Coronavirus

Saturday

28 Mar 2020

Why Boris Johnson’s popularity ratings remain so high

One of the reasons Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour was so shocked by the scale of its defeat at the last election is because they just don’t understand Boris Johnson’s appeal. All of their pre-programmed, politically correct left-wing instincts told them that he is anathema to Labour voters. How could a womanising, right-wing Etonian appeal to decent working men and women? Unfortunately for Labour it was decent working men and women who won Johnson two remarkable, against the odds, victories: the EU referendum and an election landslide. Nor was it only the Labour Party that misjudged Johnson. Tory grandees like John Major and Michael Heseltine paraded their haughty disdain and urged the Conservative

James Forsyth

Why the coronavirus crisis could peak sooner than expected

The government is adjusting to the reality of dealing with the coronavirus crisis, while three of its most important figures – the PM, the Health Secretary and the Chief Medical Officer – are in isolation. All have mild symptoms so far and modern technology means that this is not the devastating blow it would have been even a decade ago. The government now think that this crisis is going to come to a head quicker than expected. The week beginning 12 April, not mid-May, is expected to be the peak of the virus. One of those leading the government’s response to the crisis tells me that after that is ‘when we’d expect

Andrew Foxall

Putin’s plan to exploit coronavirus

Vladimir Putin knows a thing or two about a crisis, having caused a number of them over recent years. And he now appears, belatedly, to be beginning to confront the latest: the coronavirus pandemic. After claiming last week that the situation in Russia was ‘under control’, Putin used a live televised address this week to announce a series of emergency measures to limit the spread of the virus, including a nationwide week-long holiday. Russia’s authorities now admit there have been four deaths and at least 1,036 confirmed cases, in a country of 144 million. The pandemic will no doubt pose challenges to a country which over recent decades has preferred to wage wars

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Salmond cleared, Olympics postponed and Britain told to stay home

Coronavirus Sunday dawned with 233 people in the United Kingdom dead thus far from the coronavirus Covid-19 (a week earlier it had been 21), and more than 12,000 in the world. Three days later it was 442 in the UK and more than 18,000 worldwide. About 107,000 of the world’s 410,000 cases detected had recovered. A billion people in the world were confined to their homes, joined from Sunday by a billion more in India, where confusion reigned. Testing was uneven, but, in fatalities, Italy, with 6,820 by Tuesday, had gone far beyond China (with 3,277). Iran admitted to 1,934 deaths and Spain had 2,800. China was reporting few new

Tanya Gold

Dining in the time of pandemic: takeaways reviewed

I love eating while watching bad films like Battleship, so I love takeaway food from local restaurants. I am not rich enough to like the idea of takeaway from Simpson’s in the Strand and a plastic lid does not have the drama of a silver-plated dome. But eating takeaway food while watching Battleship is not my job, or at least it wasn’t until now, in the era of pandemic. The fine restaurants shuttered swiftly but the local restaurants offered takeaway, and I supported them. It is not indolence to order takeaway in the time of pandemic and, if you don’t, when this is over there will only be either Simpson’s

The Spectator

Letters: Civilisation will survive coronavirus

Covid questions Sir: I worry that Matt Ridley and others are trying to frighten us about Covid-19 (‘Like nothing we’ve known’, 21 March). The fact is that we do not know how deadly the virus is. We know that it is widespread; but that does not make it deadly. How long-lasting is the danger from Covid-19? Will it remain in the system after the pandemic scare is over? We do not know. But will civilisation survive? You betcha! I was called up to National Service in 1952 and while waiting for the train to take me to Aldershot, I bought a book at the station called Earth Abides by George

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Can my marriage survive my husband working from home?

Q. Our son and his girlfriend have announced their engagement and we are delighted with his choice. Our problem is with what I regard as the misjudged tone of hilarity among some friends, many of whom we have not heard from for years, who have telephoned to congratulate us. It’s the emphasis on how clever our son has been and how thrilled we must be — the subtext being ‘because you’re all such snobs’ — which rankles. Yes, it’s a fact that our future daughter-in-law is a member of the aristocracy and has a bit of cash — but our son is, by any standards, an exceptional young man. Moreover,

Michael Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo: Kale smoothies, writing, Pilates – my strict isolation schedule

Writers like me are used to long hours alone. I’ve never enjoyed that side of it. I don’t like the bleakness of silence. As I try to settle and gather thoughts on my bed, pillows piled up behind me — Robert Louis Stevenson did the same, and it worked for him — I must have birdsong, music, the murmur of voices, and I must be able to see the living world from my window. I need the reassurance that I am not alone. I get up from the breakfast table always reluctantly, knowing the hours of solitary work that lie ahead, often dreading to have to go to it. I

The Spectator

How much food have we really been stockpiling?

Time out When did British workers start being ‘furloughed’? The word furlough is first recorded in the English language in 1625, believed to be derived from the Dutch verloffe, meaning a leave of absence of a sailor from the navy. It seems to have come back into parlance in Britain thanks to it being used in the US prison system to describe temporary leave for an inmate. It was the title of a 2018 American film in which a female prisoner is allowed out of jail for the weekend to visit her dying mother. The film was later renamed Time Out, perhaps because not everyone knew what ‘furlough’ meant. But

Taki

How tennis went socialist

Desperately boring times but very healthy ones. No parties, no girls, not too much boozing, lots of smoking and reading very late into the night. And non-stop training and sport. What else can one do when locked in with one’s wife and one’s son and with nostalgic thoughts of a time when people gathered in groups? It seems very long ago but do any of you remember when people gave parties? Desperate times demand desperate measures and make for desperate columnists. Meditation might be good for philosophers and their ilk, but correspondents need to get out and get the story. The only thing to report nowadays are the sleeping habits

