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Boris Johnson's ministerial Jaguar was involved in a pile-up outside parliament earlier this afternoon. It seems a protester on Parliament Square tried to halt the PM's cavalcade as he was leaving via Carriage Gates after PMQs. According to the Mail's John Stevens, No. 10 is saying that there are currently no reports of any injuries. https://twitter.com/snb19692/status/1273244222385160192?
Let’s play spot the difference. Here is a tweet posted on Tuesday afternoon by Professor Devi Sridhar, a member of the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 Advisory Group: https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1272939091466883076?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Now, here is a tweeted posted by Professor Sridhar on Wednesday morning: https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1273163765928931332?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The tweets are separated by 15 hours. What happened in that time to prompt Edinburgh University’s Chair in Global Public Health to issue an apparent reversal of her considered opinion?
For the first time since Keir Starmer became Labour leader, Boris Johnson clearly bested him at PMQs. Johnson, backed up by Tory MPs who were determined to make as much noise as possible in the socially distanced chamber, pushed Starmer to explicitly declare that it was safe to return to schools. Starmer was reluctant to do so, and Johnson kept hammering the point. This took the wind out of the Labour leader’s sails who failed to land any blows on Boris Johnson despite the government’s difficulties in recent days. The backbench questions didn’t produce any particularly awkward moments either. So after a difficult 48 hours, Boris Johnson came through PMQs unscathed.
Poor Alistair Carmichael. The Lib Dem MP was only standing up for beef farmers in his constituency, raising a problem with the UK labelling regulations. But it appears that Boris Johnson didn't recognise the Orkney MP, lambasting him for his supposed support for an independent Scotland. Yes, that would be the same Alistair Carmichael who served as Scotland Minister in the coalition government and has led the Lib Dem charge against a second independence referendum. Woops!
Since becoming the new Speaker of the Commons, the softly-spoken Lancastrian Lindsay Hoyle has sought to distance himself from the tenure of John Bercow. While the latter spent his days constructing long monologues and pontificating from the Speaker’s chair, Hoyle has instead focused on limiting his own contributions in the Chamber and attempting to be an impartial arbiter of Commons debates. Despite this change in approach (and the fact that he ran for Speaker as the anti-Bercow candidate) Hoyle has generally avoided criticising his predecessor directly. Mr S wonders though if that now might be about to change. This week, Hoyle was interviewed by chief executive of the rugby league team, the Warrington Wolves.
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After the highly publicised campaign by the footballer Marcus Rashford, the government has U-turned on the question of free school meals in the summer. Was it inevitable, and what does this move mean for public spending? Katy Balls talks to James Forsyth and Kate Andrews about this as well as the Foreign Office merger and the Oxford drug breakthrough.
We need to talk about Priti Patel. Specifically we need to talk about what happened to her last week. In an emotional statement in the House of Commons, Patel talked about some of the racist abuse she has experienced, from being called a 'P**i' in the school playground to being depicted as a cow with a ring through its nose in the Guardian. (Patel is a Hindu, and the cow is a sacred symbol in Hinduism.) She did so in response to the claim made by Labour MP Florence Eshalomi that the government doesn't understand the problem of racial inequality. After recounting her run-ins with prejudicial hatred, Patel said: 'I will not take lectures [on racism] from the other side of the House.' How did the supposedly anti-racist left respond to Patel's comments?
No. 10's screeching U-turn on food for low-income kids over the summer will not do the government or ministers serious harm with the wider public. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. First, the public. They are not on Twitter. This fact cannot be repeated enough around Westminster. In a finding that should be tattooed on the flesh of every politician and journalist in and around Westminster, the latest Reuters digital news report finds that only 14 per cent of the UK population say they get news from Twitter. The hours of Twitter frenzy that precede the U-turn will have gone largely unnoticed by most people. The BBC (including its website) is still, by a mile, the biggest news source in Britain.
Lining up graphs of the UK’s growth figures last week and its employment figures this week, you would struggle to believe the data was from the same decade, let alone the same month. Despite the economy contracting by a quarter in March and April, unemployment figures haven’t budged: 3.9 per cent ending the month of April, unmoved from the quarter before, and more remarkably only up 0.1 per cent from the previous year. The employment rate remains surprisingly high too: 76.4 per cent, down 0.1 per cent on the previous quarter. Despite the shuttering of the economy, employment and unemployment continue to hover at record highs and lows, like they did before the crisis began.
This lunchtime Boris Johnson performed a U-turn on free school meals over the summer holidays. Following a campaign led by the England striker Marcus Rashford calling for the free school meal voucher system for low-income families to be extended over the summer, a 'Covid summer food fund' is to be set up which will see those eligible get a six-week voucher. For many the big question isn't 'why has the government U-turned?' but 'why did the government take so long to U-turn?'. An increasing number of Tory MPs had come to see it as inevitable as the story looked set to dominate the news and attract criticism from all sides. The popularity of the personality pushing for this meant it was a story that had cut through well beyond the Westminster bubble.
