Robert Peston | The Spectator columnists & writers

COP26 is not your typical power summit, because world leaders, NGOs and hacks are all in the same scrum. Outside their gilded fortresses politicians reveal different habits. John Kerry has the most purposeful stride, eyes rigid to the front, refusing to acknowledge the melee. Macron gives an impromptu press conference at the drop of a hat: he always has an articulate opinion to share, though his macho minders manhandle anyone who gets a little too close. Trudeau is predictably generous with his flirtatious smile. And Modi is the most huggy, which I hadn’t anticipated. He hugs everyone. Except me. I was particularly struck by his warm embrace of Luxembourg’s PM, Bettel. It felt like a symbol of this whole sprawling, dizzying affair: a country teeming with aspirational people putting the squeeze on a tiny country overflowing with surplus capital.

Boris Johnson, unlikely eco warrior

Boris Johnson is famously a politician who sees the glass half full, and whose instincts are to hope that a crisis solves itself before he has to impose painful sacrifices on himself and us. So it is all the more curious that he is strikingly gloomy that far too little is being done across the world to halt global warming. What's more, his plans to 'green' the British economy are more ambitious than many other governments' and relatively expensive. Why then is Johnson being less Micawberish and more pre-emptive on climate change than he was – for example – when Covid-19 arrived here in February 2020? Why does he 'get' the catastrophic logic of global warming, when he didn't – till too late, many would say – appreciate the merciless logic of a viral pandemic? The other day he said it was because the scientists showed him a chart demonstrating that above a certain level of warming, the desertification, flooding and species extinction becomes catastrophic and irreversible.

Has COP26 already flopped?

'There is no chance of stopping climate change next week,' the Prime Minister told me in an interview for ITV News. 'There is no chance of getting an agreement to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees'. Standing in Rome's magnificent ancient Colosseum, he warned that the cost of this failure, if not somehow rectified, would be far worse than the recent pandemic: 'The Romans thought they were going to go on forever...Then wham, the middle of the fifth century, they hit a complete crisis, uncontrolled immigration, you have the Dark Ages. The lesson is things can go backwards... for a long time. Unless we fix climate change, unless we halt that massive growth in temperatures, that's the risk we run"' But if COP26 has already failed, as the PM seems to be saying – because the world's biggest emitters are such a long way from promising measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions by the necessary 55 per cent before 2030 – why on earth are more than 100 world leaders descending on Glasgow for the negotiations? Also what's the point of this weekend's preceding discussions in Rome of the G20 leaders of the world's most powerful nations? For Boris Johnson, COP26 is what he calls a 'weigh station', a checkpoint on a route towards future agreements that would stand a chance of reducing global warming to a safe increment.

The real reason Britain failed on coronavirus

The joint health and science super-committee's report into 'lessons learned' on the UK's coronavirus response may not want to 'point fingers of blame' for the grotesque failures, but my goodness it leaves the reader angry and upset. It confirms so much that we knew anyway, namely: 1) The early consensus among ministers, officials and scientists was that 'herd immunity by infection was the inevitable outcome'. 2) That this led to lockdown being delayed, at a cost of thousands of lives. 3) That there was a 'serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach to stopping the spread of the virus as adopted by many East and South East Asian countries'. 4) That there was 'groupthink' among official scientific advisers and the government which meant 'we were not as open to approaches being taken elsewhere as we should have been'.

How will Boris build his ‘high-wage, high-skill’ Britain?

There are a few problems with Boris Johnson's big idea, namely that the sharp fall in the supply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the UK – triggered by Brexit, reinforced by Covid – will automatically lead businesses to invest, such that the UK's long history of low productivity and low incomes will end on his watch. His vision, the philosophical heart of his speech to Tory conference this morning, is of a gleaming new 'high wage, high skill, high productivity economy' and that 'we are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration'. It is important to note his stress on controlling immigration.

Could the squeeze on living standards bring down Boris?

There is about to be a two-phase onslaught on the living standards of those on low-to-middling incomes. On 1 October the energy price cap, for dual fuel, rises from £1,150 to £1,277. This is a rise of 11 per cent, at a time when furlough is ending and just a few days before the £1,000 a year uplift to Universal Credit is removed (which presumably Boris Johnson will not be swanking about in his big speech to Tory conference). That’s the first hit to living standards. There’ll then be a gradual further erosion of living standards with rising food inflation (of around five per cent, as per what Tesco’s chairman John Allan said on my show this week). The second big onslaught however comes in April, when the energy price cap is expected to be raised a further 17 per cent (!!!) to just under £1,500, based on the current wholesale price for gas.

