Features

Thursday

James Forsyth

Brexit is back – and Covid has transformed negotiations

We will know in the next few weeks if Britain is to leave the European Union without a trade deal. The ‘high-level’ meeting in June has been earmarked by the UK and the EU as the moment when they decide whether to take the negotiations to the next stage or not. If there is to be a deal, then the contours of it will need to start to become clearer at this meeting. If they don’t, then both sides will need to decide whether their time would be better spent preparing for trading on WTO terms than in unconstructive negotiations. The Covid pandemic, far from pausing the talks, has made it all the more urgent that an agreement is found quickly.

Thursday

Fredrik Erixon

League of nations: the race out of lockdown

Uppsala Last week, Europe started its liberation from lockdown — and it all feels like a study in national political identity. Belgium took its first step towards ‘deconfinement’ but no one seems exactly sure what that means. France is opting for complexity rather than simplicity. Italy’s national plan for the easing of its lockdown is more convoluted still, but few regions bother to follow it anyway. Spain, goes a national joke, went more slowly and started with a reopening of the siesta. And in Germany, everyone is praising the country’s scientific approach to the pandemic, but as soon as they were allowed to roam freely again, many Germans headed for the beer gardens. Governments say their approach is ‘guided by the science’.

Jayanta Bhattacharya & Mikko Packalen

Lives vs lives – the global cost of lockdown

‘There have been as many plagues in history as there have been wars,’ wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, ‘yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’ So it was this time. The arrival of a new coronavirus blindsided governments of most advanced nations as they reached for a tool that few had ever really considered before: lockdown. It all happened too fast for a proper discussion about the implications. The biggest question — the extent to which lockdown will claim lives as well as save them — is one you can ask at a global level. We know the national costs. In the United States, there is joblessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, with more than 33 million unemployed.

Katy Balls & James Forsyth

The MP demanding a new approach to China

Six years ago, Neil O’Brien was working for George Osborne when the then chancellor was enthusing about a ‘new golden era’ in Sino-British relations. But now O’Brien, who became the Conservative MP for Harborough in 2017, is one of the founders of the new China Research Group, a group of Tory MPs who are pushing for the government to take a tougher line with Beijing. His best-case scenario is one where the UK and its allies ‘manage to restrain some of the worst behaviours of the Chinese government’. O’Brien’s change of heart sums up the shift in Tory thinking on China.

John R. Bradley

Oil on troubled waters: the US-Saudi alliance is crumbling

Donald Trump said in October 2018 that the Saudi royal family ‘wouldn’t last two weeks’ without American military support. Last week, on the back of the collapse of the US fracking industry, he finally acted on his long-standing anti--Saudi instincts. He ordered the immediate withdrawal of two patriot air defence batteries, sent to defend the kingdom’s oil infrastructure in September after a missile attack blamed on the Iranians. He also recalled hundreds of US troops and said the US Navy presence in the Persian Gulf would be scaled back. Leaving with the ships were dozens of US fighter jets, which would have been crucial for defending against any full-scale Iranian assault.

Aidan Hartley

Another plague is enveloping the world – locusts

As if 2020 hasn’t already scared the hell out of us all, a plague of locusts is upon us. When I first witnessed a swarm swirling across my farm in Kenya, it was hard to see them in the nightmarish way they’re depicted in Exodus or the Book of Revelation. They were millions of pink and golden Tinker Bell fairies, flying in a halo around the sun, filling the air with the sound of rustling skirts. But the breeding cycle of a locust is only a few months and they are growing in numbers exponentially. Soon, it’s predicted, we will see individual swarms equivalent to the size of London, each of which consumes as much food as half the population of the United Kingdom on a daily basis.

