Lockdown

Thursday

The Spectator

Why Britain must unlock on 21 June

The scare over the Indian variant of coronavirus this week is a taste of what to expect over the next few weeks, months or even years. Like all RNA viruses, Covid-19 mutates and has done so thousands of times already. New strains supplant old ones and, for a while, questions will be raised when one mutation comes to dominate. Is it more lethal? Is there a chance it could evade vaccines? Every time so far, there has been no significant reason to doubt the efficacy of the vaccines. So the government’s timetable for lifting Covid restrictions holds firm. How far should Britain go to try to fend off new variants?

Monday

Robert Peston

Full easing of Covid restrictions on 21 June looks unlikely

The prospect of the final easing of lockdown restrictions in England going ahead precisely as planned on 21 June is close to nil, according to ministers and officials. ‘It is clear some social distancing will have to be retained, not everything we’ve set out for 21 June is likely to happen,’ said a government adviser. ‘But it is also possible some of the easing we’ve done today will have to be reversed.’  Neither he nor a minister would be drawn on precisely which parts of the planned unlocking may have to be delayed, or which aspects of unlocking that’s already happened would need rolling back. Even 10 per cent less

Katy Balls

Will lockdown still end on 21 June?

As the penultimate lockdown easing gets under way, ministers are being asked a question: will the 21 June unlocking be delayed? On Friday, Boris Johnson warned the rise of the Indian variant could ‘pose serious disruption’ to the planned lockdown easing next month, when nearly all Covid restrictions are expected to go. The line from the government hasn’t changed much over the weekend; ministers are keen to say they hope it will go ahead but won’t guarantee it. There is unlikely to be any formal decision until the week before the 21st, when the government will be able to review all the data. If vaccine hesitancy remains an issue in the government’s calculations,

Friday

Ross Clark

Could the Indian variant slow unlocking?

So is the ‘irreversible’ lifting of lockdown really irreversible after all? There is a grim echo of what happened last year in the sudden panic over the Indian variant of SARS-CoV-2. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that he ‘rules nothing out’, following a meeting of the Sage committee over how to respond to the variant. Next month’s proposed reopening of society must now look in doubt. Monday’s relaxation, which will allow indoor hospitality for the first time this year, will for the moment go ahead, but we have seen how quickly these things can change — and with what little notice. Is the Indian variant really more transmissible, or vaccine-evading,

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

The sermons poked out of the songs like busted bed springs: Van Morrison livestream reviewed

Over the decades, Van Morrison’s role within the tower of song has shifted from chief visionary officer to head of complaints. It’s not a promotion. The title track of his new album, Latest Record Project, Volume 1, is a rebuke to those who insist on living in an artist’s past rather than his present. A laudable sentiment, perhaps, but one less easy to put into practice when Morrison’s present consists of 28 tracks which hone an already ornery world view to a paranoic peak. When he isn’t griping about his divorce he’s peddling half-baked conspiracy theories, sneering at internet users and ‘media junk’, and bitching about modern music, crooked politicians

Rachel Johnson

Vaccines are out, sex is in: the rules for post-lockdown conversation

Long before Covid, it was bad enough when people (often City big dogs at ‘Notting Hill kitchen suppers’) would ask ‘So, do you do anything, or are you just a mum?’ during my childbearing years. Now, however, the pandemic has induced such chronic poverty in conversation that I recall those thrilling exchanges about house prices and schools as if I’d been at the Algonquin Round Table and not some dull catered dinner at a hedge-funder’s ‘mansion’. What a difference a long lockdown makes, eh. Nobody has done anything or gone anywhere. All the craic has been about box sets… the time your Asos parcel went Awol… how you got a

Emily Hill

Hugs vs the hug-nots: where do you stand?