We’ll all pay the price for reckless energy firms’ gambling

You know that mate of yours who is always boasting they pay way less for energy than you because they’re constantly surfing for the best deal on price comparison websites? Well they are still going to have the last laugh, even though the energy company that supplied them is going bust. That is because the energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng promised today that he would protect consumers and keep the official cap on prices, which means that the amount your mate pays for energy will hardly go up at all. And they’ll probably end up paying what you are paying. But as if to rub salt into your wounds, it is you – well all of us – who will end up paying more for our electricity, to keep prices your friend at the cap level, even though for years they benefited from cheap deals offered by businesses that were never run in a sustainable way.

Why Johnson’s tax gamble will pay off

Boris Johnson's announcement today, promising he will fix the £15 billion hole in health and social care, may well be the decision that determines his and his party's fate at the next election — and, by implication, Keir Starmer's reaction will also determine his destiny. Probably the most important point is that after the 18 months we've had, most people would argue that putting the NHS and care for the elderly and vulnerable on a stable financial footing should be the Prime Minister's number one priority. Johnson's critics would say he shouldn't break two important manifesto pledges to pay for it: first, not to raise national insurance and, second, not to ignore the earnings index to set the state pension. And they would also say that increasing national insurance by 1.

Will Johnson’s cabinet of cardboard cutouts make a stand?

Is Boris Johnson allowed to pick the next Archbishop of Canterbury?

A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was shirty with me when I asked him whether he was now a practising Roman Catholic, having recently been married to Carrie Symonds at Westminster Cathedral. His answer was ‘I don't discuss these deep issues. Certainly not with you.’ The question may be ‘deep’, as he says, but it is also – as a senior minister has reminded me – an intensely practical one and relevant to his duties as Prime Minister. Because under the British constitution: 1. The Prime Minister’s appointments secretary has an advisory role in the appointment of all bishops 2. The chair of the commission that nominates an archbishop is chaired by a lay person selected by the prime minister 3. The PM eventually picks a bishop or archbishop from a short list of two (though except in exceptional circumstances, the PM accepts the preferred candidate of the commission).

How ‘freedom day’ became ‘chaos day’

Welcome to ‘freedom day’, or more properly ‘chaos day’ – with businesses warning they can’t operate because too many employees are being ‘pinged’ and told to isolate, and the clinically extremely vulnerable terrified to leave their homes for fear no one will be wearing a mask. The funny thing is that all this madness was foreseeable. Because, as the PM himself said only a week ago, the surge in infections is almost exactly what his epidemiological advisers on Sage have been forecasting. But the government is behaving as though all this mess is just an accident, one of those things. It wasn’t. It was the choice of Boris Johnson and his cabinet. They could have absorbed the implications of the infections forecast, made months ago, and decided to keep the law on mask-wearing in place a bit longer.

Boris’s ‘freedom day’ spells misery for many

The projection from Sajid Javid that Covid-19 infections could surge to a record 100,000 per day in a few weeks, as all social distancing and mask-wearing regulations are removed, is especially terrifying for those whose immune systems are impaired or are clinically vulnerable in other ways. There are millions of these frail people. For those whose immune systems are compromised or suppressed, the efficacy of vaccines is much reduced. For others among the frail, any residual risk of becoming infected is too great, because for them it is literally a matter of life or death. So when you hear politicians and others talking about the important freedom to choose not to wear a mask and not to keep a respectful distance from others, note that their freedom is felt as oppression by those who through no fault of their own are more at risk from this awful disease.

What can Britain learn from Israel on ending lockdown?

Israel has been the world’s whole-country experiment to establish how, and how fast, Covid vaccination can return life to normal (as much as life is ever normal in a country where there is constant tension over the rights and future of Palestinians). I am in Jerusalem, trying to understand the implications for stability in Israel and peace in the Middle East of a new government where prime minister Naftali Bennett is opposed to any kind of Palestinian state, and the alternate PM Yair Lapid passionately believes a two-state solution is the only answer. I’ll return to that in later reports, though the short answer – according to members of the government – is that nothing formal or constitutional can and will change during the uncertain life of this coalition to bring peace with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank.

