Tag Archives: the waugh zone

Can The Two-Jabs-And-You’re-Outta-Here Policy Help Boris Johnson Save The Summer?

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Woah, we’re going to Ibiza. Okay, I’m not, obviously. But if you want to, from next week you can jet off to the fun-loving island, along with a raft of places beginning with ‘M’ (Malta, Madeira, Mallorca, Menorca), without fear of that dreaded return quarantine that kills dead any holiday vibe.

There was, as ever, a catch. And this was that most of the countries on the new “green list” were simultaneously put on a “green watchlist” (keep up at the back). Nations or islands on the watchlist are “at risk of moving from green to amber”, we’re told. In other words, you’re rolling the dice when you dare book a trip there.

Just how many airlines, hotels and insurance companies think that system is viable will depend on whether they are prepared to offer refunds on a destination that could at very short notice flip from paradise to pariah. That won’t stop some people who are desperate for a bit of beach after a hard winter’s slog.

The idea of replacing the third wave of Covid for actual waves of the Med is clearly tempting. And while the greenlist/watchlist looks skinnier than the PM’s Brexit trade deal, it was the other big news from transport secretary Grant Shapps that was more significant: allowing double-jabbed travellers to avoid 10-day quarantine on return from “amber” list countries.

The plan is tentative and vaguely timetabled, and it was notable that the Department for Transport press release stated “our intention” is that “later in the summer” the two-jabs freedom could kick in. Still, getting high protection from Covid and being able to travel abroad is just the kind of cake-and-eat-it outcome this PM finds mouthwatering. Cake-and-vaxx and get your freshness back, Boris Johnson must be tempted to chirrup.

Even before the formal announcement, Johnson himself let slip that he wanted vaccinations to “open up” travel. And while warning this summer would be “different”, he sounded hopeful that he’d get his own sea-and-sangria (though in his case, it’s often a Croatian red) break, saying “my plans at this stage are at the unformed stage…I’m certainly not ruling it in or ruling it out”.

The shift to double-jabbed travel freedoms would effectively abolish the current amber-flashing green classification system, leaving just “red” list nations as the real danger spots. Pfizer or AstraZeneca would become the biological equivalent of Piz Buin and Ambre Solaire of our foreign travel, offering even better protection without any sticky sand downside.

In public health terms, there’s a virtuous circle effect too. Although lots of young people queuing up for jabs are indeed doing it out of a sense of communal duty as well as personal interest, there’s no question that the prospect of being allowed to go on holiday is a huge magnet too. Not for nothing have fiftysomething mums’ Whatsapp groups been exploding whenever a new walk-in vaccination centre opens for over-18s: the whole family could possibly go on hols in the first week of September.

For the majority who are resigned to holidaying at home, all this will look bizarrely risky. Yet it’s worth mentioning that there are plenty of Brits with family and friends overseas who have not seen them in more than a year. Overseas travel does not always mean beach holidays, it means real face time with your loved ones (five million EU citizens now make up nearly one in ten of our population, and there are millions more with family ties to Asia, Africa and the Americas).

Stil, the fact that neither Shapps nor the PM trumpeted this apparent good news in a major televised press conference told its own story. Both are very wary of sending out a premature signal that life is back to normal, particularly when we are still a way off the July 19 Freedom Day in the amended roadmap out of lockdown.

The race to get as many people second-jabbed as possible is also not done, as vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi made clear on Wednesday. (Curiously, he revealed he had had to take a lateral flow test for England’s match against Croatia “because I hadn’t had enough time for my second vaccination”. The June 13 date of that match suggests Zahawi, who’s 54, had failed to follow the PM’s edict on May 14 for over-50s to get a new dose after eight weeks not 12, but that’s another story.)

The vague “later in the summer” timetabling of the two-jabs-and-you’re-outta-here policy points to its dependence on the path of the Delta variant. Fortunately, hospitalisations look like they are beginning to flatten in some parts of the UK, but the rise in cases can still look pretty scary to a hard-pressed NHS already coping with a backlog of non-Covid treatments. That’s why this announcement felt like the PM dipping a toe in the water, rather than risking a belly flop.

Johnson is under pressure from cabinet ministers like George Eustice and Jacob Rees-Mogg to use July 19 to implement total unlockdown. Eustice went public to call for “all of the legal requirements to do things, to be taken away completely”. Rees-Mogg again sounded like the Tory backbench lockdown sceptics’ tribune, saying “terminus is Paddington not Crewe. It is the end of the line, it is not an interchange”.

The PM knows more than anyone that he’s taking a political gamble with July 19, and removal of all restrictions may not be the advice of his scientists. Having tried to shrug off any link between the G7 and Cornwall’s spike in Delta cases, he could be on the ropes again if admitting thousands of UEFA bigwigs causes a fresh import just because he wants Wembley to host the Euros final.

The pressure to prove Brexit Britain is literally open for business, and pleasure, is strong. Yet the stakes are particularly high for a man who has promised the public that any move out of lockdown will be “irreversible”. He will be crossing his fingers that the second jabs really can squash the sombrero of hospitalisations in coming weeks.

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How Long Can Boris Johnson’s ‘Not Me, Govt’ Trick Keep On Working?

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UK ParliamentPA

UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/PA Wire

Like a striker lacking confidence from a goal drought (Harry Kane springs to mind), Keir Starmer was badly in need of a PMQs win. And thanks to Boris Johnson’s unique combination of complacency and tone deafness, he got one.

The Labour leader came in for some stick last week for failing to pick up on a late Dominic Cummings rant about Matt Hancock (I still think it was smarter to focus on the PM’s border policy and the Delta variant spike). But this week it appeared he was taking to heart the Substack Svengali’s latest advice to “Kick Tories up and down the street on violent crime.”

