Boris johnson

Wednesday's very upbeat Downing Street coronavirus briefing underlined the optimism that Boris Johnson feels about the way the Covid crisis could work out for him. The Prime Minister was celebrating the UK passing the ten million mark for the number of people who have received their first dose of the vaccine, and thanked the NHS for the programme, which he described as 'the most colossal in the history of our National Health Service'. He also very pointedly thanked the Vaccine Taskforce, which the Prime Minister sees as another vindication of his approach to the pandemic. For Johnson, the first part of the coronavirus crisis was bruising and the government made a series of mistakes which were obvious at the time and even more so with hindsight.

If Keir Starmer has a strategy, it's this: to paint his party as more competent than the Tories while keeping his head down on almost everything else. The aim of this is to ensure Labour can crawl across the line come the next election, winning a majority with a bit of help from the SNP. There's a big problem with this approach though: it's the same one that failed to work for Ed Miliband. To beat it, Boris Johnson need do little more than recycle the Tories' 2015 campaign, which depicted Miliband in Salmond's pocket, substituting Sturgeon in his place. The other problem with the 'do as little as possible' strategy is that it will almost certainly result in the break up of the Union. And what then for Labour?

There is no question about it, at least if you want to evaluate things objectively: the UK has handled Covid vaccine rollout well (at least so far) and the EU has dealt with it badly. For a Remainer like me, this raises a difficult question: does this prove that Brexit was a good idea after all? Compared to the EU27, the UK has been able to act nimbly in vaccine negotiations. While Brussels has been held up by various delays and supply issues, these have not affected the UK. This is thanks in large part to the fact that its contract with AstraZeneca was signed three months before the EU vaccine deal. The UK also took a gamble, betting on a vaccine that had not yet passed clinical trials.

Boris Johnson is in Scotland today and once again this counts as news. This is intolerable to everyone. Intolerable to Unionists because a prime ministerial appearance in Scotland should be as routine as a prime ministerial appearance in the Cotswolds. It should not count as a newsworthy moment. And it is intolerable to Scottish nationalists because, well, because everything is intolerable to Scottish nationalists. The Prime Minister’s visit can hardly be deemed 'essential travel' in the current circumstances even if it is also essential that Scotland never becomes a no-go area for Johnson or, indeed, other cabinet ministers. Making it seem such, chipping away at Johnson’s legitimacy, is one small front on the SNP’s long, attritional, struggle against the British state.

If there's one lesson you'd think Boris Johnson might have learned from his handling of the pandemic so far, it would surely be that it is too risky to set a date by which things will start returning to normal. And yet this evening the Prime Minister found himself talking about a date for schools returning, despite the timetable repeatedly slipping. Of course – as Johnson himself made clear at the Downing Street coronavirus briefing – 8 March is the earliest by which schools might start to return, rather than his deadline for anything happening. Johnson was asked whether he was once again being too optimistic by talking about this date, but said that 'opening schools is a huge priority for us all'.

Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Simon Stevens held a very sombre press conference in Downing Street this evening to mark the awful milestone of more than 100,000 UK deaths in this pandemic. The Prime Minister offered his 'deepest condolences to everyone who has lost a loved one', and promised that 'when we have come through this crisis, we will come together as a nation to remember everyone we lost, and to honour the selfless heroism of all those on the front line who gave their lives to save others'. He also pledged that 'we will make sure that we learn the lessons and reflect and prepare'. This was the closest the Prime Minister came to talking about taking responsibility for the high death toll.

The pandemic may still be in full swing but that hasn't stopped the SNP opting to push the case for an independence referendum sooner rather than later. Nicola Sturgeon claimed over the weekend that should the SNP win a majority (as expected) in the Scottish parliament elections, she will hold an advisory referendum on independence, whether or not Boris Johnson consents to the move.  Not everyone in government is convinced the First Minister would go ahead with this should push come to shove. But the fact it's even on the table points to the problem Johnson has on Scottish independence – his insistence that now is not the time for a second border poll will not be enough to make the issue go away. So, what will?

Exactly 40 years ago tomorrow, four Labour party grandees issued the Limehouse Declaration, signalling 'the re-emergence of social democracy in Great Britain'. The declaration, made on a windswept bridge near the east London home of Dr David Owen, marked the formation of a Council for Social Democracy, that soon became a fully-fledged political party, the SDP. The 'gang of four' very nearly succeeded in breaking the mould of British politics, as their moderation hit the spot with millions of voters who opposed Thatcherism but also recoiled from Labour’s radical socialist agenda of the time. But they were thwarted, first by Britain’s first past the post electoral system that made gaining a big parliamentary representation all but impossible.

Boris Johnson used today's press conference to issue sobering news: warning that the new Covid strain may be more deadly. The better news? The vaccines that have been approved are likely to be as effective against the new strain as the original. There were also figures to suggest things are slowly improving: the R number has fallen to a rate of between 0.8 and 1. And 5.4 million people, around one in ten of the adult population, have now received their first dose of the vaccine. Yet despite the good news on the vaccine rollout, there is little in the way of optimism in 10 Downing Street this week.