Steerpike

The antics of Scottish Covid advisor Devi Sridhar have been one of the few bright spots throughout the pandemic. During the last fifteen months, Sridhar has become something of a pin-up girl to the SNP's online army of so-called 'cybernats.' This has been due to her repeated jibes at the Westminster government, her demands for more power which Holyrood already had and her effusive praise for First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s ‘wise words’ and ‘strong leadership’. Not to mention of course her suggestion that an independent Scotland would have done better against Covid. More seriously, Sridhar has also been accused of spreading misinformation about the Oxford vaccine.

Tensions between Westminster and the devolved parliaments have been a constant feature of the Covid pandemic. Up in Edinburgh, the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has made full use of the crisis – hinting constantly at closing the English border and peppering her daily press conferences with pointed jibes at London.  Such actions are of course merely in keeping with the SNP's penchant for power grabs and undermining the Union. In April the party's Holyrood manifesto included a section grandly titled 'global affairs' boasting about their plans to engage with the 'Scottish diaspora' and the establishment of a 'Scottish Council for Global Affairs.' Foreign policy is, of course, a reserved power for Westminster.

It may be recess but diplomacy does not stop. Last week Boris Johnson welcomed one of the main Belarusian opposition leaders Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to Downing Street to show his support for the cause.  According to a No. 10 readout of the meeting, the Prime Minister claimed that the British people shared with Belarusians 'fundamental values such as a belief in democracy, human rights and rule of law' and that the UK “stands in solidarity of the people of Belarus and will continue to take action to support them.' Johnson subsequently met this rhetoric with actions yesterday when the UK introduced trade, financial and aviation sanctions on the Lukashenko regime in response to its continued undermining of democracy and human rights violations.

Shame, opprobrium and multiple select committee grillings – was the disgrace of Greensill worth it for David Cameron? The answer would now appear to be yes, judging from documents obtained by the BBC ahead of a Panorama special programme tonight on the story of the company's collapse. According to the Beeb, Cameron made about £7 million from the finance company prior to its collapse in March of this year. Documents indicate the Old Etonian received £3.25 million after cashing in Greensill shares in 2019 with details being revealed in a letter from the business to the onetime Tory leader. The letter suggests Cameron was going to be paid £3.3 million after tax for a tranche of his Greensill shares.

Last week Mr S reported that – following months of deliberation – the BBC had (finally) decided to uphold a complaint about a controversial blog post written by its LGBT correspondent Ben Hunte. The case in question concerned a court verdict in December in which senior judges ruled against children being given access to drugs that would allow them to transition genders. A lengthy piece by Hunte claimed that the High Court Keira Bell verdict on puberty-blocking drugs could cause young people considering transition to take their own lives. The BBC has now admitted that this piece was one-sided, risked endangering vulnerable people and did not meet the Corporation's guidelines on reporting suicides.

This week, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which sets the UK’s vaccine policies, recommended that 16 and 17-year-olds be offered the Pfizer vaccine – leading to speculation that the jab could soon be offered to even younger age groups. Speaking at a press conference on the issue yesterday, the deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, said his sense was that it is ‘more likely rather than less likely’ that the list of children eligible for the vaccine would broaden. It’s an interesting development given that just a fortnight ago the JCVI recommended against vaccinating over-12s unless they were particularly vulnerable to the disease.

At the beginning of the year Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was forced to hastily cancel a diplomatic trip to Europe, reportedly after top EU officials refused to meet with him following the storming of the US Capitol building. In the aftermath of the event, Luxembourg’s foreign minister suggested that Trump was a ‘political pyromaniac’ and Pompeo soon found that the United States was no longer a welcome presence in the hallowed halls of Brussels. If that was how the European Union admonished America – arguably the most important democracy in the world – one can only imagine the treatment it planned to dole out to the world’s tyrants and dictators this year.

Sir Ed Davey has called on the government to ‘keep the British taxpayer out of’ the Sizewell C nuclear plant, arguing that a part nationalisation of the project would ‘be a total betrayal of taxpayers and cost every household in Britain a small fortune’. Ministers are reportedly considering plans to strip the Chinese state-owned energy firm CGN of its 20 per cent stake, bringing the costs onto the Exchequer’s books. Mr S is pleased to see the Liberal Democrat leader stand as a lone voice for fiscal prudence — particularly because he hasn’t always been opposed to cripplingly costly nuclear deals. Between 2012 and 2015, Davey served as secretary of state for energy in the coalition government.