The only silver lining of Churchill's encasement is that he didn’t have to suffer the indignity of seeing thugs perform Nazi salutes in front of him. It's a toss up whether this was more grotesque than the hoodies of the week before who threw bikes and bottles at police. Rightly, there was the proper police presence over the weekend to prevent widespread crime and disorder. But why did police surrender to one mob and not the other? The job of police is to uphold the law. But is that always still the case?
When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary he was constantly irritated by how small the department’s budget was, and how the Department for International Development had so much more money than the Foreign Office. After the 2017 election, he used Theresa May’s weakened position to get some joint Foreign Office-DfID ministers appointed. But even this didn’t fully address his concerns. So, it was always likely that as Prime Minister he would want to bring DfID fully into the Foreign Office, all the DfID junior ministers are already double hatting. I suspect that the aid charities will not like this move at all. But bringing DfiD into the Foreign Office will make the 0.7 per cent aid target more politically sustainable.
Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford has caused a bit of a storm in the Westminster bubble this morning – the 22-year-old's plea to the PM to extend free school meals into the summer holiday has not gone unnoticed. As Katy Balls writes this morning, there is a growing feeling among Tory backbenchers that the cost of the scheme is small compared to the negative PR generated from falling out with a world-class footballer. But it seems the secretary of state for the department of work and pensions didn't get the memo. Thérèse Coffey decided to fact check one of Rashford's tweets, pointing out that it's illegal for water companies to cut off customers' supply. https://twitter.com/theresecoffey/status/1272789819354161152?
How long will the government's decision not to provide free school meal vouchers over the summer last? Away from arguments about the two-metre rule and allegations of lobbying, Boris Johnson has inadvertently found himself in a high profile disagreement with England striker Marcus Rashford. On Monday, Rashford, 22, called for the free school meal voucher system for low-income families to be extended over the summer – speaking of his own personal experience relying on the scheme when he was younger.
In a change of government approach, Dominic Raab appeared alone at Monday night's Downing Street press conference: he was not flanked by a medic or a scientist. This is only the second time a minister has appeared on their own, and the first time it happened government sources said it was because the chief nurse was stuck in traffic. In reply to a question from Jane Merrick of the i, Raab made clear that government ministers would now be flying solo more frequently. He said that scientists would still attend from time to time, but ministers would also appear with school leaders and the like as the country reopened. The move away from having the scientists present at every press conference will please Tory MPs.
Any remaining doubts where most of the Conservative party sits on the government's two-metre rule was put to bed with today's Commons debate on the issue. Tory MPs lined up this afternoon to criticise the social distancing policy, and in many cases call for it to go immediately. Although the government has attempted to calm the party by putting the two-metre rule under review, MPs are increasingly impatient over its existence and view it as the number one problem policy. Speaking in today's debate, several Conservative MPs didn't just call for it to go once the review was completed but for it to face the axe today. Former minister Tobias Ellwood said 'one metre is the right decision, now is the right time – not in two weeks'.
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As the government tries to encourage more spending with the opening of non-essential shops today, is the public still too cautious about Covid?
It isn’t news to say the Johnson administration doesn’t understand how to fight Covid-19 or reopen schools or save the economy. But the knowledge that it doesn’t understand the people who put it in power is new and worth hearing. A poll given to The Spectator today by the Best for Britain think tank shows the gap between ‘Red Wall’ voters and the Tory elite in London is dizzyingly wide. It reports overwhelming opposition to a no-deal Brexit in the seats that put Johnson in Downing Street. As striking is the widespread concern about living standards and equally valid worries about the Conservatives tying Britain to the Trump administration. Best for Britain’s pollsters interviewed 5,317 people across the country from 9 May to 5 June.
By most measures Keir Starmer has, politically speaking, won the war when it comes to Covid. Since becoming Labour leader in early April he has hardly put a foot wrong, balancing his desire to appear supportive of Boris Johnson’s government during this unique moment of national crisis while retaining the freedom to expose and criticise its many mistakes. But as Britain comes out of lockdown, can he win the peace? In the early stages of the lockdown voters were uncertain about the new Labour leader and, understandably, rallied behind Johnson: according to YouGov, in April 46 per cent thought Boris Johnson was best qualified to be Prime Minister, while only 22 per cent thought Starmer was. The latest polling now shows both men are on level pegging at 33 per cent.
The Tories claimed a monumental election victory because of voters in seats like mine, Rother Valley, who placed their faith in our vision for Brexit. An extension to the transition period is unthinkable and would be a betrayal of all those former ‘Red Wall’ voters. We enshrined December 2020 into law for a reason: to communicate our steadfast intent and iron resolve with regards to extricating ourselves from the EU once and for all. Time and again, I speak to constituents who remind me of the sacrosanctity of this Brexit promise. As a party and a country, we must remember that Brexit is one of the highest priorities for voters in the ‘Red Wall’. This is an opportunity to prove that we know that and that we are politicians of our word.