As it happens, I’m told Starmer wasn’t aware of that particular Cummings line and in fact the focus this week on criminal justice was part of his new strategy of picking a few topics and ramming them home. Asking Johnson, repeatedly with increasing cold anger, why 98.4% of reported rapes don’t end in a criminal charge left the PM stumbling and mumbling.

Johnson’s attempt to accuse Labour of being soft on sentencing looked as lame as it was obvious, with Starmer ridiculing the idea that sentencing was even relevant when so few rapists ended up in court in the first place.

The PM was the one who sounded like a quibbling lawyer when he cited “considerable evidential problems, particularly in recovering data from mobile phones” in his defence. “There is not a good enough join-up across the criminal justice system,” he then admitted, before claiming he was “addressing” the problem.

This was classic Johnson, distancing himself from previous Tory cuts as if this was the second year not the 11th year of Conservative rule. A mix of ‘not me, guv’ and ‘not my govt’, the tactic has worked effectively whenever the austerity charge is levelled at him. What the PM calls “the blessed sponge of amnesia” certainly worked a treat in the general election.

Often it feels like a Blairite trick, updated for the 2020s, a kind of ‘New Tories, new Britain’. One Labour MP tells me he attended a social event with some very confident Tory ministers recently, “and to hear them you would think it was like us in 1998, at the peak of our powers, not 11 years in”.

But for once, this was a social distancing too far. Johnson tried to cite a recent rise in Crown Prosecution Service staffing, but when set against the decade of failure it felt superfluous. Starmer was merciless in response, pointing out that years of cuts to the CPS, 25% cuts to the Ministry of Justice and closing half the courts collectively dwarfed a small increase in budget of late.

Starmer’s best line however was when he said: “I spent five years as Director of Public Prosecutions, prosecuting thousands of rape cases.” That’s a line his allies want him to say again and again and again, replacing ‘rape cases’ with ‘terrorist cases’, ‘violent crime cases’ and more.

Some around him have been frustrated at the lack of emphasis on his security credentials, especially when contrasted with Johnson’s own decadent life politics. In the coming months, the public may get to hear a lot more about the ex-DPP’s record (though he can’t give the full detail of the terror plots he managed to foil).

Starmer was also canny enough to use evidence to the Home Affairs committee just minutes before PMQs, when victims’ commissioner Vera Baird said the government’s current plans to improve rape conviction rates was “underwhelming”. It was Baird’s previous quote – “in effect, what we are witnessing is the decriminalisation of rape” – that Labour deployed with a Cummings-like brutality earlier this year.

When Johnson used his prepared line that “they jabber, we jab”, he invited further charges that he was dismissive of the lived experience of women up and down the land. And when he finally apologised for the way “the trauma” suffered by rape victims in the criminal justice system, it felt cursory and dragged out of him. Imagine if he had opened with a heartfelt apology instead.

Street security, national security and job security are key themes Labour believes it can use to prove the party really has changed, together with a “tough on the causes of crime” style approach to youth services and “preventive public services”. In coming months the party will need such sharp definition, and so will Starmer.

But the biggest task is to use every opportunity to tell the public this is not a ‘new’ government but an old government – with form as long as your arm.

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Can Keir Starmer Learn From Johnson’s Message Discipline?

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The long-lens of Downing Street snapper Steve Back has caught out many people over the years. Today, he captured a rare image of the “lines to take” briefing notes used by the PM’s official spokesman in his encounters with political journalists.

And this particular document was all about Dominic Cummings. Given that one of Cummings’ arguments is that Boris Johnson is too obsessed with newspaper headlines, there was some measure of irony in seeing No.10′s stonewalling defence against his criticisms.

To be fair, the note correctly anticipated media interest in Cummings’ latest claims that the PM ‘lacks focus’, doesn’t care about the Union, governs like ‘a pundit who stumbled into politics’ and runs an administration summed up as ‘the blind leading the blind’.

What was striking was that the answer to every single question was the same: we’re not going to engage with every allegation made, and anyway “the PM is entirely focused on recovering from the pandemic, moving through the roadmap, distributing vaccines and delivering on the public’s priorities”.

Now of course it’s blatant baloney to claim the PM is entirely focused on the pandemic, not least as he not too long ago took time out to ring newspaper editors to blame Cummings for leaks against him. It also lacks credibility to claim, as Matt Hancock did on Radio 4 this morning, that the government was delivering on the PM’s promise on social care.

But Hancock, just like No.10, does know the merit of repeating again and again the same political position. The government had delivered Brexit, delivered on its pledge to protect the NHS, delivered on its programme for vaccines.

One can pick apart each element of that formulation: the Brexit brake on trade with the EU is a sleeper problem that businesses and individuals in both Britain and Northern Ireland are waking up to; the NHS didn’t collapse but the cost in lives and frontline trauma has been huge; the vaccine delivery is really the NHS’s triumph not Johnson’s.

Yet each element definitely has a ‘delivery’ bonus that is proving highly popular with the public, as the latest polls show (SavantaComRes has the Tories increasing their lead over Labour to a whopping 14 points). With every single voter directly affected by the vaccination programme, its success has an impact like no other public policy in living memory, with massive goodwill on its side.

Still, the Conservatives’ handling of what new Labour used to call “message discipline” is also having an impact. By contrast, Keir Starmer has struggled with that very concept over the past six months. Micro-policies have come and gone, and lines-to-take have too.