Alexander Pelling-Bruce

Lockdown, foot down: driving in the time of Covid

After the post-apocalyptic fall-off in traffic at the start of lockdown, cars are now slowly starting to return to the roads. Well, if you’ve seen a smug git cruising through north Perthshire in a 1989 Atlantic Blue BMW 320i convertible, that’s me. I’m rediscovering the love of the car. I started lockdown in London, hurtling down Edgware Road blasting out ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials. Having decamped to the Highlands (in defiance of the SNP edicts to stay away), I now chug along at 20 miles per hour below the speed limit, with a gentle accompaniment of Hall & Oates. It’s pure bliss. Is driving for pleasure within the government’s lockdown guidelines? It’s certainly not ‘essential’ travel.

Thursday

Matt Ridley

We know everything – and nothing – about Covid

We know everything about Sars-CoV-2 and nothing about it. We can read every one of the (on average) 29,903 letters in its genome and know exactly how its 15 genes are transcribed into instructions to make which proteins. But we cannot figure out how it is spreading in enough detail to tell which parts of the lockdown of society are necessary and which are futile. Several months into the crisis we are still groping through a fog of ignorance and making mistakes. There is no such thing as ‘the science’. This is not surprising or shameful; ignorance is the natural state of things. Every new disease is different and its epidemiology becomes clear only gradually and in retrospect. Is Covid-19 transmitted mainly by breath or by touching? Do children pass it on without getting sick?

Fiona Mountford

Is baking and watching Netflix really comparable to being bombed?

Much mention has been made in these past weeks of ‘Blitz spirit’. The Queen even hinted at it in her address to the nation, referencing Vera Lynn in her ‘We will meet again’ closing remarks. TV presenters, journalists and indeed our own Prime Minister cannot resist these stirring references to the resilience of the Home Front, the sense of national solidarity, the pluck and grit of the British people, especially as we reach the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Blitz spirit has become such a powerful and recognisable reference point in our national imagination that it is applied, almost at whim it often appears, to any tricky situation the country faces (the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, for instance).

Isabel Hardman

The importance of the Natural Health Service

Most people consider going for a walk or a run as a sort of optional leisure activity, something you get round to once you’ve been to the shops. But when the government announced its coronavirus restrictions, there it was in its own category of ‘essential activities’: daily exercise. Yes, there have been rows about whether sunbathing or sitting on a bench to eat a snack are acceptable, but by and large the message has been clear: we need to get outside to stay well. But it’s not just exercise that’s essential to our lives, it’s nature too. We have become used to thinking of nature as something we need to travel to see, a middle-class luxury along the lines of buying expensive cheese or owning a labradoodle: nice, but not the stuff of staying alive.

Freddy Gray

Hiding Biden is the best way to get him elected

So Mrs American Voter, which septuagenarian sex abuser do you want to be President? The whole ‘#MeToo’ business probably should have taken a back seat in 2020 — given the epochal health crisis, the vast Covid-19 death toll and the collapsed US economy. But sex always makes headlines and this month Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, finds himself wrestling with the shocking allegation that in 1993, he ‘digitally penetrated’ a young woman staffer called Tara Reade. Biden adamantly denies Reade’s claims. However, as someone who peddled the ‘Believe all women’ mantra when it suited him politically, he is now hoist by his own canard.

Damian Thompson

Fake news is spreading faster than the virus

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’.

Elisa Segrave

Lockdown can be overwhelming for those with autism

National Autism Month in April coincided with our strictest phase of lockdown. My son, 36, who has Asperger’s, has consequently been unable to stick to all his routines — one being the Sunday car boot sale on Brighton Racecourse — and I was worried about how he’d cope. He suggested we watch classic EastEnders together from our separate homes and text each other about the personalities and plot. It worked. The episodes from the early 1990s are fast-moving and the characters very real. One scriptwriter then, Susan Boyd, born in Glasgow, hung out with the Jamaican community in Ladbroke Grove in the 1970s. She died at only 55. I looked up her obituary. ‘The woman comes across as unassuming and unmaterialistic and also very talented. Son.

Nigel Farndale

Writing obituaries can be strangely life-affirming

In my line of work I sometimes owe a cock to Asclepius. The ancient Greeks believed that a sacrificial offering to Asclepius, the god of good health, could buy you time. Perhaps it worked in the case of Boris Johnson. On the night he was taken into intensive care, I had the digital team of the Times breathing down my neck. They wanted to know if I, the paper’s obituaries editor, had an obit ready to go straight up online, ahead of the print version. I was up until midnight making sure we had, updating and recasting our existing one, trying to get the tone right. The cock may have been metaphorical, but it was offered all the same.

