James Forsyth

Spare a thought for those due to sit their A-Levels next summer. They have already had considerable disruption to their education. But today’s announcement that this year’s A-Level grades will be done by teacher assessment risks compounding their misfortune.  It means that the current lower sixth will be competing for university places — and jobs — against those who have received teacher assessed grades, which are bound to be more generous than those that an exam would produce. (For all sorts of understandable reasons, teachers will want to give their pupils the benefit of the doubt when awarding potentially life-changing marks). The disadvantage the current lower sixth cohort is being put at is so obvious that the government will have to address it.

Tory MP’s reaction to the lockdown easing plan is a mixed bag. In general, they would have preferred a quicker timetable. But, as I say in the magazine this week, there is also relief that Johnson has explicitly ruled out going for a zero-Covid strategy and that there is an end date for all restrictions. A big fear on the Tory benches was that unless a date was set, restrictions could drag on for years in the way that rationing did after the second world war.  If the data on vaccine take-up and efficacy continues to beat the government’s models, there will be some very impatient Tory MPs One senior Conservative backbencher from the more libertarian wing of the party observes that the plan ‘could have been worse’.

‘Alas’ is a word used many times by Boris Johnson during the pandemic. It is how he prefaces announcements that the data is getting worse and so the government has to impose further restrictions. In recent weeks, though, the numbers have been going in the right direction. The first stage of the vaccination programme was completed two days ahead of schedule. For the first time in this crisis, government targets are being moved forward, not back. Early results seem to show that the jabs are more effective than expected: a Public Health Scotland study suggests that the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine, the workhorse of the UK immunisation programme, cuts the risk of hospitalisation by 94 per cent. At the same time, take-up has been higher than predicted.

Several of Tony Blair’s ideas have found their way into the government’s Covid policy, most notably the policy of prioritising first doses. The end of Boris Johnson’s statement today owed a lot to Blair. Johnson cast himself as charting a middle course between those who think the government’s plan is too ambitious and those who want restrictions eased faster. It was classic Blairite triangulation. The road map is an interesting document. It is initially cautious and the decision to put five weeks between easing measures means that we won’t be able to sit inside a pub until 17 May, a long way from the idea that things would be heading back to normal by the Easter weekend. But at the end of the plan, the step up in freedoms is dramatic.

The vaccine news today is good, and better than would have been expected even a month ago. The Public Health Scotland data indicating that four weeks after the first dose of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine there is a 94 per cent reduction in the risk of hospitalisation is phenomenal (the figure for Pfizer/BioNTech is 85 per cent). It suggests that the vaccines should deliver on the ‘protect the NHS’ part of the government’s strategy. This will lead to more Tory pressure on Boris Johnson for a faster easing of lockdown. The argument will go that given the data is better than expected, the pace of lockdown easing should be sped up.