Those who know him well will admit that his lawyer’s brain finds it difficult to parrot soundbites. He’s always keen to read an entire brief, then focus on crafting the right arguments rather than being ‘on message’.

In interviews, he struggles to stick to a line, partly because he finds it unnatural to speak like a politician. Yet as [George] ‘Bush’s brain’ Karl Rove once said, it’s only once journalists are heartily sick of the same soundbite that the public are probably just starting to listen.

However, the Labour leader has been disciplined of late in one area, on Johnson’s “lax borders” that allowed the Delta variant into the UK from India. And there are tentative signs that it is paying off. A new YouGov poll finds that 35% of people think the rise in Covid cases is the government’s fault, up from 28% in January. 45% still blame the rise on their fellow public, but that’s down from 58% in January.

There are other impacts of the Covid spike of course, and today there were figures showing nearly a quarter of a million pupils missed school because of outbreaks, the highest figure since kids went back in March. Add that to the lack of a funded plan for catch-up education and Starmer could deploy it in PMQs on Wednesday. Delays caused by the ‘Johnson variant’ are affecting jobs, schooling and travel abroad, he may argue.

As I’ve written before, the pitfall for Labour would be to be seen as almost wishing the cases to rise further, just to prove how right its analysis was of Johnson’s mistakes. The latest figures have the first glimmers of a plateauing of hospitalisations (particularly in London), so expect the PM to revive his own line-to-take of Starmer “talking the country down”. Similarly, Labour opposing all overseas travel may prove unpopular if double jabs can ‘save the summer’.

But MPs and aides from all wings of Labour want their man to punch harder. Those punches may land if he does indeed deliver the soundbites needed. Just as the government’s public health messages rely on repetition, an Opposition’s political health relies on effective comms. Words are all Starmer has, and they can help him prove he’s got the “focus” that Cummings claims the PM lacks.

There was one caveat in those No.10 briefing notes, which departed slightly from the script. Referring to the claim that Johnson runs a blind-leading-the-blind government, the PM’s spokesman was advised: “if pushed – we reject this characterisation”. That charge of lacking focus clearly worries Team Johnson.

Starmer’s problem ahead of the Batley by-election is that his own leadership is seen as the bland leading the bland. This summer, if the unlockdown goes well and Labour lose another northern seat, it won’t be the party’s message that dominates. It will be the message from the voters.

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Does Chesham And Amersham Show The Political Tectonic Plates Are Shifting?

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On the day of the Chesham and Amersham by-election on Thursday, one voter couldn’t quite believe just who was captured on the video on their ‘Ring’ doorbell. Theresa May, the former prime minister, was door-knocking in a last-ditch attempt to get the vote out. It looked desperate and it was.

In fact, May was already well known to the electorate precisely because her face had been plastered all over election leaflets. But she wasn’t on Tory campaign material, she was quoted on Lib Dem leaflets for her opposition to the planning reforms proposed by Boris Johnson. This was a 2021 redux of the 2017 classic, ‘the Maybot wot lost it’, but in a very different way.

It was those controversial planning reforms to build more homes without local consent, plus a vehement opposition to the HS2 rail line (embodied by building works currently causing road chaos in the seat), that created an overall narrative that the Conservatives were going to rip up the Chilterns countryside.

Add in the much bigger picture of Johnson’s constant focus on the ‘red wall’ of northern seats and the Lib Dems’ spectacular success was in sending a message that this seat was sick of being “taken for granted”. In that sense, and perhaps the only sense, the Home Counties upset mirrored Labour’s Hartlepool defeat a few weeks ago.

So in many ways, there were almost textbook conditions for a Lib Dem by-election upset. The seat was so close to London, a mere Metropolitan Line tube ride away, the party could easily flood it with activists. In HS2 and planning, there were two perfectly local issues to exploit. Crucially, this was also a classic sleeper operation, a LibDem ‘quiet revolt’ with the party deliberately not shouting about its progress to avoid alerting the sleepy Tories.

All the old tricks were deployed too. One Labour figure whose mother lives in the seat confided she’d told him how nice it was the Lib Dem candidate had actually sent her a personal, hand-written letter (even though it was pro-forma, and cleverly printed to look hand-written). Getting a candidate in place early, hiding the party’s national support for HS2, all worked.

Moreover, the Tory campaign was as inept as the Lib Dems’ was impressive. One Tory MP told me how the party had been far too slow to get a candidate, had produced ‘insipid’ leaflets (“Where was the image of the PM getting his vaccine jab? Nowhere.”) and crazily focused on swing voters rather than its core vote. Despite May’s last minute doorknocks, I was told the Tories didn’t even have tellers at polling stations for large parts of the day.

As one shrewd Lib Dem old hand told me, the genius of the party’s campaign was it managed to both attract the younger more liberal voters forced out of London by expensive house prices AND the older NIMBYs who don’t want the extra housing needed to support even more of these newcomers.

And while this was in many ways a classic, localised by-election win, the Lib Dems are hoping that they can capitalise more broadly in the south. It’s certainly true that anger over planning was a factor in the party capturing other seats in the local elections (there were literal ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ vote shifts over the issue in May)

But are the tectonic plates of our politics shifting? Well, the demographic shifts of an influx of younger, graduate class to Tory seats are reflected in other seats across the south. Some in Labour firmly believe that while they should shout more about successes in places like Peterborough, West of England and Worthing in May, the fact is in parliamentary seats it’s the Lib Dems who can capitalise most.

As one Labour insider put it to me, the long term trends are good but in the short term the number of marginal winnable seats for 2023/4 in the north and midlands far outweigh the potential gains of the odd upset like Canterbury. Others in the party see it as a comforting fantasy to believe that a hipster coffee shop appearing in a Tory town somehow signals a revolution.