Thursday

John Lee

Covid’s metamorphosis: has lockdown made the virus more deadly?

‘Nothing makes sense in biology, except in the light of evolution,’ the splendidly named biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973. It’s a good rule of thumb. Despite near-miraculous advances in medical science we remain biological beings, subject to biological laws. None is more central to our understanding of disease than evolution. Yet this theory remains poorly understood and poorly utilised in medicine. And an evolutionary perspective raises important questions about the drastic action we have been taking to confront Covid-19. Most doctors are too busy dealing with the day-to-day deluge of cases to have much time for what they may consider abstruse academic ideas.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s cautious path out of lockdown

Ever since Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital on 5 April, the government has been in a holding pattern. No big decision could be taken without the Prime Minister, but he was in no position to make one. He is now back at work, though, and has a plan for what to do next. Put simply, it is to drive the coronavirus transmission rate — the reproduction number, or ‘R’, which shows the expected number of infections directly generated by one case — down as low as possible and then stay on top of it through a ‘track, trace and test’ approach. In other words, the government is going to go South Korean on the virus. This raises the question: why wasn’t this the strategy all along?

Simon Barnes

What Joanna Lumley and two cobras taught me about fist-fighting

Why do we box? It’s an almost ludicrously inefficient form of combat. The last thing the SAS suggests its soldiers to do is put their dooks up. But boxing is nonetheless the world’s leading combat sport — millions watch boxing in lockdown, and when we’re all allowed out, thousands will head first to the pub, then out into the streets and carparks, to throw punches at each other’s heads. Why? I have the answer. It came to me by a combination of Joanna Lumley and a fight I once witnessed between cobras. Boxing is not a great form of combat — not if your aim is to put your opponent out of action fast.

Melanie McDonagh

Scotland’s new ‘hate speech’ rules are a modern blasphemy law

It is 178 years since the last recorded charge of blasphemy in Scotland, against the Edinburgh bookseller Thomas Paterson for ‘exhibiting placards of a profane nature’ in his shop window in 1842. One of those placards announced that ‘Paterson & Co (of the Blasphemy Depot, London)… Beg to acquaint infidels in general and Christians in particular that… [we] will sell all kinds of printed works which are calculated to enlighten, without corrupting — to bring into contempt the demoralising trash our priests palm upon the credulous as divine revelation — and to expose the absurdity of, as well as the horrible effects springing from, the debasing god-idea.

Paul Wood

Never mind 100,000 – should we be aiming for 10 million tests a day?

My friend ‘D’ is an instantly recognisable type in the Middle East: the middleman. He’s always chasing the next deal, always about to make millions. One scheme was to build a London Eye in a flyblown town in the Levant. Another was to buy a ‘Trump sex tape’ for $10 million. He invited me to watch the negotiations. They ended with a sociopathic Russian gangster ringing up in the night threatening to kill my children. ‘We know where you live.’ His latest scheme is to get the British government to buy coronavirus test kits from Turkey. This could be the big score: for biotech companies, testing is a new goldrush. And though there’s a touch of Del Boy about my friend, he’s right about the need for test kits.

Katy Balls

The competitive world of Covid brides

I had planned to spend this Saturday in a large white dress, sipping rosé and cutting into a three-tier rhubarb pavlova. Instead, I’ll be drinking gin on my sofa as family members dial in to offer commiserations to me and my fiancé. I am a Covid bride — one of the many whose weddings have been put on hold because of the lockdown. While the pandemic has had devastating and irreversible effects on people’s lives, it has also left many engaged couples with nowhere to go. In our case, the marriage licence application had been sent, the father of the groom’s slideshow completed, bridesmaids’ dresses finally agreed on (this may have been the hardest bit of all) and the table plan was under way.