On Monday, the Prime Minister says, we can hug again. Personally, I never stopped, but then I’ve been corrupted by southerners, foreigners, posh boys and gorgeous homosexuals. In luvvie land (aka London and Twitter), there’s this perception that everyone is desperate to rush into one another’s arms because they’ve desisted for so long. In many places outside the M25, that idea is so nuts it’s comical. In Norfolk, where I was raised, most people meet with a nod and a grunt, and it is the height of good manners not to ‘look at anyone funny’ (in other words, we don’t make eye contact with strangers). If any outsider tries to

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

When will the economy recover to pre-pandemic levels?

New growth figures were released this morning show that the economy contracted 1.5 per cent in Q1 this year and remains 8.7 per cent smaller than it was in Q4 2019 (the last quarter not to be impacted by the pandemic). Alongside this update, the Office for National Statistics also released its latest set of monthly figures, which saw GDP rise by 2.1 per cent in March — the biggest boost since August last year — taking the economy to 5.9 per cent below pre-pandemic levels. That GDP fell by just 1.5 per cent overall once again illustrates the extent to which businesses have developed a resilience to lockdowns. The first

Tuesday

Robert Peston

Why a Covid public inquiry could prove useful for Boris

The Prime Minister said today there would be a ‘full proper public inquiry’ into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. This is highly significant, because a ‘full, proper public inquiry’ means one led by a judge and with witnesses represented by lawyers. I am also told – though Downing Street is refusing to comment on this – that the Cabinet will be asked by the Prime Minister to approve the terms of the inquiry on Wednesday morning, and there could be an announcement shortly afterwards. Such a public inquiry – like Leveson’s into hacking and Chilcot’s into the decision to go to war in Iraq – would take many years

Ross Clark

Were fears of a third wave overblown?

So, the third wave is officially no more. New modelling by SPI-M, the government’s committee on modelling for pandemics, has, at a stroke, eradicated the predicted surge in new infections, hospital admissions and deaths which it had pencilled in for the autumn or winter as a result of lockdown being eased.  Previous modelling published in April suggested that we could end up with 20,000 in hospital — higher than during the first peak last April. Now the third wave is looking less like the swell off Newquay during an Atlantic storm and a little more like a ripple on the Serpentine. The central predictions for the next peak in hospitalisations,

Brendan O’Neill

A 'cautious cuddle'? No thanks, Boris

There have been some truly dystopian spectacles during the past year-or-so of lockdowns. Cops using drones to spy on dog-walkers. Park benches sealed off with yellow tape. Curtain-twitchers dialling 999 after seeing the bloke next door go for a cheeky second jog. But this headline surely tops all of that: ‘Hugs will finally be legal again from next Monday.’ Read that again. We live in a country in which the government has accrued so much power that it now gets to tell us when we may hug each other. This should send a chill down the spines of all who care for liberty. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware

Thursday

Jay Bhattacharya

The case for sending vaccines to India

Hospitals in Delhi are openly pleading for supplies of medical oxygen, a commodity so scarce that it is now being sold on the black market for almost ten times the normal cost. Makeshift crematoria are being set up around the city to cope with the surge in the number of deaths. Richer countries are asking why India, with 20 million Covid cases now recorded, is so reluctant to lock down again. It is a good question. The answer lies in the disastrous effects of lockdown for so much of India’s population. Closing any society has serious consequences, but the results were always going to be worse in the developing world.

The Spectator

Data, not dates: there is no reason to delay a return to normal life

A slogan can come back to haunt you. For Boris Johnson, the words ‘data not dates’ sounded powerful at a time when Covid cases were high and hospitals full. The idea was that the government would be guided by scientific reason, would respond to the figures and would not let rigid targets dictate policy. Since the Prime Minister announced his roadmap at the end of February, however, ‘dates’ seem to have become far more important than ‘data’. How can he claim to be following the data when he will not budge from a timeline which now looks like it was designed for a different phase of the pandemic? Why were

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

‘I’ve seen the bare bones of London’: street painter Peter Brown interviewed

‘I’ve been seeing the bare bones of London,’ explains the landscape artist Peter Brown, who is known affectionately as ‘Pete the Street’. We meet on the corner of St Martin’s Lane, where he is painting the view facing north, taking in the Coliseum, the Duke of York theatre and an Iranian restaurant called Nutshell. ‘The pandemic has been a good opportunity to paint all these West End theatre awnings.’ What has he noticed about London during the pandemic? ‘UPS vans, everywhere,’ he says. How about Deliveroo bikes? ‘I’ve spotted less of those.’ Has London changed over the past year? ‘I met a bloke on Old Compton Street who described how

Monday

Kate Andrews

When will vaccines begin boosting the economy?