Labour polled its lowest ever vote share of any by-election, with just 1.6% of the vote, but those around Keir Starmer were utterly relaxed, seeing that as the inevitable squeeze of tactical voting (it’s worth pointing out that under Corbyn, Richmond Park saw a lower vote score for Labour than membership of the local Labour party, precisely because voting Lib Dem removes a Tory).

“Keir didn’t go to Amersham and Chesham, we didn’t pour resources into it. We absolutely stepped back, actively said we are not keen to engage in this. So we stepped back and allowed that squeeze message to work,” one source said. If the party does the same at the next general election in seats where the Libs are the main challenger, it would simply be repeating the Blair-Ashdown tactics of 1997.

For some around Starmer, the big, tantalising prize after Chesham is that it shows not only are voters less tied than ever to party loyalty but also that the Tories can be routed if Labour isn’t seen by southern voters as a threatening presence in No.10.

I remember joining Johnson on the campaign trail in south west London in 2015 and he correctly predicted the anti-Lib Dem landslides in seats like Ed Davey’s and Vince Cable’s, partly because of a fear that Ed Miliband would ally with Alex Salmond.

Older Lib Dem-Tory switchers are at heart liberal conservatives but they are still conservatives. As academic Paula Surridge points out today, Tory Remain voters had a tremendously low opinion of Jeremy Corbyn.

Some Starmer supporters believe that’s the main reason he can never allow  himself to be depicted as ‘Miliband-lite’, let alone ‘Corbyn-lite’. He may currently have major problems with clarity for what he stands for (which have to be solved), but Starmer’s huge asset to date has been that he doesn’t scare those southern horses.

Johnson’s two biggest problems are complacency and confusion. Today, he appeared in west Yorkshire, clearly having anticipated a cakewalk victory in Chesham that he could use to help him in Batley and Spen. The date of the Batley by-election, July 1, was clearly also designed to be a victory lap after June 21’s unlocking. So much for complacency.

As for confusion, the PM today also started talking once more about uniting and levelling up because “that’s what One nation Conservatism is all about”. That unity message was certainly his line the morning after the 2019 election, but within days he squandered it with endless culture wars on the BBC, political reporters, the judiciary, even cuts to overseas aid.

One Nationism has instead been replaced by Two Nationism, and his messages to the ‘red wall’ have often conflicted with ‘blue wall’ values. It’s not just Labour that has difficulty keeping a working class and middle class voter coalition together.

Batley (which I’ll write more about soon) is a very different seat from Chesham. Still, some Tories think one read-across is they chose their candidate too late and are still failing to target the right voters. Starmer has a brilliantly local candidate, but faces ‘headwinds’ still from the vaccine rollout and George Galloway’s targeting Asian voters. 

The biggest lesson for both Starmer and Johnson is that it’s only by trying to unify the country, not split it into different groups or regions or coloured walls, that politicians can win big majorities. In a first past the post election system, that remains more important than demographic shifts or tweaks to campaigns. Oh, and never take your base for granted.

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Will Rishi Sunak Realise That Covid Isolation Is Just As Vital As Vaccination?

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When it emerged today that Dido Harding had indeed applied for the top job to run NHS England, the verdict from Labour’s Justin Madders was drier than the Sahara.

“I would hope that all candidates’ applications are judged on the basis of their recent performance in public sector roles, which in her case speaks for itself,” the shadow health minister said. “Failing which, Dominic Cummings WhatsApp ought to provide a candid assessment.”

Trying to replace NHS chief exec Sir Simon Stevens is certainly a bold move by the former head of Test and Trace. The litany of failures is well documented, but it’s worth a swift recap of some. The Commons Public Accounts committee said there was “no clear evidence” her organisation had cut Covid rates despite its huge cost (£22bn last year, £37bn over two years).

Former Treasury permanent secretary Nick Macpherson said Test and Trace “wins the prize for the most wasteful and inept public spending programme of all time”. The National Audit Office discovered the DHSC’s business case for the spending last year was “the avoidance of a second national lockdown”. (Narrator: a second, and third, national lockdown took place).

Harding is characteristically unabashed, however. She recently told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that her “one regret” was that the expectations for the service were “set too high”. She suggested that the big mistake at its conception was the hope that “testing and tracing and isolating, on its own, would stop the course of the disease”.

Part of the problem, almost certain to be highlighted in the forthcoming “lessons learned” report by the joint health and tech committees inquiry, was the lack of local expertise in contact tracing. While testing capacity was hugely expanded, much of that progress was undermined if each person’s contacts were not being tracked down quickly or effectively enough.

Yet the real clue to the problem lay in the organisation’s very name. It was always ‘Test and Trace’, never ‘Test, Trace and Isolate’. And all the tests in the world, and all the contact tracing in the world, count for nothing if at the end of the process there are large chunks of people failing to stay at home in self-quarantine.

As Jeremy Hunt has pointed out, there was such an obsession about the numbers of tests done per day that the government failed to focus on the metric that mattered: how many potentially infectious people were isolating. At times, the proportion of those who were not doing so was upto 40%.

To be fair to Harding, she eventually grasped this and admitted in February that perhaps as many as 20,000 people a day were ignoring calls to isolate. There are lots of reasons, from boredom to lack of shopping and childcare, for people breaking 10-day isolation. But lack of cash is certainly a key one, as many in public health will attest.

The Tory peer did manage to get some more state support, notably in offering £500 isolation payments for people on low incomes, often administered locally. But as with most means testing, the take up is far less than it would be if there was a universal, across the board, salary replacement system.