Charles Moore

The psychological and economic dangers of enforced idleness

‘Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus,’ says a discouraging headline in the Catholic Herald. Jesus ‘made the lame to run’ and ‘gave the blind their sight’, but Christians are not like Jesus, however much they may try to imitate him. We lack miraculous powers; and so, in matters of life and death (though not of the afterlife), we must defer to the civil power. On Tuesday, our neighbour rang for my wife, who is a churchwarden, and asked: ‘Shall I open the church as usual this morning?’ After some rummaging on the diocesan website, she found that the answer, following Boris Johnson’s broadcast the night before, was

The Spectator

The government must be as ready to remove restrictions as it was to impose them

For days, the Prime Minister had been resisting the kind of measures which have placed many other countries into lockdown, confining their citizens largely to their homes. Civil servants had pointed to studies saying that many ‘social distancing’ strategies might do more harm than good. In the end, the trajectory of the virus — and the global response — meant the restrictions now in place were inevitable. But at every stage, the Prime Minister has made it clear he was acting with reluctance. While he has been criticised by those seeking a heavier-handed approach, opinion polls suggest most of the country is with him. Yet public opinion can be fickle.

Matt Ridley

The curious age discrimination of coronavirus

The generational effect of the corona-virus is cunning and baffling. By often being so mild in the young and healthy it turns people into heedless carriers. By often being so lethal in the old and sick, it makes carriers into potential executioners of friends and neighbours. The virus is very dangerous for people who have certain underlying illnesses, which is probably the main reason it is so serious for the elderly. It is almost as if it does not kill people by itself, just worsens other disorders. This is unlike flu, where children are as much at risk as old people. By contrast, in this case, young people in good

John Lee

How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear

In announcing the most far-reaching restrictions on personal freedom in the history of our nation, Boris Johnson resolutely followed the scientific advice that he had been given. The advisers to the government seem calm and collected, with a solid consensus among them. In the face of a new viral threat, with numbers of cases surging daily, I’m not sure that any prime minister would have acted very differently. But I’d like to raise some perspectives that have hardly been aired in the past weeks, and which point to an interpretation of the figures rather different from that which the government is acting on. I’m a recently-retired Professor of Pathology and

Tanya Gold

The Cornish revolt against second-home owners

It was sunny on Monday so I took the children swimming in Mousehole harbour. It was almost empty but a woman sanding a boat on the quayside scowled at me. She couldn’t hear the children’s Cornish accents, which might tell her that I live here. There have been tensions for years between native Cornish and the incomers who buy houses and drape them with nautical-themed junk. With pandemic, they have developed into hostility. A sign appeared on the bus stop in Mousehole: ‘If you have travelled from a hotspot area outside Cornwall (like London) you are putting vulnerable people in this village at risk of death. Please come back when

Rory Sutherland

The trick that will let you have a conference call from your home phone

For the past 12 years, Roger Alton and I have shared this half page like Box and Cox: he writes fortnightly about sport and I write fortnightly about technology. Normally it would be Roger’s turn this week to cover sport. Unfortunately there isn’t any. So we’ve reached an agreement. For now, while there’s no longer any sport, I may write a little more frequently about technology. Then, in six months’ time, if there’s no longer any technology, Roger can write more frequently about the newly popular sports: bare-knuckle pugilism, dog-fighting and Mad Max-style steel-cage jousting. He could even throw in some nostalgic pieces recalling the golden age of football, when

James Forsyth

How will the ‘war’ on coronavirus change Britain?

In the past ten days we have seen the greatest expansion of state power in British history. The state has shut down huge swaths of the economy, taken on paying the bulk of the wages of millions of private sector workers, and told citizens that they can leave their homes only for a very limited number of approved activities. Boris Johnson likes to say that Britain is ‘at war’ with Covid-19. The parallel is hardly exact, but this expansion in state power is what you would expect in a war of national survival. It is worth remembering, as A.J.P Taylor wrote, that before ‘August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could

Douglas Murray

In this strange new world, where do we find purpose?

Perhaps we are at least past the beginning of this crisis. The phase where the hunt for multipacks of loo-rolls briefly became the national sport. Now we are into the second, perhaps even less glorious stage, in which we all have to sit in our solitude and hope that the storm blows over us. And if this passivity is the great demand of our generation — a demand that brings its own ironies — then now is a good time to ask the question: ‘How do we spend our time well?’ The question is one we ought to ask more throughout our lives. But the truth is that most of

Max Pemberton

On the NHS front line, we’re braced for what’s coming

From the moment when Boris Johnson announced that the country was moving from containment to ‘delay’ in handling coronavirus, the world’s biggest healthcare organisation has been on a war footing. What doctors like me have witnessed over the past days and weeks has been nothing short of extraordinary. Trusts in the NHS declared a ‘major incident’ on the evening of the announcement, and emergency plans swung into action within hours. By the time I came into work the next morning, managers, who had been up all night, had already started to implement profound changes to the way in which the hospital and services were run, and this continued over the

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris’s coronavirus pragmatism is confounding his critics

If ever Britain has undergone a period of authoritarian socialism, then this is surely it. Massive state intervention in the economy is taking place alongside state direction of the activities of private citizens that is both intensive and extensive in nature. Yet there are few private sector tycoons to be found arguing not to receive state support or, for that matter, free enterprise economists claiming that the market will, left to its own devices, come up with an optimal solution to coronavirus. Meanwhile more than 90 per cent of us approve of the draconian limits placed on our individual freedom in pursuit of the collective good. And I say that