Steerpike

Labour have been taking a cheeky pop at the PM's father today in the Guardian over new coronavirus regulations coming into force later this month. Under the guidelines from 29 March, people will be allowed to leave the UK to prepare a second home for sale or rent as part of a list of specific 'reasonable excuses to travel' outside the country. Andrew Gwynne has dubbed this the 'Stanley Johnson clause' in a reference to the latter allegedly breaking Covid guidelines by travelling to his Greek villa to make it 'Covid-proof.

Things got a little heated in the House of Commons last night after defence secretary Ben Wallace gave short shrift to fellow Tory MP and ex Royal Anglian Regiment reservist Lieutenant Mark Francois. All hell broke loose after a war of words over the Ministry of Defence (MoD) budget blackhole. Scot’s Guard’s own Captain Wallace pointed out that criticism lobbed from the backbenches about defence procurement would carry a little more weight if the honourable critics had themselves not been former defence ministers overseeing the deficit of which they complained. Lieutenant Francois was particularly aggrieved, demanding corrections to the record and apologies galore.

It has not been a great nine weeks for the European Union. Readers both inside and outside the supranational bloc will have been horrified at the dithering, disinformation and mixed messages of the commission and its national leaders, now considering an export ban to stop vaccine orders to the UK being honoured. The French position on the Oxford jab for instance has gone from banning it, to allowing it for just those under the age of 65, to allowing it for all, to banning it and now allowing it only for those over 55. Polling now shows 61 per cent of people in that country think the AstraZeneca vaccine is unsafe.  It all seems to have been rather too much for some of Britain's most prominent remainers.

The BBC is attempting today to break out of its London-centric mindset. The new Director General Tim Davie told BBC staff in a call this morning that the corporation will move 400 jobs out of the capital, and promised to make programmes that are more relevant to people who live outside the M25. Mr S wonders though if simply sending BBC staff up north will be enough, if BBC Breakfast (which broadcasts from Salford) was anything to go by this morning. On the show, housing secretary Robert Jenrick was interviewed by BBC presenters, who ended the segment by sniggering at the minister’s Union Jack in the background of his office and his portrait of the Queen on the wall: https://twitter.com/wallaceme/status/1372521185792167937?

This week’s Spectator looks at the role Sir Keir Starmer has played in granting the government extraordinary emergency powers to deal with the rise of Covid. The Labour leader appears happy to maintain such restrictions on the right to protest and even tried to bolster his credentials on law and order by backing under fire Met Commissioner Cressida Dick. But Mr S has done some digging in the archives and it shows Sir Keir was not always such a fan of the police. His works from the 1980s and 1990s prior to taking silk as a QC show a strong libertarian-left streak and a disdain for authoritarian justice and a strong executive. Tony Blair might now be advising his successor but Starmer was not always so receptive to New Labour’s views on law and order.

Few government agencies have had a worse pandemic than Public Health England (PHE) whose mission is ‘to protect and improve the nation’s health and to address inequalities.’ Criticisms levelled at PHE over the past 12 months include failing to expand diagnostic testing and contact tracing, discouraging the use of face masks, failing to share infection data with local authorities and overcounting the number of Covid deaths in England. It has also been slated for focusing too much on lifestyle choices at the expense of properly preparing for a pandemic. In 2018/19, some £220 million of the public health budget was spent on anti-obesity schemes – more than twice the budget for infectious diseases.