And the blame for that may ultimately lie with chancellor Rishi Sunak. When a flat-rate payment was floated earlier this year, the Treasury ruled it out on the grounds that the cost would be too high because of the sheer numbers who were getting Covid. That ignored both just how dynamic the situation was (the cost reduces as cases reduce) and also the huge savings to the public purse achieved by avoiding lengthy lockdowns.

This whole issue reignited today when Politico revealed emails from senior civil servants complaining that the furlough scheme was being used to help those temporarily off work because of Covid isolation. The most telling line, written in January at the height of the third wave, was this: “Incentive payments are too low to incentivise employees to take tests due to risk of loss of income.”

Even aside from using furlough more flexibly to cope with illness, the chancellor has refused repeated requests to increase statutory sick pay (the UK has one of the lowest rates in Europe).

That seems to be partly because of a fear (possibly misplaced given the government’s majority) that such a hike could not be reversed in future. Yet the sums needed for isolation payments are minor compared to the £37bn earmarked for Test and Trace.

Of course, surge testing still matters (and Test and Trace should get credit for its ability to help councils rapidly boost testing). So too does surge vaccination, although as Blackburn’s public health director today pointed out, jabbing the over-12s is desperately needed particularly in areas with high Asian populations, many of them young.

But it’s the lack of a surge in sick pay that is perhaps the most baffling part of the government’s response. With vaccine protection taking two weeks, getting the infected to swiftly stay at home arguably matters more even than getting them jabbed.

And with Chris Whitty warning today of an “exit wave” that will follow the July 19 unlocking, and “winter surge” later this year, the need for higher levels of self-isolation is as pressing as ever.

The economic risks of further possible lockdowns ought to be enough to prompt a rethink on isolation payments from Sunak, before he’s inevitably urged to do so by the parliamentary inquiry.

If not, he may just gift Keir Starmer the present he desperately needs to tie both No.10 and No.11 in a joint enterprise on Covid failures.

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Cummings Wants Hancock’s Scalp, But Keir Starmer Is Right To Focus On The PM

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“Brevity is the soul of wit/And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes.” Thanks to his latest long, long blogpost, Dominic Cummings has perhaps proved one thing beyond doubt: he’s no student of Shakespeare.

With his 7,286 words, wonky screenshots and phone snaps, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser displayed once more a literary incontinence that only the internet can allow. It was not so much a stream of consciousness as a scream of bumptiousness, laced with venom.

Cummings’ new opus was seen as both tedious and treacherous by many Tory MPs, who share a mutual loathing with the ex-Vote Leave chief. The public too appear to have long ago concluded that he is far from a credible witness in any prosecution case against Johnson’s failings on Covid.

The mastermind of the £350m-a-week-for-the-NHS on that bus, the genius behind the ‘76 million Turks are joining the EU’ poster, is hardly the man to lead the charge against lying in politics.

And there’s no question that Cummings is in many ways his own worst enemy. His renewed character assassination attempt on Matt Hancock was so relentless that it undermined some of the more sensible points he tried to make about the failures of governance at the start of the pandemic. Talk about blogging a dead horse, we get that he hates Hancock already.

Yet if you got beyond the word-blizzard, the repeated use of italics for emphasis, the ACRONYMS and bolded out jargon, the obsessive lists of lettered (A to E) and numbered (1 to 4) paragraphs, there were some nuggets that ought to concern everyone well before the public inquiry begins.

Hancock’s claim in March to have got PPE supplies “all sorted” was undermined by an official telling Cummings that procurement rules and cost concerns meant masks, gloves and gowns being shipped rather than flown from China. Most damning of all was Johnson’s WhatsApp message, “On PPE it’s a disaster. I can’t think of anything except taking Hancock off and putting Gove on.”

Similarly, on delays in getting more ventilators, the PM’s verdict was just as withering: “It’s Hancock. He has been hopeless.” And on the health secretary’s failure to get more Covid testing, Johnson upped the disdain with that eye-catching expletive: “Totally fucking hopless.”

It’s worth saying that on the central charge that Hancock “lied”, the jury remains out because there is no recording of what he actually promised in the Cabinet room. Cummings again claimed cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill said that he and other ministers and officials lacked confidence in Hancock’s “honesty”.

But while saying this conversation was “reinforced in written exchanges”, he failed to publish them. We now await for the Commons select committees to get Sedwill’s own version. I recall No.10 admitting it hadn’t contacted the former cabinet secretary (who, let’s not forget, Cummings helped to oust from his job). Surely the MPs have asked him about such a serious charge?

Given that Cummings’ blog dropped shortly before PMQs, some have accused Keir Starmer of missing an open goal by failing to quote the “fucking hopeless” claim. Yet I can see why the Labour leader opted not to focus on Hancock, partly because blaming him may end up being Johnson’s alibi come any public inquiry. “Hopeless Hancock” could be reshuffled soon, too.

Starmer did quote Cummings, but only on his previous claim that Johnson had a chaotic border policy. He realised that while the personality politics of last year’s sweary WhatsApps may make good newspaper copy, the public are more focused on the here and now of why the Indian variant has been allowed to let rip.

Raising again the issue of proper payments for self-isolation (on the day it seems the Cabinet Office has its own internal document urging just that), plus the ending of business rate relief and full furlough, showed he was talking to immediate concerns not historic ones. Hospitality and small businesses groups contacted Starmer after PMQs thanking him for raising their lack of support and clarity, I’m told.

And Starmer’s strategic target is of course the PM himself. That’s why Labour talks about ‘the Johnson variant’ of the virus and it’s why it will keep hammering its message that lax border controls may have undermined all the hard work of both the public and the NHS’s vaccine programme.

