Portrait of the week

Home Open-air markets and car showrooms will be allowed to open from 1 June and other ‘non-essential’ shops from 15 June. Sales of goods in April had fallen by 18 per cent, those of clothing by 50 per cent. Government borrowing rose sharply to £62 billion in April, the highest sum known. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicted borrowing for the year of perhaps £298 billion, more than five times the estimate at the time of the Budget in March. The government announced funding for new long-term housing for 6,000 rough sleepers, of whom more than 14,000 had been given emergency accommodation from the start of the coronavirus lockdown.

Home The United Kingdom seemed reluctant to come out of its lockdown. ‘We are likely to face a severe recession, the likes of which we haven’t seen,’ said Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unemployment rose by 856,500 in April to 2.1 million. More than two million claims had been made for the grant scheme for self-employed people. The government was estimated to be paying ten million of the UK’s 27.5 million private-sector workers. At quiet railway stations, wardens supposedly trained in crowd control stood around talking to each other. Police in England and Wales issued 14,444 fixed penalty notices for breach of the coronavirus regulations up to 11 May; one person was fined nine times.

Home The government changed its slogan from ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ to ‘Stay alert, control the virus, save lives’. Authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland refused to adopt it. The day after a 13-minute televised speech to the nation by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, the government published a 50-page Recovery Strategy. A 14-day quarantine would bind anyone entering the country (with exceptions, such as people from France). Everyone should continue to work from home if possible, but workplaces ‘should be open’, apart from those required to be closed.

Home The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was for office workers to avoid sharing staplers and to face the wall in lifts. An Ipsos Mori poll found that 61 per cent of people would feel not very comfortable about using public transport. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, appeared at a daily coronavirus press conference and said: ‘We have come through the peak, or rather we have come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we have been going through some huge Alpine tunnel, and we can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us.’ Professor Neil Ferguson resigned from the government’s Sage scientific advisory body after accepting visits to his house by a woman friend.

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, returned to work at Downing Street after recovering from his Covid-19 sickness. Speaking outside No. 10, he said that there were ‘real signs now that we are passing through the peak’. By the beginning of Sunday 26 April, there had been 20,319 deaths, mostly in hospital, of people who had the disease; a week earlier the cumulative total had been 15,464. There were additionally 2,000 coronavirus deaths in care homes in the week ending 17 April, according to the Office for National Statistics, twice the number of the week before. In the week ending 10 April, of the 7,996 excess deaths above the average, 1,783 were not attributed to coronavirus.

Home The number of people with the coronavirus disease Covid-19 who had died in hospitals by the beginning of the week, Sunday 19 April, was 15,464, compared with a total of 9,875 a week earlier. Two days later it was 16,509. But the number of people in London in hospital with Covid-19 fell for seven consecutive days and there were plenty of empty beds. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was reported by colleagues to be worried that relaxing lockdown measures too soon might lead to a second spike in the outbreak. Supplies of personal protective equipment were reported to be falling short; a delivery of 84 tons, including 400,000 gowns, from Turkey was delayed.

Home The number of people with the coronavirus disease Covid-19 who had died in hospitals by the beginning of the week, Sunday 12 April, was 9,875, compared with a total of 4,313 a week earlier. Three days later it was 12,107. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was discharged from hospital after a week, three days of which were in intensive care. Thanking staff and nurses who saved his life ‘when things could have gone either way’, he said: ‘We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country. It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable. It is powered by love.’ He recuperated at Chequers despite harsh criticism of other ministers for moving between town and country houses.

Home The number of people who had died from the coronavirus disease Covid-19 in the UK by Sunday 5 April was 4,313, compared with a total of 1,228 by 29 March, and of 281 by 22 March. In the following two days the total rose to 5,373. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, was taken to hospital after his Covid-19 symptoms had persisted for ten days, and then to intensive care. His fiancée, Carrie Symonds, roughly six months pregnant, had spent a week in bed with Covid-19 symptoms. The aim was for there to be 100,000 coronavirus tests a day in England by the end of April, Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said; by 1 April 10,650 people a day were being tested.

