Covid

The government has finally attempted to crack down on the problem of people bringing Covid back into the UK, a mere 11 months after the pandemic began. The transport minister Grant Shapps has announced that from Monday, for the first time, travellers will be required to present a negative Covid test at the border, to ensure new variants aren’t brought into the country. The rules will apply equally to British and foreign nationals, which means holidaymakers will be forced to seek out a Covid test abroad before they return to the UK. But has Shapps missed a trick when it comes to the new testing regime? According to the rules, travellers will have to present a negative Covid test which has been taken 3 days before they arrive at the border.

As government ministers avoid putting a date on an easing of restrictions, let alone an end to them, scientific advisers have stepped in to fill the silence. Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam has suggested the lockdown could remain in place well into spring while Professor Neil Ferguson – who briefly stood down from his role last year for breaking lockdown rules – has suggested measures could be in place until the autumn. This, however, is not going down well with the Tory MPs who make up the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group. As the Sun reports, Steve Baker has issued a rallying call to his fellow members over the situation.

Tuesday's cabinet meeting discussed the usual topics of Covid and the Brexit transition period, but at the end, Boris Johnson told ministers he had asked Sir Michael Barber to conduct a rapid review of government delivery 'to ensure it remains focused, effective and efficient'. Downing Street's readout of the meeting said the Prime Minister told his colleagues that 'it remains important to ensure that work continues to ensure that we build back better from the pandemic'. Barber, currently chair of the Office for Students, set up the first 'delivery unit' in Downing Street in 2001, and has even written a book on How to Run a Government. He will be examining how No. 10 can deliver its domestic policies over the next few years.

It is much harder being an embattled minister in the socially distanced Commons than in normal times. There is no group of supportive MPs to arrange behind you, no ability to organise sympathetic noises from the backbenches as you give your statement explaining why you've taken a last-minute decision to close all schools when you said you wouldn't and had been threatening councils who were trying to do so just before Christmas with legal action, and why you've spent the past few weeks insisting that exams would go ahead in the summer, only to cancel them this week too. On this charge sheet, Gavin Williamson would have struggled in any Commons setting when he explained why the government had changed its mind at the last minute.

Boris Johnson this evening tried to give a little more background to why he had called England’s latest lockdown – and why he had confidence that this really was the darkness before the dawn. The Prime Minister told the Downing Street coronavirus briefing (yes, we are back in that sort of lockdown) that more than 1 million people in England are now infected with Covid – around 2 per cent of the population, according to the ONS – but that as of today, the same number of people in England, and a total of 1.3 million people across the UK, have received the vaccine. He had to explain why he had changed his tune on schools so rapidly, going from insisting that most schools should return to cancelling face-to-face teaching within 36 hours.

There is a sense of grim inevitability this morning that even tighter Covid restrictions are coming very soon. On his media round this morning, Matt Hancock has been emphasising that the new variant means that the ‘old tier system… is no longer strong enough’ and that the only thing that can stop the spread of the virus is people not seeing others. There is beginning to be a shift back to the ‘stay at home’ message we heard so much during the first lockdown. The increased transmissibility of the Kentish variant, let alone the South African one, means it is unclear if even a March-style lockdown would be enough to get the R rate below one. So, the only way out of this situation is mass immunisation.

Oh dear. Nicola Sturgeon has been forced to apologise after photos appeared of her in the Sun breaching Covid rules. The SNP leader had been attending a funeral when she got chatting to three seated women drinking in the public part of the venue. Scottish Covid regulations state that those not drinking in a public venue should be wearing a mask. https://twitter.com/ScottishSun/status/1341647454454878208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw She told Holyrood she was 'kicking herself' after her breach became apparent. It seems it's one rule for Nicola...

The port of Dover has been closed down. The Eurotunnel isn’t carrying any freight for a couple of days. The lorries are already starting to back up in Kent, the supermarkets are working out where they can get fresh supplies from, and flights have been suspended, with the British likely to find they are turned away from most of our neighbouring countries. If you had blanked out all the other news you might think that after some terminal row about herring, Brexit had actually been brought forward by ten days, creating the kind of chaos that even the most swivel-eyed Remainer could scarcely have imagined possible. And yet, of course, it is the new strain of Covid-19 that means restrictions are being put in place. But, hey, one thing seems to have come good.

How certain should we be of the government’s claim that the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 is 70 per cent more transmissible than the previous common strain falls apart? I ask not because I have any information that would contradict the Prime Minister, but because it has become a repetitive feature of this crisis: that the piece of science which leads the government into a sudden change in policy ends up looking a little flaky. It happened with Professor Ferguson’s famous prediction of 240,000 deaths unless the government introduced the first lockdown – Imperial published similar figures for Sweden which were later shown to vastly overstate deaths, throwing serious doubt upon its model.

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer both assumed that today was the last PMQs before Christmas, suggesting that they don’t expect Parliament to be sitting next Wednesday. Their exchanges were particularly unenlightening this week. Starmer argued that his concerns about the tier system had been justified by the fact that cases are rising in three quarters of tier 2 areas and half of tier 3. Johnson again attacked him for abstaining on the vote on the tier system. Interestingly, Starmer set himself fully against the Christmas easing calling it ‘the next big mistake’ and approvingly quoted the joint Health Service Journal / British Medical Journal editorial, which called for a ban on household mixing at Christmas.

Sir Keir Starmer has called on Boris Johnson to hold an emergency Cobra meeting, arguing that the current plans to ease coronavirus restrictions over Christmas should be reviewed. The Labour leader said this afternoon that his party would support the government if it decides that tougher measures are needed. He stops short of calling for the Christmas easing to be cancelled, presumably because he'd rather not be the political grinch in this case. But he is still pushing Johnson. In a letter to the Prime Minister, Starmer argues that the current tier system has not been working and that the government cannot ignore the rising cases.