Yet there was material in the Cummings blog that will come in useful in attacking Johnson. We learned for the first time that the PM had texted to his advisers “how do we win the herd immunity argument?” The full text of that was frustratingly not reproduced (and Johnson is bound to argue he didn’t go ahead with that argument anyway).

The account of how Johnson runs meetings, avoiding conflict, failing to ask proper questions to officials, “doing a thumbs-up and pegging it out of the room before anybody can disagree”, sounded all too realistic. This at least proved the PM is as blithe in private as he is in public, but it’s a worrying lack of leadership nevertheless. Starmer, in the G7 statement later, had a wounding line that Johnson was a “host, not a leader, a tour guide, not a statesman”.

For his part, Johnson in PMQs showed again why he’s a formidably cynical politician. Every question was batted away with “Brexit, vaccines, flip-flop Starmer, Brexit, vaccines, flip-flop Starmer”. His jibe that “Captain Hindsight needs to adjust his retrospectoscope” was actually pretty funny.

Faced with such spin and sleight of hand, Starmer can only hope that the public will one day tire of the jokes and the failures of governance. He needs to combine the air of being a grown-up in the room with his own message of optimism, just as Joe Biden persuaded Americans that the crazy years had to be followed by calm good government.

If Labour can at the next election persuade the voters that it is Boris Johnson who was “fucking hopeless” in keeping Covid under control, that’s a much bigger prize than giving Dominic Cummings the scalp of the health secretary. The party needs big answers on big issues like childcare, social care and life chances too. But Starmer at least has his eyes on the real target.

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How Many Deaths Is Boris Johnson Willing To Tolerate To Keep His July 19 Promise?

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It’s barely three weeks since Dominic Cummings gave his evidence to MPs, yet it already feels like a long time ago. Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser may have electrified Westminster but he left the public just shrugging its shoulders in contempt, leaving barely a trace.

Still, Cummings’ real impact may have been in highlighting the need for the PM to be extra-cautious about Covid, heeding the warning signs when case numbers spike and forcing him to really listen to his medical and scientific advisers.

We also have Cummings’ testimony to thank for getting on record Johnson’s frustration last autumn that he hadn’t acted more like “the Mayor from Jaws”. And today, Labour pounced on that phrase to ram home what it thinks is one of his biggest blunders of the pandemic: not closing the borders to India.

In possibly his best speech since taking the job of shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds said that the 14 day delay in putting India on the “red list” was a “fortnight of failure” driven by Johnson’s desire to have a photo-op with Narendra Modi. It was not the India variant, nor the Delta variant, but “the Johnson variant”.

Moreover, Thomas-Symonds said Johnson’s Jaws mayor tribute act had had tragic consequences with “British people..attacked in their thousands” by the shark of Covid. He even conjured up the image of Keir Starmer as police chief Martin Brody from that same movie: “eyes on the shark, doing everything to keep people safe”.

Some in Labour have been pushing hard for months to ram home this attack line about the need for tighter borders. It turns Johnson’s “take back control” Brexit mantra into a judo throw aimed at knocking him off his balance. Allied with more state funded support for the aviation and travel industry, it is at least a coherent strategy and one that anticipated imports like the Delta variant.

Though it avoids the “hindsight” charge, there are pitfalls. One risk is that Labour can appear to be banking on the virus outpacing the vaccines in coming weeks, in the hope of proving itself right about Johnson’s border failure. Without careful handling, that could turn out to be an even worse look than an opposition which relies on increases in unemployment to win power.

Then again, as I mentioned last night, there is a real risk entailed in the PM claiming July 19 is a “terminus” date. Michael Gove highlighted the implicit logic of that approach this morning when he refused to deny that hundreds of deaths would now be tolerated once the final unlocking happens.

“Hundreds” is of course much less than the “thousands” (or “tens of thousands” the PM referred to at one point yesterday) that would have died if the June 21 unlocking had gone ahead. Yet the Sage papers released on Monday night made for grim reading. Even with a five-week delay, one model estimates between 31,200 and 62,900 extra deaths by December 31.

Those death numbers are much, much higher than the worst winter flu outbreaks, even though that’s the comparison increasingly made by ministers. On ConHome’s Moggcast, Jacob Rees-Mogg said “you can’t run society just to stop the hospitals being full”, but he also said deaths were the key metric – and on this measure the Indian variant could yet wreak havoc.

Rees-Mogg has proved he has more lives than Gavin Williamson in his current post and that may in part be because he reflects the lockdown sceptic views of some backbenchers. The PM too is more of a Mayor Vaughn than a Chief Brody. He is clearly braced for more fatalities, the question remains just how many he will tolerate, and whether he will tell us what the number is.

But just how many excess deaths will the public tolerate? The phrase you’ll hear in coming weeks is that we all have to “learn to live with” Covid. For the families of those who fall prey to this awful virus, that may sound like learning to die with Covid. And even Boris Johnson’s famed political skills may have trouble with that soundbite.

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Will Boris Johnson Come To Regret Making July 19 The Terminus Of His Roadmap?

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Just when you think you’ve got it beat, Covid-19 somehow comes back stronger. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger but without the charm, this Terminator of a virus has an “I’ll be back” menace that risks undoing all the hard work of the UK’s stunning vaccine rollout.

The epic battle between the vaccines and the virus certainly has high stakes. Perhaps that’s why Boris Johnson sounded unusually nervous as he announced he would indeed be postponing ‘Freedom Day’ by another four weeks. Instead of the sunshine of Midsummer Merrie England, there was a blizzard of scary charts of projected hospitalisations.

