Steerpike

The Newsnight team were rapped on the knuckles by the BBC yesterday, after presenter Emily Maitlis opened Tuesday's show with a monologue saying Dominic Cummings had broken the rules with his lockdown trip to Durham. The corporation ruled that the introduction ‘did not meet our standards of due impartiality'. Safe to say, those working on Newsnight were not happy with the BBC’s reprimand. In response Maitlis ducked out of presenting the show last night, while policy editor Lewis Goodall sent tweets praising the ‘world class presenter’ and reiterating his support for the programme. So you can imagine Goodall’s delight this afternoon when it was reported that Durham police had concluded that Cummings had broken the lockdown rules.

Today, Boris Johnson was grilled by MPs on the Liaison committee, which is made up of select committee chairs. The Prime Minister was asked about a range of topics in the marathon session, including about his adviser Dominic Cummings’s trip to Durham during lockdown. But while the Prime Minister seemed to survive arguably the trickiest part of the session involving Cummings – after MPs mainly used the opportunity to grandstand, rather than ask probing questions – Boris seemed to struggle when asked about female participation in his top team. Former Home Office minister Caroline Nokes began by asking the Prime Minister about his comment that ‘enough’ women were involved in the decision-making process during the coronavirus crisis.

Dominic Cummings doesn't have a huge number of supporters in the newspapers this morning, but Michael Gove is doing his best to defend the PM's chief aide. Asked by LBC's Nick Ferrari whether he would, like Cummings, go on a sixty-mile trip to test his eyesight, Gove suggested he would do, before abruptly changing tack: Gove: 'I have on occasions in the past driven with my wife in order to make sure I...what's the right way of putting it?' Ferrari: 'I'm staggered. I don't know how you're going to get out of this but it's going to be fun.' Gove: 'I think people who know me would know I'm not an authority on driving...' Ferrari: 'I merely asked you whether you'd been on a sixty-mile round trip to test your eyesight and you said you had. I mean, why not go to Specsavers?

It's become a common sight to see SNP politicians complaining about journalistic bias against them. Just last week the BBC's Sarah Smith was in the firing line for suggesting Nicola Sturgeon was 'enjoying the opportunity' to set lockdown policy in Scotland different to the rest of the United Kingdom. However, Mr S wonders if the latest STV offering may be more to their taste. This afternoon STV released a video of children thanking the First Minister for keeping them safe. In the somewhat bizarre video, various young children are filming taking part in a joint message of thanks set to soft piano music: The children of Scotland would like to say thank you - to Nicola, our First Minister of Scotland. We are so grateful. Thank you for always keeping us safe.

As a former shadow education minister, you would expect Angela Rayner to be keeping a close eye on the scientific advice about when schools should begin to reopen. The government currently plans to reopen schools for some pupils on 1 June – a decision which has provoked the ire of several teaching unions, who say it is not yet safe for staff members or children. Which perhaps explains why this morning the deputy leader of the Labour party went on the attack, and tweeted out an article by the Times Educational Supplement, pointing out that: ‘SAGE concludes June 1st “too soon” to open schools. Teacher unions have been absolutely correct in asking for safety measures to be in place before re-opening.

As scientists around the world race to find a cure, treatment or vaccine for Covid-19, the US president Donald Trump revealed that he had been doing his bit of medical experimentation this week. At a press conference last night the President revealed that he had been taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine every day for a week and a half, to ward off the virus. Trump said that ‘a lot of good things had come out about’ the drug, that frontline workers were using it, and that there was no harm in taking it, even if it didn’t stop the disease. Hydroxychloroquine has been touted as a potential treatment for Covid-19 after French studies seemed to show that it inhibited the infection of cells.

Nothing causes Whitehall headaches like a government IT project. Remember the Ministry of Defence digital upgrade back in the 2000s? MoD officials originally told MPs that the software roll-out would cost an eye-watering £2.3 billion. The upgrade, which suffered multiple delays, eventually ended up costing the taxpayer somewhere north of £7 billion. Or cast your mind back to the NHS's national programme for IT, a £10 billion flop that was scrapped after the public accounts committee blasted the project, saying that 'the biggest IT project in the world' had become 'the biggest disaster'. The history of Westminster web projects is littered with costly mistakes.

Boris Johnson continues to enjoy healthy ratings in the polls but not all of the Prime Minister's Tory colleagues are pleased with his performance. Conservative backbencher Peter Bone has just taken a pop at Boris in the virtual Commons, slating the PM for revealing his lockdown plan on television on Sunday night rather than in front of MPs:  'The television presentation by the Prime Minister was plain wrong. Too many of the Prime Minister's special advisers and aides think they are running a presidential government. That the Prime Minister goes on television and announces all sorts of executive orders without any reference to parliament. Many of them have clearly been watching too many episodes of West Wing'. https://twitter.com/petesaull/status/1260235765189091328?