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, contracted the coronavirus disease Covid-19, as did Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary. The Prince of Wales had earlier been tested in Scotland and isolated himself with the disease for a week. Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, also isolated himself after suffering symptoms, as did Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief strategist. By Sunday 29 March, 1,228 people in the United Kingdom had died of the disease, compared with a total of 281 a week before. Two days later the total was 1,789. Two more temporary hospitals, in Birmingham and Manchester, in addition to the Nightingale Hospital in the London docks, were being built. Restrictions might last six months.

Coronavirus Sunday dawned with 233 people in the United Kingdom dead thus far from the coronavirus Covid-19 (a week earlier it had been 21), and more than 12,000 in the world. Three days later it was 442 in the UK and more than 18,000 worldwide. About 107,000 of the world’s 410,000 cases detected had recovered. A billion people in the world were confined to their homes, joined from Sunday by a billion more in India, where confusion reigned. Testing was uneven, but, in fatalities, Italy, with 6,820 by Tuesday, had gone far beyond China (with 3,277). Iran admitted to 1,934 deaths and Spain had 2,800. China was reporting few new home-transmitted cases and Wuhan was to lift its lockdown in April.

Home After a Cobra emergency meeting about the coronavirus Covid-19, when the number of cases in the United Kingdom had reached 40, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said that they had ‘agreed a plan so that as and when it starts to spread — as I’m afraid it looks likely that it will — we are in a position to take the steps that will be necessary’. The plan expects up to a fifth of the workforce to be off sick during the peak of an epidemic. After a week in which shares lost 12 per cent of their value, the Bank of England said that it was working ‘to ensure all necessary steps are taken to protect financial and monetary stability’. The Budget had to be adjusted.

Home The government told Britons returning from 11 quarantined towns in northern Italy to isolate themselves, for fear of spreading Covid-19, the contagious coronavirus fever. Random testing began at 11 hospitals. Thirty British and two Irish passengers from the cruise ship Diamond Princess quarantined at Yokohama had been flown to Britain and sent for another fortnight’s quarantine in the Wirral. The price of first-class stamps is to go up on 23 March from 70p to 76p. The EU disclosed its negotiating position on a trade agreement with the United Kingdom, saying in a strange sing-song formula that it ‘should uphold common high standards, and corresponding high standards over time with Union standards as a reference point’.

Home The Budget, still scheduled for 11 March, had to be rewritten after Rishi Sunak was made Chancellor of the Exchequer when Sajid Javid resigned rather than agree to his special advisers being sacked and provision being pooled between No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street. Questions were asked about how far this was the work of Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. In the cabinet shuffle, Julian Smith was replaced as Northern Ireland Secretary by Brandon Lewis. Suella Braverman replaced Geoffrey Cox as Attorney General; she had recently written an article regretting that ‘decisions of an executive, legislative and democratic nature have been assumed by our courts’.

Home The Department of Health classified the novel coronavirus (named by the World Health Organization Covid-19) as a ‘serious and imminent threat’ to public health so that, under the 1984 Public Health (Control of Disease) Act, quarantine could be made compulsory. There were 93 British citizens in quarantine at Arrowe Park Hospital in the Wirral and 105 from a later evacuation flight in a conference centre in Milton Keynes. Steve Walsh, a gas salesman from Hove in East Sussex, was found to have picked up the virus in Singapore and unwittingly infected 11 people at a French ski resort. One of them was a locum GP at the County Oak medical centre in Brighton, which was temporarily closed. British Airways cancelled flights to and from Beijing and Shanghai until 31 March.

Home The Queen agreed to ‘a period of transition’ during which the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would spend time in Canada and Britain. The Queen had summoned a family conference at Sandringham five days after the Sussexes issued a statement saying: ‘After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution. We intend to step back as “senior” members of the royal family and work to become financially independent.’ Since the plan had not been agreed with the Queen or the Prince of Wales, royal incandescence tended towards the white end of the spectrum.The Duchess flew off to Canada to rejoin the dogs.