Fluffing his lines, the PM referred to “the adults of this company” (he meant “country”) and then wrongly declared the new unlocking date was July 29th (correcting it later to July 19th). Polling shows most of the public are relaxed about a delay, but Johnson is acutely aware that the 24% who are unhappy include several of his own backbenchers, and it showed.

Nowhere was this more telling than in his repeated reassurance that the Freedom Day Mk II was the real deal. He was “pretty confident” that July 19 will be “the terminus date” (he said “terminal date” too). June 21 was always a “‘not before’ date”, whereas this was much firmer, he suggested. This was not a defeat for lockdown sceptics, it was a victory, he seemed to imply.

That spin may or may not work on Tory MPs, but it could paint the PM into a corner for the first time in months. Ever since he bowed to Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance’s plan for a cautious roadmap, he has been able to fall back on their insistence that all four tests have to be met (the new variant test was particularly shrewd) and that “data not dates” will drive his decisions.

But now with talk of “terminal” and fixed timelines, it feels like dates not data is the new approach. Steve Baker, Mark Harper and Sir Charles Walker, who will probably vote against the delay, have much more concrete evidence of a breach of faith should that July 19 date somehow slip again.

Whitty and Vallance gave the PM invaluable backing at the press conference. The chief medical officer in particular pointed out that even without the Indian variant, the very restoration of unrestricted indoor mixing of “households that are unrelated” was always going to lead to an uptick in cases. He added there had to come a point where fatalities switched from “deaths averted” to deaths delayed”, as with flu.

Patrick Vallance even suggested that locking down beyond July 19 would be counter-productive. And he made the case for that date containing the Goldilocks calculation of just how hot or cold to make the roadmap porridge. Giving over-18s their first jab and pushing unlockdown closer to the school holidays certainly added some sugar, as did a lifting of the cap on wedding numbers.

Still, for Keir Starmer, the talk of 19 July as a “terminal” date is an opportunity for a Judgement Day on Johnson’s competence. If the vaccination programme can’t sufficiently flatten the Delta variant spike, he is sure to step up his own attack line that Johnson’s failure to stop flights from India is the real culprit. Already today, the Labour leader hardened his rhetoric to say it was a “pathetic” border policy that had postponed freedoms.

Starmer’s clear aim is to drive a big wedge between the excellence of the NHS vaccine rollout and the government’s wider failures. It’s unclear whether it was the PM’s desire to keep alive post-Brexit trade talks with Narendra Modi that prompted his inaction, but the suggestion that he recklessly undermined both the NHS’s programme and public sacrifices is a toxic one.

Today’s failure to offer extra financial support to businesses added extra political risk too. Those firms which were hanging on by their fingertips will now face having to pay their share of furlough bills, with no extra income to fund them. Add in the self-employed already upset and an Opposition that was pro-enterprise could make inroads.

To oversee one Covid wave is a misfortune, to allow two begins to look like carelessness. But to trigger a third wave, squandering all the good work of your own vaccine success story, could be seen as unforgivable by a public which has to date been incredibly forgiving of its prime minister.

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Why The Unite Election Has Lessons In Unity For Keir Starmer – And The Left

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“Two down, one to go.” That’s how a Labour MP reacted this week to the news that moderate Gary Smith was just elected to lead the GMB union. It was a reference to the fact that this year’s general secretary elections for the UK’s ‘big three’ trade unions – Unison, Unite and GMB – have seen two victories for candidates seen as friendly to Keir Starmer.

While Smith won the GMB contest on Thursday, earlier this year Christina McAnea saw off three more left-wing rivals in the battle to lead Unison. But although Unison is now the largest union in the country, it is the fight to succeed Len McCluskey that is seen as the race with the biggest prize. A clean sweep of ‘moderates’ would deliver for Starmer more union boss support than any Labour leader since the 1950s.

Of course, the contests are often more than a straight battle between ‘left’ and ‘right’. As a former Communist, McAnea is hardly a Blairite. She was however seen as the most pragmatic of the contenders for the Unison top job. Crucially, she also became the first female leader of a ‘big’ union, which was fitting given just how many women NHS, council and social care staff make up Unison’s membership.

Women make up more than half of the GMB’s membership and after an independent report found evidence of “institutional sexism” among its ranks, some had expected Rehana Azam to clinch the general secretary job. On his victory, Smith acknowledged the sexism findings and vowed to implement reforms. Still, some in the union claim the “women’s vote” was split after another candidate, Giovanna Holt, decided to stand.

In fact, “splitting the vote” is often a feature, whether deliberate or unintentional, of general secretary elections. Why? Because unlike virtually every other internal election (say Tory and Labour leader elections), they are run under first past the post rules. When McAnea won the Unison post, her vote was less than the combined total of the three leftwingers who stood against her.

And it’s that first past the post factor which is now very much in play in “the big one”, Unite. Centrist Gerard Coyne is up against three leftwing rivals (Steve Turner, Howard Beckett and Sharon Graham) and as a result could end up winning with less than half of the vote. As Turner conceded to me recently: “If we had the same turnout as last time, there ain’t enough votes to go round on a straight three-way [Left] split to defeat” Coyne.

Turnouts tend to be low in union elections (the GMB’s this week was just 10.6%, Unite’s last time was about 12%). That’s in part because the Conservative government has refused to allow online balloting (something that’s allowed in political party elections), partly because of a lack of public profile and partly apathy among union members.

But given the low turnouts, three Left candidates are often fishing in a small pool for the same votes. After Turner narrowly won last year the crucial nomination of the ‘United Left’ grouping in the union, Beckett opted to still stand. National organiser Graham was always going to stand in her own right too, which means the Left will indeed be split.

