Fraser Nelson

Throughout the various Covid meetings, Sir Patrick Vallance was scribbling in his notebook almost as much as Michael Gove, leading Boris Johnson to assume that he was keeping a diary to be published afterwards. This made sense to Johnson who started to tell friends that Vallance knew ‘more about arse-covering than face-covering’ (Vallance had refused throughout the crisis to say whether the policy of police-enforced mask mandates had any basis in science). Now, we see some scribbles in Vallace’s diary via the Covid inquiry: not very illuminating and some expected insults about those who questioned lockdown. But there is one point that I’d like to take issue with. Vallance says that science was given too much weigh over economics. ‘The science was there for everyone to see.

Humza Yousaf is one of the most prominent Muslims in public life. This is tangential to his being elected SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland, but has handed him an unexpected role during the recent Israel-Gaza crisis. It's one that he is taking seriously and, in my view, discharging well. Yousaf doesn’t discuss his faith often – few leaders do – but he takes it seriously and released a picture of himself praying with his family in Bute House on his first day in the job. At a time when politicians tend to cover up their faith, it was quite a move – he was saying (as his rival Kate Forbes has said) that faith does have a role in public discourse and politicians are allowed to 'do God'.

The triviality-obsessed Covid Inquiry has today been having fun with Dominic Cummings’s emails and finding rude words he used about colleagues. Trying to draw anything substantial from this is hard but one line did jump out at me: Boris Johnson saying ‘I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff’. The inquiry should be asking: was he right?  It was October 2020. The Prime Minister messaged Lee Cain, his press chief, to talk about Covid deaths: I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82-81 for men and 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get COVID and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive.

Does it matter if the chief scientific adviser referred to Rishi Sunak as ‘Dr Death’ In a private message to a Sage adviser during lockdown? This embarrassing fact came out last week in the Covid inquiry, an apparent reference to his Eat Out to Help Out scheme. Some have argued that publishing this comment, made in a private WhatsApp message, serves to embarrass Professor Dame Angela McLean and not much else. I’d argue that it exposes one of the most important facets of the pandemic: the psychological effect on those at the top at a time of great pressure. And how this led to tribalism and an environment where facts, data and science took second place to the desire to trounce lockdown sceptics. The Dr Death comment shows that this set in not just among the politicians.

One of Britain’s best-known cartoonists, Steve Bell, says he has been ‘effectively sacked’ by the Guardian after drawing Benjamin Netanyahu. It wasn’t published, but he released it on Twitter (above). It depicts Netanyahu operating on his own stomach, showing a cut in the outline of the Gaza Strip. Bell then used Twitter to say what happened next: Losing him over this cartoon was a mistake and sets a dangerously low bar for what counts as unacceptable satire I filed this cartoon around 11 a.m., possibly my earliest ever. Four hours later, on a train to Liverpool I received an ominous phone call from the desk with the strangely cryptic message ‘pound of flesh...