Brazil

Rio de Janeiro When I first began writing about politics in 2005, my Brazilian husband, David Miranda, was not remotely interested in the subject. When politicians or journalists would visit us in Rio and invite us to dinner, he would always try to get out of it: ‘I’m not going; you’ll talk about nothing but politics the whole night and I will be desperately bored.’ In 2013, David was detained at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act 2000. I’d been working on the Edward Snowden story, uncovering the extent to which the NSA and GCHQ surveil their own citizens, and David had travelled to Berlin to help with a documentary about the investigation.

How worried should we be about the news that P1, one of the two Brazilian variants of Sars-CoV-2, has been found in six people who travelled from Brazil to Britain before the hotel quarantine rules came into force, and that one of these people has yet to be traced? Variant P1 is of concern not just because laboratory study has revealed changes to the spike protein, which might make it theoretically more transmissible, but because of real-world data from Manaus, the Amazonian city to which its origins have been traced. It was first detected in Japan on 6 January among a family which had travelled from the city.

The World Health Organisation’s appeal to stop naming variants of Covid-19 after geographical locations evidently cut no ice with the Prime Minister, who warned MPs yesterday about a new Brazilian mutation of the Sars-Cov2-virus. Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance later suggested to ITV News that the changes identified in the new variant ‘might make a change to the way the immune system recognises it but we don’t know. Those experiments are underway.’ According to Pfizer last week, its vaccine still offers protection against the newly-identified Kent and South African variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. But should we now be worrying that the Brazilian variant will creep through our defences?

We are in Imbassai in the state of Bahia. It’s lush, beautiful and green. I am escaping the London winter gloom. For Fixyá of the Fulni-ô tribe, covered in body paint, he is escaping a desertified region in Pernambuco state. He lives by a town called Aguas Bellas (Beautiful Water) which is ironic as there isn’t any. We are here for the Encontro Multietnico, organised by Juliano Basso, where representatives of several different Brazilian indigenous groups, nearly all from the Amazon, can 'get together, exchange information, bond and have fun'. You certainly bond with people in a three-hour sweat lodge session, even if I wouldn’t call it fun exactly.

Still depressed, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, ‘the foot less prompt to meet the morning dew’, I got out of bed one afternoon and exchanged the soggy Devon hills for the tower blocks of Canary Wharf. I went at the invitation of Dr Ivan Mindlin, orthopaedic surgeon, Las Vegas casino house doctor during the mob-run era of ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal and Tony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, and one of the most successful sports bettors in US history. He kindly put me up in an ‘executive’ room at a hotel round the corner from his 18th-floor apartment. The first night we went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We went there on foot. It was like going for a walk in a multicultural concrete-and-glass future.

Home Paul Nuttall, aged 39, was elected leader of the UK Independence Party. He said: ‘I want to replace the Labour party and make Ukip the patriotic voice of working people.’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was rebuffed by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, and by Donald Tusk, the President of the European Commission, when she proposed settling the status of British and EU expatriates even before Article 50 was invoked. She made another attempt in talks with Beata Szydlo, the Prime Minister of Poland. There was some interest in a note photographed on papers being carried after a meeting in Downing Street by Julia Dockerill, an aide to Mark Field, a Conservative MP, that said: ‘What’s the model? Have your cake and eat it.