Boris Johnson’s refusal to talk about faith

I am struggling to make sense of the Prime Minister’s answer to my question: whether he is a practising Roman Catholic - which I asked in good faith and with good reason because he was recently married in Westminster Cathedral. His answer was: 'I don’t discuss these deep issues. Certainly not with you.' He is aware that - for better or worse (worse for a long time) - this has been a pertinent question for chief and prime ministers since Henry Vlll. More broadly, the professed faith (or none) of a leader matters to many voters. But it was the 'certainly not with you' that took me aback. There is nothing in my 35 years as a journalist to suggest that I would trivialise or denigrate religion, or any issue of conscience.

Was Matt Hancock guilty of ‘negligence’?

The Health Secretary Matt Hancock has insisted that he promised the Prime Minister and his former chief aide Dominic Cummings only that all elderly and vulnerable patients would be tested for Covid on discharge to a care home when there was adequate testing capacity, and not with immediate effect. This is Hancock’s defence against Cummings’s charge that the Health Secretary lied to him and the PM when promising to test patients prior to them going to a care home. But I understand Cummings has documentary evidence that as late as May last year he and the PM feared they had been misled by Hancock about how he would protect the elderly in care homes, and that he was guilty of ‘negligence’. Cummings says Hancock made an unconditional promise not to send potentially infected patients into care homes.

Cummings will not pull his punches

Dominic Cummings will not pull his punches when criticising the Prime Minister when he appears before MPs on Wednesday morning. In evidence to MPs on the combined health and science committees, he will allege Boris Johnson said 'Covid is only killing 80-year-olds' when delaying lockdown in the autumn. Cummings will say that the PM insisted he wouldn’t repeat what he saw as his mistake of March when being pressurised over the possible collapse of the NHS, and added that 'I’m going to be the mayor of Jaws, like I should have been in March'. As I have reported, potentially the most damaging testimony from Johnson’s former chief aide is likely to be around his failed attempt to persuade the prime minister to lock down in September.

Why Boris shouldn’t be optimistic about the Bolton Covid data

I am bemused by Boris Johnson’s optimism about the prospects for full unlocking on 21 June, based on the data he says he is seeing. Because the government’s own daily published data is showing worrying trends for the Indian variant. For example, there were 280 Covid infections reported for Bolton alone yesterday, 10 per cent of the UK total, and as you can see here the trend is steeply upward: That would be less worrying if there was also a steep rise in Covid testing in Bolton. But there isn't. As you can see here, the ratio of positive test results to tests carried out in Bolton – the positivity ratio – is holding fairly steady at about 7.5. It is obviously encouraging that there has not been a sharp associated rise in hospitalisations.

The fatal flaw in the Covid travel restrictions

Here are two Covid questions, thrown up by the rate at which the Indian variant is infecting parts of the UK. First, does it show that the traffic light system, which was designed to prevent the UK from importing new strains and variants from abroad, is unfit for purpose? The delay of one to two weeks in moving India from the amber to red category – which I’ve been banging on about for a month – is relevant, and looks like a serious government mistake. But isn't there a more fundamental flaw in the system? Ministers keep pointing out that with India in the amber category the UK should have been protected – because passengers from India were supposed to quarantine at home for 10 days and take tests on days two and eight.

Full easing of Covid restrictions on 21 June looks unlikely

The prospect of the final easing of lockdown restrictions in England going ahead precisely as planned on 21 June is close to nil, according to ministers and officials. 'It is clear some social distancing will have to be retained, not everything we've set out for 21 June is likely to happen,' said a government adviser. 'But it is also possible some of the easing we've done today will have to be reversed.' Neither he nor a minister would be drawn on precisely which parts of the planned unlocking may have to be delayed, or which aspects of unlocking that's already happened would need rolling back. They say it's dependent on data that will become available in around a fortnight, though the final decision is still around a month away.

Why a Covid public inquiry could prove useful for Boris

The Prime Minister said today there would be a 'full proper public inquiry' into the government's handling of the Covid-19 crisis. This is highly significant, because a 'full, proper public inquiry' means one led by a judge and with witnesses represented by lawyers. I am also told – though Downing Street is refusing to comment on this – that the Cabinet will be asked by the Prime Minister to approve the terms of the inquiry on Wednesday morning, and there could be an announcement shortly afterwards. Such a public inquiry – like Leveson's into hacking and Chilcot's into the decision to go to war in Iraq – would take many years and might not report until after the next election. During the Queen's Speech debate, in answer to a question from the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey on the timing of the start of an inquiry, the PM said: 'I can certainly say we will do that within this session.

