Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Joe Biden and the weaponisation of Ireland

Joe Biden loves Ireland. He wears his Irish heritage proudly. ‘The BBC? I’m Irish’, he quipped when Nick Bryant asked him if he had a quick word for the Beeb. Which is all very nice. It’s good when people take pride in their heritage, even if it does come off as a bit ‘Oirish’ when Irish-American politicians do it. Expect to see President Biden in a poky pub in Ireland sipping on a pint of the (non-alcoholic) black stuff in front of the world’s media within the year. ‘It’s grand!’, he’ll probably say. Everyone will cheer; I’ll cringe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Fraser Nelson

Are we on the brink of a Covid vaccine?

14 min listen

The drugs firm Pfizer has announced that its vaccine — currently in stage three trials — is 90% effective. Meanwhile, Britain and the EU are entering the final stage of trade negotiations. Finally, No. 10 is ramping up its inquiry to discover who leaked news of England's second lockdown. Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

Katy Balls

Number 10 are cautiously optimistic about the Pfizer vaccine

There's been a rare case of Covid-19 good news today with the announcement that the Pfizer vaccine could be 90 per cent effective. Citing early results from the phase 3 trials of the vaccine, the pharmaceutical company said the initial findings marked 'a great day for science and humanity'. While it's still early days and the trial is not complete, the news has been cautiously welcomed by the government. Few in government expect an immediate end to social distancing Speaking this lunchtime, the Prime Minister's spokesman called the results ‘promising’ but warned 'there are no guarantees'.

Nick Tyrone

Labour risks learning the wrong lesson from Biden’s victory

‘One election victory does not mean that work is now finished for the Democrats; for us in the Labour party, it is only just beginning,’ Keir Starmer wrote today in the Guardian. Amongst his comrades on the centre-left, he seems almost alone in understanding this point. Biden’s victory was greeted by the British centre-left on social media as the definitive end of an era. Brexit is ‘over’ somehow, or at least, no-deal Brexit has become impossible. The Tories are now supposedly on the brink of being pushed from office by a moderate centre-left wave. Except of course, Starmer is correct – and Labour is in real danger of learning the wrong lessons from this US election, as their American cousins in the Democratic party already seem to have done.

Theo Hobson

Rory Stewart has avoided the traps Boris’s critics usually fall into

In this week’s TLS Rory Stewart reviews Tom Bower’s biography of Boris Johnson. He doesn’t say much about the actual book, but it’s one of the most important articles on the prime minister I’ve read for a long time. Just now, in place of ‘the prime minister’ I wrote ‘Boris’, deleted it, then wrote ‘Johnson’ and deleted it. This sums up the issue: does one buy into the charm, or conspicuously resist it? Just in the act of naming him, neutrality feels impossible: one is either too matey, or too frosty. This stands for a wider decision: does one smile at his wit, or does one wag one’s finger? Few of us want to seem like prigs who don’t get the joke, who don’t know how to lighten up.

Jonathan Saxty

The limits of a ‘free-market Brexit’

The UK must not be frightened of harnessing the power of the state as the country negotiates life after Brexit. Many people who remember the 1970s – a time when the British state seemed incapable of doing anything productive while the country suffered the indignity of going cap-in-hand to the IMF – often balk at such a suggestion. Many of the same people came of age in the 1980s, and associate the private sector with growth and opportunity, while the public sector was forever tainted with the stench of poor productivity, unemployment and power cuts. Yet this Anglo-centric view misses what was going on in the rest of the world at the time.

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Raab ‘excited’ to work with Biden

Dominic Raab – ‘I'm excited' about working with President Biden On the morning after Joe Biden was declared President-elect, the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab offered his congratulations to Mr Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris. Raab told Sophy Ridge that the Biden administration would find plenty of common ground with Boris Johnson's government: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1325384057602117633?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw DR: The things that President-elect Biden wants to achieve internationally... not just security and counter-terrorism in the Middle East, but coronavirus and returning to the Paris Climate Agreement – these are all things which... we'll have a huge amount to co-operate on and I'm excited about working with the new administration.

Patrick O’Flynn

Boris Johnson’s ‘method’ isn’t working

Is the Boris Johnson ‘method’ reaching the end of the road and if it is, can the Prime Minister find a new one – or is he altogether done for? The method, by all accounts deployed across more than one facet of the Prime Minister’s life, involves issuing a series of charmingly delivered apologies for things not having turned out as he’d led his audience to believe they would. Each apology is immediately followed by a new pledge that matters will take a decisive turn for the better very soon. And thus does the PM buy himself more time in which to extricate himself from scrapes. On Thursday he was at it again during a Downing Street press conference called to sugar the pill of a second national lockdown.

Saturday

Katy Balls

Boris congratulates Biden

After days of government ministers declining to take a public stance on the US election, Boris Johnson has congratulated Joe Biden on his victory. The Democrat's lead in Pennsylvania prompted several US networks to call the election for Biden and the Prime Minister then released a statement on social media: https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1325133262075940864?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Johnson's message of congratulations came after Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon sent their own messages of support. It also comes despite Donald Trump and his team insisting that the result is not final and suggesting they will contest it.

