Politics

Even if the Covid-19 coronavirus does not become a mass killer on the scale of, say, the Spanish Flu in 1918, the mere possibility of such severity still carries huge weight. Just the potential for a disastrous pandemic demands a response whose seriousness and nature will have political and social implications. Even in this first week of the full UK response, some of those implications are clearly visible. And some of the inferences and lessons that can be drawn from this week are, to my mind, quite positive - small points of light in a dark and threatening sky, if you like. 1.

At the beginning of the year Lisa Nandy became the first Labour leadership candidate to subject herself to a grilling by Andrew Neil. It took almost two months, but this evening the two other candidates left in the race, Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey, finally appeared on the show as well. And while both survived the encounter, neither particularly impressed. Keir Starmer appeared to have trouble defining his political relationship with Jeremy Corbyn. The Holborn and St Pancras MP admitted that Corbyn was a major issue on the doorstep at the last election, but then unconvincingly denied there were any rifts between him and the Labour leader over the party’s Brexit policy last year.

Nothing brings people together quite like a late night kebab. That was certainly the lesson that Mr Steerpike learnt on Tuesday evening when the Westminster Village descended on the British Kebab Awards. The annual meat-based bash saw politicians, hacks and restauranteurs rub shoulders at the Park Plaza hotel in Waterloo.  But Mr S wasn't the only one who felt a sense of gastronomic geniality. Jeremy Corbyn, the outgoing Labour leader, was spotted snapping a selfie with his new Tory colleague Dehenna Davison. Mr Corbyn seemed unaware of the fact that the new MP was one of the so-called 'Red Wall' Tories. Davison managed to deprived the Islington socialist of the traditional North East Labour stronghold of Bishop Auckland at last year's general election.

UK and Scottish government modelling shows that the economic and fiscal costs of a Covid-19 epidemic could be on a par with the costs of the 2008 banking crisis. According to a senior government source: ‘that is what our modelling shows’. If millions were unable to work and significant numbers of businesses unable to trade – as usual during an epidemic – there would be a huge automatic rise in Universal Credit and other welfare payments to those quarantined. Further costs would be incurred from whatever schemes are put in place to shelter otherwise viable businesses from collapse, coupled with any emergency top ups to health and social care spending.