Nine lessons from the elections

Here are the big things I learned from Thursday's elections and their aftermath. 1. The Scottish parliament will vote to hold a referendum on independence for Scotland — but the legislation probably won't be introduced till late 2022. 2. The earliest there would be a referendum would be 2023. 3. Boris Johnson's revealed preference is to persuade the people of Scotland of the merits of remaining within the UK, rather than exploiting the Westminster government's 'reserve power' to veto independence. He wants to avoid what would be widely seen in Scotland as the tyranny of Westminster depriving the Scottish people of a voice on their future. That means a referendum in around three years is likely — which does not mean independence for Scotland is likely.

Can Starmer reverse the horror of Hartlepool?

The Tory victory in Hartlepool, with a swing of 16 per cent and the biggest increase in a governing party's vote in any by-election since 1945, is a terrible blow to Labour hopes that the choice of Sir Keir Starmer would soon stem their rot. What happened in what was a safe Labour seat — it was Peter Mandelson's in New Labour's heyday — is that voters who backed the Brexit party in 2019 switched to the Tories. According to the election analyst Matt Singh, if that sort of shift were repeated in other seats where the Brexit party made an impact then more than 20 Labour MPs would lose their seats — including leading figures like Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas. So it is little surprise that Labour and Starmer are already being ever so humble, saying they know 'people don't want to hear excuses' and that 'he will take responsibility for fixing it'.

How Tory MPs plan to clip Cummings’s wings

On 26 May, Dominic Cummings will give evidence to MPs grouped on the health and science super committee, chaired by Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark. This will be box office politically, because – as I have mentioned – Cummings will prosecute Boris Johnson and his scientific advisers for failing to lock down early enough in March 2020, and Johnson and Rishi Sunak – though not the scientists – for failing to lock down in early September (not late September). But the Tory controlled committee will not allow him to use them to humiliate the PM in other ways (though some might say the charge that the PM put thousands lives at risk by refusing to lock down is humiliating enough). The committee’s members expect Cummings to give them a massive 'dump' of papers and data.

The truth about the government and ‘herd immunity’

I spent much of the 1980s and 1990s reporting on company chief executives who didn’t understand the distinction between mine and theirs. They enjoyed lavish lifestyles — company flats, art collections, huge expense accounts — without the owners of the company (you and me through our pension funds) having a clue. Then came the corporate governance revolution, and much of this was cleaned up. So I had déjà vu earlier this week when reporting that the Tory party had loaned tens of thousands of pounds to lavishly decorate and refurnish the PM’s home in Downing Street. Maybe Tory donors and members think this is an appropriate use of their money. But did anyone bother to ask them? To add insult to Tory party injury, the Electoral Commission says it may have committed ‘an offence or offences’ in the way it used donors’ money to pay for the gold doorknobs and wallpaper.

The Edition

The nightmare: Boris’s battles are just beginning

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The Edition

The nightmare: Boris’s battles are just beginning

28 min listen

Revealed: How Boris paid for the Downing Street refurbishment

I understand that CCHQ (Conservative Campaign Headquarters) made a payment to the Cabinet Office to cover the initial costs of refurbishing the Prime Minister’s home in Downing Street, and the PM is now repaying CCHQ. There is an audit trail and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case knows about it. This is presumably why he told MPs today that he would do a report on the propriety of how the decoration and furnishing was funded. Downing Street says to me that the PM has now paid for the costs of the refurbishment. But there was a loan to him from the Tory party. And I assume that loan will now have to be declared by him. Readers can decide whether it was appropriate for his party to give him this kind of financial help.

The truth about Boris’s ‘bodies pile high in their thousands’ comment

Cummings’s attack spells big trouble for Boris

When No. 10 briefed newspapers on Thursday that Dominic Cummings was the source of leaks of the Prime Minister's text conversations with Sir James Dyson and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and pointed to Cummings as the 'chatty rat' who leaked news of the November lockdown, I said this looked like an exercise in mutually assured destruction. And so it has turned out. The PM's former chief aide — who was closer to Boris Johnson than anyone till he was forced out at the end of last year — has issued a statement that explicitly brands Johnson as 'unethical' and implicitly calls him a liar. Cummings says he does not possess the relevant Dyson texts, so could not be the leaker, and that he can prove the PM knows both that he is not the 'chatty rat' and that the finger of suspicion was pointed at another aide, Henry Newman.