Britain may be about to go from one economic extreme to another. This winter the OECD calculated Britain suffered one of the highest levels of economic damage in the developed world, compared with the year before, due to its stringent lockdown. Fast forward to spring and the UK’s trajectory for economic recovery is now being revised, with forecasts only moving in one direction: up. Today alone, two heavy hitters boosted their predictions. This morning EY Item Club revised its 2021 growth forecast from 5 per cent to 6.8 per cent – which, if accurate, would see the UK grow at its fastest rate on record, recovering to pre-pandemic levels months earlier

Matthew Lynn

The EU will regret suing AstraZeneca

Well, that will teach them to go around manufacturing a vaccine against a global virus at cost price, and at record speed. The European Union has today said it is planning to take legal action against the pharmaceuticals conglomerate AstraZeneca for failing to deliver enough doses of the Oxford shot on time.  No doubt European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and her team are planning to be exonerated. They will finally be able to demonstrate that the whole vaccine debacle, for which the Commission has taken so much flak, and which has already caused thousands of unnecessary deaths across continent, was all the fault of the Anglo-Swedish company. No doubt the untrustworthy

Saturday

Patrick O’Flynn

Can Cummings really hurt Teflon Boris?

Seldom have so many keyboard warriors and political activists professed so much dissatisfaction towards the government of the day. For some left-wing bloggers and tweeters, the number one cause of outrage of the moment is so-called ‘Tory sleaze’, a subject to be added to an already formidably long list of gripes towards Boris Johnson that includes Brexit, the claim that Britain is not very racist and his alleged unforgivable bungling of the Covid crisis. On the right, there is now, if anything, an even wider array of issues igniting fury towards the Prime Minister. These range from the ongoing suspensions of normal civil liberties to an allegedly ‘ruinous’ green agenda; from

Friday

Alec Marsh

Spare a thought for introverts

How do you feel about 17 May, when the next major set of lockdown restrictions are due to be lifted in England? Are you looking forward to going out to dinner with friends inside an actual restaurant, or are you breathless with anticipation at the prospect of hosting your first, legal, dinner party for as long as you care to remember? Quite how you feel about any of the above will relate closely to how strongly you perceive yourself to be either an extrovert or an introvert. If you’re the former, then 17 May, followed by 21 June (when apparently lockdown will be ‘over’), will have you salivating with joy

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Boris should heed Blair's advice on the Covid vaccine data

We’ve known from the data from phase three trials that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines have good efficacy against symptomatic cases of Covid-19. The data also hinted at near 100 per cent efficacy against serious illness, although the limited numbers of participants made it hard to be sure.  This morning, however, comes real world data showing the vaccines have all but eliminated hospitalisations. According to figures obtained by the Daily Telegraph, 74,405 people were admitted to hospitals across the UK between September 2020 and March 2021. Of these, just 32 were people who had received a vaccine at least three weeks earlier. The figures don’t reveal whether or not there

Sunday

Philip Thomas

Need we fear a third wave after lockdown ends?

When Boris Johnson revealed his roadmap out of lockdown at the end of February he promised a ‘one way road to freedom.’ Since then, it has seemed that instead of freedom we may end up with continued social distancing, perhaps Covid passports and mandatory mask-wearing. The justification offered is that the virus might come back. But does the data back up this pessimism? I’m an academic at Bristol University and have developed the Predictor Corrector Coronavirus Filter (known as PCCF) model, updated daily on The Spectator’s data hub. It confirms that we can safely return to the ‘old normal’ on 21 June with no need for extra measures. It predicts that