Boris johnson

Thursday

Robert Peston

The truth about me and Dominic Cummings

It is such a relief that Dominic Cummings has gone. Not for the sake of the country or the government — you can make your own mind up about that. No, no, I’m talking about me. Over the past year or so, the abuse I’ve received on Twitter and Facebook for reporting anything perceived to have originated anywhere near Cummings has been wearing. I’ve never endorsed anything he said or did. That’s not my job, as you well know. My job is to tell you the thoughts, plans, hopes and dreams of the most powerful member of the government (which he was for a period last autumn). Sometimes that was

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Inside the court of Carrie Symonds, princess of whales

Carrie Symonds, the Prime Minister’s fiancée, ‘gets’ the media. That’s what her friends are quick to tell you. She’s a PR professional. If she doesn’t like the thrust of a story, she lets you know. She contacts journalists to tell them how ‘disappointed’ she is in their sloppy work. And she doesn’t seem all that scared of senior newspaper editors, perhaps because her father co-founded the Independent. It’s said she even thinks she can ‘edit what goes in the Mail on Sunday’. When the Times ran a silly piece suggesting she had ‘grown weary’ of Dilyn, her rescue dog, and that the poor creature was facing a ‘reshuffle’, she is

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris in a spin: can the PM find his way again?

Something strange is going on in Westminster: nearly every minister and Tory MP has a spring in their step. It’s not (just) the vaccine breakthrough, or the magic money tree now bearing such fruit in the back garden of HM Treasury. The liberation-of-Paris feel in locked-down Westminster is inspired by the departure of Boris Johnson’s senior Vote Leave aides, Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain. Tories of all stripes seem to think they will now get what they want. When the news broke that the pair were to leave Downing Street with immediate effect — following a power tussle with the Prime Minister’s partner Carrie Symonds and new press spokeswoman Allegra

James Forsyth James Forsyth

More devolution in England could save the Union

Tory MPs are already starting to talk about May’s various elections. Boris Johnson’s first post-Covid electoral test will take place on 6 May and will show the durability — or otherwise — of his 2019 electoral coalition now that Brexit is ‘done’ and Jeremy Corbyn is gone. Can the Tories hold on to the much-prized Teesside and West Midlands mayoralties? If the answer is yes, the party will feel it can face the future with confidence. If not, it will start to panic. But the most significant result of the night will be the most predictable one: a Scottish National party victory in Holyrood. The SNP is currently polling comfortably,

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The fatal flaw in Boris’s ten point carbon plan

There is nothing wrong with the general direction of policy contained within the government’s ten point plan to cut carbon emissions, announced today. Who doesn’t want clean energy and more energy-efficient homes and vehicles? The problem is the perverse target which lies at its heart: the legally-binding demand, laid down in the Climate Change Act, to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. This is so badly defined that the government’s ten point plan becomes really little more than a manifesto to export much of British industry, food production and power generation. The UK’s definition of carbon emissions, as used in the Climate Change Act, covers only ‘territorial’ emissions

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Boris’s eco-optimism will get the better of him

Vote blue for green jobs in the red wall. That’s the message we’re supposed to take from Boris Johnson’s ten point plan for reaching zero carbon emissions. The launch follows some shallow Westminster chatter about how this stuff relates to the departure of Dominic Cummings, chatter which somehow overlooks the fact that said departure has made precisely no difference to what’s being announced. Do the Tories new voters in red wall seats care about eliminating carbon emissions? My think tank, the Social Market Foundation, has been investigating this question. For what it’s worth, our polling and focus groups don’t find much regional variation in attitudes here: broadly speaking, voters are quite positive about

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Blundering Boris will regret insulting Scotland

Every so often I make the mistake of thinking Boris Johnson must have exhausted his capacity for indolent carelessness and each time I do he pops up to remind me not to count him out. There are always fresh depths to which he may sink. For he is a Prime Minister who knows little and cares less that he knows so little. In happy times of placid prosperity this might be inconvenient but tolerable; these are not such times. Speaking to his northern English MPs last night, Johnson declared that devolution has been ‘a disaster north of the border’ and was the biggest mistake Tony Blair ever made. The implication,

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Boris was right: Scottish devolution has been a disaster

Boris Johnson says devolution has been a ‘disaster’. This has the rare quality for a Boris statement of being true but he, or rather the Scottish Tories, will be made to pay a political price for it. Barely had the contents of the Prime Minister’s remarks in a Zoom chat with northern MPs been reported than Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was at the Twitter barricades: Far from subduing the forces of nationalism, devolution built the separatists their own command centre at the foot of the Royal Mile The division of labour here is this: Boris is right intellectually, Ross is right politically. Devolution has been a disaster. We know

Monday

Nick Tyrone

A (partial) defence of Dominic Cummings

As a liberal remainer type, I’m not sad to see Dominic Cummings leave Number 10. I fundamentally disagreed with his agenda, from Brexit to civil service reform to a more active state aid programme. Yet I cannot chime in with those saying Cummings was a failure, an ad man who blustered his way into the heart of government due to Boris Johnson’s weakmindedness. Why? Because it simply isn’t true. And those Labour supporters who are speaking of Cummings’ exit as one of the few highlights of this dismal year have revealed an uncomfortable truth: they wish they had someone like him on their side. This is nowhere clearer than in the criticism

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Boris set to unveil ‘ten point plan’ for a green industrial revolution

Boris Johnson wants to use this week to relaunch his leadership after a torrid few days in his top team. Downing Street says tonight that the Prime Minister will ‘will make a series of critical announcements over the next couple of weeks that will be a clear signal of his ongoing ambitions for the United Kingdom’. When plans to underline how serious the Prime Minister is about the future are announced like this, you know things are fraught. Things will presumably be no less fraught when Johnson, who is now self-isolating after coming into contact with a fellow MP who has since tested positive for Covid, holds a meeting with

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Does Boris have a supporters’ club left in parliament?