Kate Andrews

Joe Biden wins the election

Four days after a (much closer than predicted) election, American networks have called the race for Joe Biden, who has secured more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the race. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News (and now the BBC) project Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States, as vote counting in Pennsylvania gave the Vice President a big enough lead for them to say with confidence he had won. The additional 20 electoral votes from the swing state bring Biden to a total of 273. Based on current projections, Biden only needed one of the outstanding states (including Georgia or Nevada) to cross the finish line. In addition to the networks, Joe Biden is now also declaring victory.

Kate Andrews

What will Boris make of a Biden win?

President Donald Trump sees himself as a great friend to the UK: he backed Brexit, likes Boris, and has personal ties to Britain as well. He’s proud of his Scottish heritage, and long before he was running the nation, he was running golf courses in his mother’s home country. But it’s not obvious the UK government always appreciates the President’s expressions of support. The Johnson team made nothing of Trump’s endorsement for the Tory candidate during the 2019 general election. The government is notably squeamish whenever the President lavishes his praises.

Lionel Shriver

Why I voted Biden

If the prospect of Joe Biden as fills me with such foreboding, why did I vote for the guy? I’ll spare you the standard foam-at-the-mouth diatribe about Trump being a threat to democracy itself and keep it short. The man’s incompetent. And Biden has upsides. His health care plan beats no health care plan. A president who has occasional verbal lapses beats a president who can’t talk at all. Biden might halt the attrition of qualified civil servants from every branch of government, while improving his country’s international standing — at least from knee-high to mid-thigh. Biden’s very dullness could restore a sense of order; rather than ‘Build back better’, his slogan might more persuasively have run ‘Make America boring again’.

Kate Andrews

Can the NHS cope with Covid?

25 min listen

At Thursday's coronavirus press conference, Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, said a second wave 'is real and it's serious', as he warned that 11,000 people were already in hospital with the virus. Is the NHS able to cope with another spike in infections, and has the government adequately prepared for winter? Kate Andrews speaks to Fraser Nelson and Dave West, deputy editor of the Health Service Journal.

Mark Gettleson

The Republicans’ nightmare in Georgia

Joe Biden is the President elect. His lead in Pennsylvania is unassailable, such that even if he somehow slipped behind in Arizona, Nevada or Georgia, he will still receive the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. President Trump, however, at the time of writing, continues to dig in. With lawsuits filed in several key states and the President making increasingly deranged statements around ‘illegal votes’ and the illegitimacy of late-counted mail-in ballots, it seems possible that he’ll refuse to leave the White House quietly. Some in Trump World have even made the outlandish suggestion that the Pennsylvania state legislature, controlled by Republicans, should override the election result and nominate their own slate of electors to choose the President.

Thibault Mercier et al

Liberté! An open letter by 200 French lawyers protesting against lockdown

After saying there was 'no question of lockdown', Emmanuel Macron has announced what many feared: the implementation of a new national and mandatory lockdown. We are lawyers and jurists of all specialities and from all parts of France and write to express our indignation at the injustice of this measure. After being astonished by the first lockdown, we believe that such violations of our freedoms and ways of life are neither viable nor legitimate. Lockdown will have major collateral consequences that will be more harmful than the virus itself. While we agree with the President’s statement that nothing is 'more important than human life'.

Fraser Nelson

Why is Britain so worried about Denmark’s mink farm Covid outbreak?

How worried should we be about a mutant strain of Coronavirus found in Denmark’s mink farms? The virus was found on its farms in June, and it emerged a few days ago that a dozen people had been infected with a strain of Covid called ‘Cluster 5’. This has raised the prospect of a new, more virulent vaccine-proof strain: a prospect dismissed in some places but being taken very seriously in 10 Downing St. So seriously that Britain has just become the only country in the world to close its borders to anyone from Denmark. Francois Balloux, a professor of genetics at University College London  has downplayed it as a story “making the rounds on Twitter.

Friday

James Forsyth

What does Biden’s win mean for Britain?

So, how will Joe Biden’s victory affect US-UK relations? As I write in the Times, the downsides for this government are obvious. Biden fiercely opposed Brexit and those around him, like many on the American left, look to London and see a mini-Trump. They will regard other leaders from Merkel to Macron as more natural partners for them. The first phone calls are likely to go to them, not to Johnson. If the transition period ends without a trade deal and the Northern Ireland clauses of the Internal Market Bill come into force, that will further strain relations. The bulk of Biden’s key appointments will need to be confirmed by the Senate, which will – depending on the Georgia run-offs – probably have a narrow Republican majority.

Matt Kilcoyne

Nicola Sturgeon is not so different to Donald Trump

Nicola Sturgeon sank to a new low this morning. The SNP leader bizarrely seemed to compare opposing a second independence referendum in Scotland to Trump refusing to concede the US election. https://twitter.com/NicolaSturgeon/status/1324622924813393920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw This is, of course, the same SNP leader who still refuses to accept the SNP’s 2014 referendum loss – a referendum her party claimed would be a ‘once in a generation’ vote. Perhaps Sturgeon should take a long hard look in the mirror before claiming that ‘politicians who rage against democracy don’t prevail’.