Lockdown

At 3.48pm on Thursday the Sun’s political editor tweeted out an explosive story that Steve Baker, the co-convenor of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, had warned that Boris Johnson’s party leadership would soon be under threat if restrictions were not lifted soon. Less than 100 minutes later, Baker put out his own tweet as follows: ‘What this country needs is the complete success of Boris Johnson… I am clear Boris is the only person to lead us out of these difficulties and I support him in that endeavour.’ In short, Baker had overplayed his hand to an embarrassing extent – much to the delight of those parliamentary colleagues

At tonight’s Covid press conference, the Home Secretary Priti Patel sought to defend the coronavirus restrictions against suggestions that the law was confusing and hard to follow. She said: ‘The rules are actually very simple and clear. We are meant to stay at home and only leave home for a very, very limited number of reasons’. What were those reasons? A list followed, including: ‘outdoor recreation but in a very, very restricted and limited way, staying local, I’ve said that several times over the last week.’ Except, outdoor recreation was specifically deleted as a deemed reasonable excuse to leave home by the regulatory amendments bringing into effect the national lockdown.

Matt Hancock spent Monday evening trying to explain a very delicate tension to the public. There’s the good news of the vaccine and his determination that all four of the most vulnerable priority groups will be vaccinated by mid-February. And then there’s the bad news that in the meantime, coronavirus is spreading and we haven’t yet seen the worst of its impact on the NHS. So alongside announcing that more than 2.3 million people across the UK have had their first dose of the vaccine, Hancock warned at Monday night’s Downing Street press briefing that unless the public sticks to the rules, he will have to tighten restrictions on meeting others for

When Boris Johnson rolled back the legal restrictions over summer as Britain emerged from the first lockdown, he was clear that enough was enough: ‘Neither the police themselves, nor the public that they serve, want virtually every aspect of our behaviour to be the subject of the criminal law…After a long period of asking…the British public, to follow very strict and complex rules to bring coronavirus under control…we will be asking [people] to follow guidance on limiting their social contact, rather than forcing them to do so through legislation’. Alas (as Boris Johnson keeps saying), trust in people doing the right thing voluntarily, rather than under legal obligation, turned out to

Right-wing protest politics has just catastrophically over-reached in America, but it is suddenly back in business in Britain. Its dominant figure, Nigel Farage, has a new political start-up and is sounding rather pleased about it. Earlier this week the Electoral Commission finally — after more than eight weeks of humming and hawing — gave him permission to rebrand the mothballed Brexit party as Reform UK. ‘It is excellent news that the Electoral Commission has approved our name change application. The need for Reform in this country is greater than ever,’ tweeted the new Reform UK leader (an unelected post, naturally). Given that the Brexit party has not only been in