout – unavailable to poorer countries in Europe – to try and spend its way out of the crisis. Many German employers have been

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Like a project the BBC might have considered 30 years ago and turned down: The Understudy reviewed

Hats off to the Lawrence Batley Theatre for producing a brand-new full-length show on-line. Stephen Fry, with avuncular fruitiness, narrates a dramatisation of David Nicholls’s novel The Understudy, published in 2005. It’s a back-stage comedy about a newly written sex romp inspired by the life of Lord Byron. The show, predictably enough, is entitled, Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know. Here’s an excerpt. Byron is lying athwart his naked Italian mistress when the Muse summons him to draft a sonnet. ‘I must write here,’ he declares, ‘between a pair of pert peaches nestled.’ This doesn’t quite catch the tone of period drama in its present form. A modern playwright tackling

The Spectator

What is there to see in Barnard Castle?

Site test What’s on offer in the town of Barnard Castle? — Ruined 12th-century castle perched high above the Tees, built by Bernard de Balliol and later passed into the hands of Richard III, whose emblem appears above an inner window. — Bowes Museum: magnificent 19th-century French-style gallery built by mine-owner John Bowes and his wife, Josephine. Contains works by El Greco, Goya and Canaletto. Most popular exhibit is a mechanical silver swan which preens itself every day at 2 p.m. — Teeside Way: riverside walk in gorge of River Tees. — Barnard Castle Band: a brass band which has been going since 1860. Signs and symptoms The government broadened

The Spectator

Letters: Why we need music festivals

Disastrous decisions Sir: One cannot but agree wholeheartedly with Lionel Shriver (‘This is not a natural disaster’, 16 May). Given the unremarked impact of other diseases which she mentioned, Covid-19 is small beer. The government set out on the right path with its herd immunity policy, but was bounced into lockdown by the ‘science’, hounded by the media in full cry. We are now in a situation where employees, mainly in the public sector and supported by the unions, refuse to rise from their feather beds and return to work. This is not a situation from which we will recover easily — if at all.George KellyMaids Moreton, Buckinghamshire Guarantee improvement

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The ferocious bias against Dominic Cummings

At Dominic Cummings’s press conference on Monday, reporters tried two lines of attack. One was to behave like local detectives, fixating on exact details of the Cummings family journey to Barnard Castle, such as why the car had stopped en route (answer: so that the Cummingses’ son, aged four, could have a pee). The other was to invoke viewers, readers, members of the public blind with fury that there was ‘one law’ for government bigwigs, and ‘another’ for everyone else. Yet Mr Cummings’s statement and answers made a good case that there had not been ‘one law’ for him, but that he had the ‘reasonable excuse’ that the law permits

Toby Young Toby Young

Unfortunately our new puppy is not just for lockdown

Will the huge surge in demand for puppies and kittens during lockdown lead to a lot of abandoned pets when life returns to normal? That’s the concern of various professional bodies and animal welfare organisations. The Kennel Club has warned those searching for puppies on its website that a dog is for life, not just the coronavirus, while Battersea Dogs Home initially slapped a ban on rehoming, allowing only fostering during the crisis. ‘Now isn’t the right time to bring home a puppy, or make an impulsive decision to get a pet,’ warned Holly Conway, head of public affairs at the Kennel Club. The Young family acquired Malinky, our five-month-old

The Spectator

It’s time to end lockdown – and switch to voluntary social distancing

Who occupies the post of chief adviser to the prime minister is not generally an issue of great interest to the public. That Dominic Cummings has come to dominate the news for several days is partly explained by the long shadow of Brexit and his role in the referendum campaign. But it is no use attributing to that alone the furore over his decision to travel from London to Durham at the height of lockdown. People are genuinely aggrieved that when they have made personal sacrifices to conform to the ‘stay at home’ edict, a man who helped devise those rules appears not to have done the same. In vain

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Cummings under fire, protests in Hong Kong and a big cat in East Finchley

Home Open-air markets and car showrooms will be allowed to open from 1 June and other ‘non-essential’ shops from 15 June. Sales of goods in April had fallen by 18 per cent, those of clothing by 50 per cent. Government borrowing rose sharply to £62 billion in April, the highest sum known. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicted borrowing for the year of perhaps £298 billion, more than five times the estimate at the time of the Budget in March. The government announced funding for new long-term housing for 6,000 rough sleepers, of whom more than 14,000 had been given emergency accommodation from the start of the coronavirus lockdown. The

Susan Hill Susan Hill

I’m sick of people patronising Captain Sir Tom Moore

Nobody earns the right to respect just by having lived into old age, whenever that begins — it has happened by chance and by virtue of having dodged a few bullets. But everyone has the right to be treated with good manners and kindness by those with any power over them — even prisoners and toddlers having pyrotechnical tantrums. Mostly, politeness and consideration are forthcoming. It is always a shock if a bank clerk, dentist or traffic cop are brusque, perhaps because it is so rare. Still, I can stand rudeness more easily than I can tolerate being patronised, something older people encounter regularly. When Colonel Sir Tom Moore raised

Fiona Mountford

As the primary schools go back, it’s the older kids who suffer

It now appears that school’s out till after the summer for pretty much all secondary pupils. The loudest cries, an equal mix of exaltation and despair, come from those who were due to sit GCSE and A-l-evel exams this term: groups now split between delight at unstructured months of leisure time and anxiety that lackadaisical efforts in mock exams won’t prove enough to secure them the required grades. Yet my sympathies in this stalemate lie with those in Year 12, or the lower-sixth, the sandwich year between the two public exam groups. The Prime Minister has said that from 15 June, these 16- and 17-year-olds will be allowed ‘some contact’

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Covid has all but left London. Why?

My partner, Julian, hovered at my shoulder on Friday as I tapped out my Times Saturday column (about travel quarantine). I’d slipped in a paragraph with my own thoughts about the transmission of Covid-19. ‘Cut the lot,’ he said. ‘You’re not an epidemiologist. Nobody’s interested in your theories.’ This was probably good advice so I put my own thoughts on hold. Until now. Because something’s still nagging me. I know I’m not an epidemiologist, but silences speak loud in science, and from those experts put up for media interview I notice a curious silence — a silence on what feels like a most important report and, from their interviewers, a