The Spectator

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Tiers, Scotch eggs and a devastated high street

Home The Commons voted by 291 votes to 78 for new coronavirus regulations putting 55 million people in England into the restrictive Tier 3 or the little less restrictive Tier 2, apart from the 700,000 or so folk of Cornwall, the Isle of Wight and the Scilly Isles. There were 55 Tory rebels, whom the government had attempted to placate by publishing a 48-page dossier, generally regarded as thin stuff. There would, they were also assured, be a review on 16 December of the areas put into tiers. ‘We do want to be as granular as possible,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told the Commons encouragingly. Labour let the regulations go through by abstaining, though 15 Labour MPs voted against. Wales prohibited pubs from selling strong drink and made them close at 6 p.m.

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Letters: Labour’s left vs left struggle

Left vs left Sir: Your leading article (‘Comfort spending’, 28 November) makes the classic mistake about modern politics which prevents so many from grasping what is going on. You refer to Sir Keir Starmer as the leader of a battle against Labour’s left by its ‘centre’. Since Neil Kinnock’s pantomime battle with Militant in 1985, political journalists have been beguiled by a fantasy. They think that Labour leaders who attack villainous leftist factions do so in the cause of moderation. But this is in fact a battle by the sophisticated left — of post-1968 cultural revolutionaries — against the crude and embarrassing steam-powered left of Militant or Jeremy Corbyn. Each thinks the other is the wrong kind of socialist.

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What are the best pandemic board games?

Dangerous games Sage scientists advised against playing board games at Christmas. Some games to consider if you are feeling subversive:Pandemic Co-operative board game inspired by 2003 Sars outbreak in which players pool their talents to defeat a deadly disease. Was stocked by the unlikely gift shop at the US Centers for Disease Control.Corona Battle Against Covid-19 German game where players battle to defend their businesses against the pandemic.Plague Inc. Players compete as diseases to infect the greatest number of people.Viral Players compete to try to infect a human body, braving its immune system.Infected One person plays plague doctor, while the others are villagers competing to try to stop him infecting the village.

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2483: In my soup – solution

Unclued lights are anagrams of animals: PRAENOMINA (1A: Pomeranian), MARTIAN (18: tamarin), LARBOARD (21: Labrador), SHORE (28: horse), PROTEIN (42: pointer), MACLE (6: camel), MENTALISM (24: Simmental), LATER (25: ratel), CREMATE (31: meercat) and MAGYAR (34: margay). The title suggests the song ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’. First prize A.R. Wightman, Harpenden, HertsRunners-up Roderick Rhodes, Goldsborough, N. Yorks; G.H.

Tuesday

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Full list: the Tory tier rebels

This evening, the House of Commons voted to enact the new tiered system, which will come into force when the national lockdown ends this week. Boris Johnson did not emerge unscathed though, with 78 MPs voting against his proposals, including 55 MPs from his own party. Labour leader Keir Starmer instructed his MPs to abstain on the vote, but 15 decided to vote against the government's plans.

Thursday

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The Conservatives are losing the fiscal high ground

Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures that Rishi Sunak laid out in his spending review this week boggle the mind. He has been Chancellor barely ten months, yet has already borrowed more than Gordon Brown did in ten years. The upshot of his Commons statement this week is that Sunak will carry on spending money as fast as the Bank of England can print it. But as he knows, debt bubbles have a habit of bursting. The response to this crisis may sow the seeds of the next one. It’s a point which Sunak has a hard time making in Downing Street, let alone with his party. The Prime Minister likes to use the language of low taxes, economic dynamism and fast recoveries.

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Portrait of the week: Christmas is on, Trump is off and Piglet stars on a 50p piece

Home The AstraZeneca vaccine developed by the University of Oxford was found to be 70 per cent effective — 90 per cent among those given a half-sized first dose and a full-sized second dose. It does not require supercooling. The United Kingdom had ordered 100 million doses. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 22 November, total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive for the coronavirus) had stood at 54,626 including 2,860 in the past week, compared with 2,878 the week before. The proportion of secondary school pupils absent for reasons connected to Covid-19 rose to 22 per cent. Travellers from abroad would from 15 December be allowed to pay for a coronavirus test after five days’ quarantine and be let out if it proved negative.

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Letters: Solidarity is the best thing for Scotland

SNP sophistry Sir: Andrew Wilson (‘Scot free’, 21 November) poses the question: ‘What if the case for independence was a highly sophisticated position?’ If only. For the SNP position is one of sophistry rather than sophistication. Wilson states that Scottish voters want Scotland to return to Europe. He also states that an independent Scotland would retain sterling, but does not mention the two policies are incompatible. It would be impossible for an independent Scotland to join the EU using sterling.

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Which countries are most sceptical about vaccines?

Gloss over Should we be worried that the head of research into respiratory drugs at AstraZeneca is called Dr Pangalos, given that his near namesake, Dr Pangloss, is a byword for foolish optimism? Dr Pangloss was tutor to Candide in Voltaire’s satire on Gottfried Leibniz’s work on theodicy: the attempt to reconcile why a benevolent and all-powerful God should allow evil, tragedy — or a pandemic — to exist. Dr Pangloss’s favourite phrase, ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, encapsulates Leibniz’s belief that the Earth, for all its apparent faults, was the best that God could possibly have created.

