Boris johnson

Boris Johnson has this evening confirmed that he will delay the lifting of all Covid restrictions by four weeks to 19 July. Announcing the decision in a press conference, Johnson said the Indian variant – also known as the Delta variant – has changed the picture and meant the government was no longer able to proceed with the full unlocking plan they had first hoped.  The Prime Minister said two jabs were very effective against the new variant. The problem? 'There are still millions of younger adults who have not been vaccinated and sadly a proportion of the elderly and vulnerable may still succumb even if they have had two jabs,' Johnson said.

In an at times grouchy press conference, Boris Johnson tried to calm the row over the Northern Ireland protocol. The Prime Minister declined to comment on what Emmanuel Macron is supposed to have said about Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. He said that the whole issue of the protocol had taken up a ‘vestigial’ amount of time at the summit. (Interestingly, Mujtaba Rahman of Eurasia Group, who is particularly well connected in EU capitals, says that he has been told it took up two-thirds of the conversations in the margins of the summit).  Instead, Johnson wanted to emphasise the vaccine commitments that the summit had made and how these would help ‘demonstrate the benefits of democracy and freedom and human rights’ to the rest of the world.

Word is that Boris Johnson will delay the 21 June re-opening by two weeks, possibly even a month — an announcement that has caused some division of opinion in the offices of The Spectator. In the circumstances (the Indian variant growing exponentially) I can see the case for waiting another week or so until we have more data. That's not say that I want delay, just that the rise of the Indian variant in the UK has made me see the abolition of remaining restrictions as a finely-balanced argument. Whereas, a few weeks ago, I thought the facts heavily favoured going ahead with a full reopening.  I discuss this with Kate Andrews, Katy Balls and Cindy Yu in today's Coffee House Shots podcast.

Turn on any television news broadcast and peruse any news stand on the eve of the G7 summit, and what was the favourite picture? Carrie and Jill take a barefoot walk along the Cornish sand beside the blue Cornish sea, and enjoy a frolic with little Wilfred (just past his first birthday).  Ahhhh. Isn’t that lovely, so natural, so normal, you say. Melania (snarl) would never have done that. Oh, and by the way, Jill’s jacket said 'Love' on the back, contrast with Melania’s during a visit to a migrant detention centre, which said (if you have already forgotten) 'I really don’t care, do U?' Well, you might care. Then again – like me – you might not. And in a moment I will explain why.

What is Prime Ministers' Questions? Is it a simple contest of ideas? Or is it a judicial roasting in which a lone defendant, governed by strict rules, must face an army of malign inquisitors? Boris thinks it’s an open debate about policy. Speaker Hoyle sees it as a court-hearing over which he presides as judge and procedural expert. Today they clashed. It began with Sir Keir Starmer blowing holes in Boris’s botched catch-up plan for schools. A government wonk, Sir Kevan Collins, had ordered huge sums to be lavished on the programme but the Treasury declined. Boris agreed with the Treasury. And Sir Kevan flounced off into obscurity leaving a few stinging insults about the education department in his wake. Ho-hum. Just another day in Whitehall.

Update: Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle has announced that a vote on the aid spending amendment has not been selected. Hoyle says the amendment is out of the scope of the current bill, meaning Boris Johnson will avoid a potentially difficult vote on the issue – for now. Hoyle suggested the government should give MPs an opportunity for a vote at a later date on restoring the foreign aid pledge to 0.7 per cent of gross national income. As preparations get underway in Downing Street for this week's G7 summit, trouble is brewing in the House of Commons. The government is facing a potential defeat on a vote it didn't want to have: the cut to the foreign aid budget.

If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until a sizeable portion of this article’s readership is dead. The next redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023 is almost certain to favour the Conservatives, adding ten seats to the already unhittable target of 123 constituencies Labour needs to win to govern on its own. There’s a possibility that Scotland could be independent by the end of the decade, and that ought to terrify anyone who wants to stop the rest of the country becoming a one-party Tory state.