Boris Johnson needs to use the departure of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain to repair relations with his parliamentary party. That is very clear, and the problems have been brewing for months. What is less clear is how much of a group of naturally loyal MPs, who have the same political instincts as the Prime Minister, remains. Johnson is a strange combination of charismatic communicator and loner. Many who have known and worked alongside him for years say they still don’t see themselves as his close friends and find it hard to identify a cogent social group around the Prime Minister. His lieutenants had to work hard to build a

Thursday

James Forsyth

Cummings set to leave No. 10 by Christmas

Dominic Cummings will leave Downing Street at the end of this year, the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg is reporting. Cummings is one of those rare individuals who has bent the arc of history. He has been crucial, if not indispensable, to several key moments in this country’s recent past. His work at Business for Sterling is one of the things that put Tony Blair off attempting to take the UK into the Euro. Even more importantly, it is hard to believe that Leave would have won the 2016 referendum without the brilliant, heterodox campaign that Cummings devised. Cummings has long been more interested in how government works The victory

The Spectator

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,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will the government be left suffering from ‘long Covid’?

The first full week of the new national lockdown had the potential to be very difficult for Boris Johnson. Although just 34 Tory MPs voted against this England-wide measure, many more are unhappy about it. They have, as Tory MPs now do when they come across things they dislike, set up a group with a three-letter abbreviation: in this case, the CRG (Covid Recovery Group), which will oppose further lockdowns. Adding to the discontent among backbenchers, No. 10 had just U-turned on extending free school meals into the holidays. Tory MPs were left wondering why — as with exam result appeals — they had bothered taking so much flak from

Bruce Anderson

Drinking to the glories of Burns and follies of Boris

At least in London, midwinter spring has not been entirely vanquished, and the trees are still a couple of strong winds away from losing their autumn glory. This will give the government some undeserved help. People can sit outside, and the view from windows is not too depressing. Before long, though, those indoors are likely be cursing the PM and his close associates: ‘sic a parcel of rogues in a nation’. Burns and the onset of seasonal bleakness makes one think of the dark. In earlier times in Scotland, Hallowe’en was a characteristic festivity: an attempt to embrace the oncoming winter. Its theme was ghouls and witchcraft. Children, dressed as

Saturday

Kate Andrews

What will Boris make of a Biden win?

President Donald Trump sees himself as a great friend to the UK: he backed Brexit, likes Boris, and has personal ties to Britain as well. He’s proud of his Scottish heritage, and long before he was running the nation, he was running golf courses in his mother’s home country. But it’s not obvious the UK government always appreciates the President’s expressions of support. The Johnson team made nothing of Trump’s endorsement for the Tory candidate during the 2019 general election. The government is notably squeamish whenever the President lavishes his praises. Perhaps this comes down to cultural differences, but it’s hard to overlook out the nervousness that accompanies a statement from

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Alas, ‘alas’ is losing its irony

Boris Johnson looked unhappy, as well he might, standing at his indoor lectern last Saturday to announce the new lockdown: ‘In this country, alas, as across much of Europe, the virus is spreading.’ He said alas a couple more times during the conference. Normally such a word belongs to the sprinkling of slightly absurd phrases that garnish his speech like particularly curly parsley. But, Ichabod, the fun has departed. Alas, there is less and less irony in saying alas. The Prime Minister is doubtless aware of the classical origin of alas in lassitudo, Latin for weariness. Lassitude came into English in the 16th century. Francis Bacon, the Jacobean Lord Chancellor,

The Spectator

Whatever the science of this lockdown, the execution has been a disgrace

The benefit of having a lockdown announced some days in advance is the ability to savour what is about to be lost. People have been able to visit friends and family, not knowing when it will be legal to meet again. Parishioners have attended church to say their farewells, as have small groups of friends and family. Small shops stayed open until midnight on Wednesday to serve customers, restaurants were booked up. Yes, we face the return of Covid-19. But was also face a government that seems in a flap, unable to decide what to do. Boris Johnson has said that this latest lockdown will last only four weeks, and there

James Forsyth James Forsyth

This lockdown comes at a high political cost

Keir Starmer has his first attack line of the next general election campaign. He will say that England’s second lockdown was longer than it needed to be because the Prime Minister didn’t act when he had the chance. If Boris Johnson had listened to the scientists, Labour will say, we’d have had a two week ‘circuit-breaker’ and controlled the virus. As things stand, a man who set his face against lockdown was then forced to adopt one — making it longer, more painful and costing far more jobs. A couple of weeks ago, there was a clear dividing line: Labour wanted national measures; the Tories wanted regional ones. So Starmer

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Boris’s ‘Captain Hindsight’ attack backfires

Boris Johnson may be able to explain his U-turn on imposing a second national lockdown on England in policy terms, arguing as he did last night that he favoured trying to keep as many businesses operating as possible while taking other steps to drive down the rate of infection. But it is far harder to justify politically because of the way he conducted himself while resisting the idea of the lockdown. The Prime Minister appears to have regarded the difference between his local approach and the ‘circuit-breaker’ favoured by Sir Keir Starmer as a campaigning opportunity. Not only did the Conservative party publish a now widely-mocked tweet criticising Labour for