Thursday

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Portrait of the week: Cummings goes, Corbyn returns and pigeon sells for £1.4m

Home Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, left Downing Street after a week in which the public learnt that Lee Cain was the director of communications at No. 10, and that he had resigned after his appointment as chief of staff was withdrawn. The imbroglio directed focus on the performance of the Prime Minister and gave an opportunity for politicians to air their grievances. Mr Johnson then went into 14 days of quarantine, having been contacted by the national Test and Trace system after breakfasting with Covid-ridden Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield. Mr Johnson’s own Covid test proved negative. He had intended to set out his ‘personal ambition’ for the country (such as making it carbon neutral by 2050).

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What does it mean to be ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’?

Boris and the butcher’s dog Who first coined the phrase ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’? It has been traced to Lancashire. It is not the only quality attached to butcher’s dogs, however — such animals were perhaps widely observed as a result of customers having to entertain themselves somehow while the butcher prepared their cuts, and a dog gave them something to watch. A variant has someone as ‘happy as a butcher’s dog’. John Ray, in his collection of English proverbs from 1670, describes the expression ‘as surly as a butcher’s dog’.

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Letters: The limitations of a Covid vaccine

Still distant Sir: In James Forsyth’s analysis (‘Boris’s booster shot’, 14 November) he infers that a vaccine, if provided to the majority of the UK population, would deliver herd immunity from Covid-19, noting that ‘it seems increasingly probable that by the second half of next year, we will be emerging from this Covid nightmare’. I pray that he is right, though fear he may not be. In a recent Lancet editorial the view expressed was the exact opposite, as it notes that any vaccines are ‘unlikely’ to prevent transmission, though will reduce the severity of symptoms and likelihood of death.

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Denial is not a strategy, Prime Minister

The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and even family visits. A million jobs have gone since the first lockdown, with at least a million more to follow when the furlough money runs out. Children’s education was so badly set back by school closures that there are calls to cancel summer exams because pupils won’t be ready. Millions are facing financial ruin. A country looks to its Prime Minister for leadership. Yet the big announcement, made on the eve of the Brexit deal Boris Johnson was elected to deliver, is that he will ban the sale of new petrol cars by the end of the decade and hybrids five years later.

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2481: Octet solution

The octet associated with CHERRY STONES (19) is: tinker (1A), tailor (40), soldier (20), sailor (15), rich man (6A), poor man (23), beggar man (1D), thief (32). First prize Anthony Briggs, Brinkworth, WiltsRunners-up Donald Bain, Edinburgh; G.R.

Thursday

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Portrait of the week: Vaccine hopes up, Zoom shares down and Biden calls Boris

Home Pfizer and BioNTech announced a vaccine against Covid-19 of 90 per cent efficacy from two injections three weeks apart. It was not known if it prevented transmission of the virus. The vaccine has to be stored at an ultra-low temperature of minus 80˚C. In July, the British government had bought 40 million doses, enough for a third of the population, with ten million available by the end of the year (along with access to five other vaccine candidates, totalling 340 million doses in all). The army and police planned vaccination centres. Shares in air transport went up; shares in Zoom went down. Asked whether we could say with confidence that life should be returning to normal by spring, Sir John Bell, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, said: ‘Yes, yes, yes.

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Open and shut case: how did lockdown affect shops?

Shot in the arm Global stock markets reached a new high after pharmaceutical firm Pfizer announced a vaccine it is developing has been found to be 90 per cent effective. What have been the best- and worst-performing FTSE 100 shares over the past 12 months? BEST Scot. Mortgage Investment Trust | +109% Ocado | +94% Fresnillo (gold production) | +86% Flutter Entertainment | +75% Polymetal | +51% WORST Rolls-Royce | -74% Int. Consolidated Airlines | -71% BP | -61% Shell (B shares) | -58% Lloyds Bank | -52% Pharma’s life Who was Mr Pfizer? Charles Pfizer set up a factory with his cousin Charles Erhart in Brooklyn in 1849, initially to produce the drug santonin, used to purge the intestinal tract of parasitic worms.

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Letters: Why lockdown II was necessary

Cancelled procedures Sir: Your leader (‘A lockdown too far’, 7 November) suggests that the Prime Minister should have shown ‘leadership’ and ignored Sage’s call for a second national lockdown. Sam Carlisle (‘No respite’, 7 November) illustrates why this would have been a mistake. Sam reminds us that ‘half of community paediatricians were deployed to acute services’ during the pandemic’s first wave. Many other specialists were similarly redeployed. That the NHS was not overwhelmed in the first wave was precisely because most routine work stopped and staff were redeployed en masse to treat Covid-19 patients. Leaving projections aside, there were in fact 13,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital on Sunday 8 November.

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Boris won’t be forgiven if his No. 10 chaos makes him cave on Brexit

Mayhem has once again engulfed 10 Downing Street with the dramatic resignation of Lee Cain, Boris Johnson's communications chief. He was with the Prime Minister on the Vote Leave campaign — as had Dominic Cummings, Oliver Lewis and others who have formed a band of brothers in No. 10. Cain's departure put a question mark over the future of the others, which comes at an odd time because the Brexit they all campaigned for is weeks away from a conclusion. There are huge issues facing the government: a second lockdown, due to end on 2 December. The procurement and rollout of a potential vaccine. But another deadline, just weeks away, is Brexit. This is the mission Johnson was elected to accomplish, this is the drama that has defined British politics for the past five years.