I understand that all four candidates now have enough branch nominations to formally stand as candidates. With the final deadline for nominations due on Monday, Coyne and Turner are holding back details for now, possibly to gain even more backing over this weekend. Graham was the first to reach the threshold, and Beckett “smashed” through it this week. There are no signs that any will step aside to unite around a single Left candidate but bragging rights over who has most nominations will be valuable.

Why does any of this matter beyond internal union affairs? Well, Unite has been Labour’s biggest donor in recent years and still retains a significant presence on the party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC). Some even think the stakes are so high that this Unite election may have more long-term impact on the party than the May local elections, or even the forthcoming Batley and Spen by-election.

Beckett, who has been suspended from Labour over a tweet about Priti Patel, is almost certain to be reinstated after a reprimand, insiders believe. His supporters think he has the momentum in the race. And if Beckett succeeds McCluskey “he’ll make Len look like a pussycat”, one union source told me. He has already threatened to pull funding for Labour, tweeting his warning just minutes after the party’s Unite staff branch voted to nominate Coyne. Turner, a collegiate trade unionist by nature, has said he would happily work with Starmer.

Beckett’s Twitter controversy may well have helped him raise his profile in the Unite election. Similarly, Newsnight’s allegations of his role in moves to unseat Labour MPs may even boost his credentials among some left-minded union members. However, Coyne’s camp believe he’s the only candidate committed to introducing transparency in how Unite spends their money, be that on the £98m hotel complex in Birmingham or on paying more than £2m in libel costs to ex-MP Anna Turley.

Coyne may also be boosted by the little-noticed fact that in the Labour leadership election, Starmer won a majority of Unite members’ votes. As Steve Turner, who backed Rebecca Long-Bailey, put it to me recently: “We didn’t win the argument inside our own union…We won it amongst the politicos and that group that loves to talk to themselves…But in the real world out there, where 99.9% of our members reside, they’re not.”

And that’s really perhaps why the Unite contest matters. Many of its members, who like both Brexit and state spending, actually voted for Boris Johnson in 2019. If the new general secretary can somehow help Starmer reconnect with those voters, while somehow helping Labour to look more united (the clue is in the union’s name), many of his MPs would be grateful. For the party’s Left, unifying around a single candidate may be just as valuable a lesson too.

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Will Boris Johnson Now Pause His Roadmap To Boost The Jabs’ Magic?

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What was meant to be Boris Johnson’s ‘quiet week’ just keeps on getting noisier. Today started with a kicking over catch-up funding for schools, swiftly followed by warnings that the simmering unease over international aid cuts is ready to boil over into rebellion. To top it all, it looks like millions of Britons won’t be getting a summer holiday abroad after all.

That’s the very downbeat conclusion many in the tourism industry have drawn from transport secretary Grant Shapps’ big announcement. Shifting Portugal from the “green list” to the “amber list” of travel destinations, albeit with a week’s notice, signals that holidays overseas are getting harder, not easier as some had assumed.

Politicians love using the phrase “direction of travel”, but that terminology will feel singularly inapt for those who had pinned their hopes on ending a long and gruelling year with at least a break in the Mediterranean sunshine. It’s still possible that in three weeks’ time the numbers may have fallen again in various European countries and islands, but no one is banking on it.

It’s worth pointing out that many Brits can’t afford or don’t want a foreign holiday. But a sizeable number of them very much do, and several Tory MPs will point out this is not some middle class obsession. “My working class constituents work bloody hard and save every penny for that week in the sun,” one tells me. “They’ll wonder why the hell they can’t still do that if they’re double jabbed.”

One problem lies in the traffic light system devised by the government, or more particularly, the amber bit of it. Because travel to amber list countries is legal, though not advised, there is no automatic right to a refund that would occur on the red list.

David Davis is another Tory who thinks there are political risks with Shapps’ announcement. “This is an irrational overreaction,” he tells me. “If you’re going to do this, at least make it a green-red system so people can get their money back.”

As it happens, that’s Labour’s position too. Shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds says the amber system is just a recipe for confusion, with reports of 50,000 travelling into the UK daily, each possibly bringing back a nasty souvenir in the shape of an infectious new variant of the virus.

I suspect that some Brits will actually hedge their bets by splitting up what would have been a fortnight abroad. They could take a risk on the first week holidaying in an amber country like Portugal, Spain or Greece, then using their second week’s holiday to quarantine at home before getting a test release after five days that lets them take a short trip in the UK too.

But only a minority will want to risk that. The real difficulty with the current traffic light system is that it’s hard to tell amber-flashing-red from amber-flashing-green. It is designed to offer a careful route from the most unsafe to the most safe environments and embodies a proportionality of risk that drives Boris Johnson’s thinking. That’s why he probably won’t ditch it.

Yet this virus doesn’t respect proportionality, and often the only language it understands is overwhelming force (we’ve learned lockdowns have to be hard and fast). The amber list is the overseas version of the domestic regional tiers system designed last year to contain Covid in defined areas. That system failed miserably this winter in the face of the Kent variant, which staged a deadly route march out of the south east across the whole country.

And again in and around Bolton and other “hotspots” where the even more transmissible Indian variant was found, the virus has shown a marked disrespect for borough boundaries, let alone national borders. The latest figures showing the big jump in cases in Blackburn, plus the wider spread of the virus across Lancashire, proves that once a new variant gets a foothold it moves fast.

As the PM ponders what this all means for his June 21 unlockdown date, history tells us he will want to have his cake and eat it. We shouldn’t forget that the public too quite like a bit of cakeism (European style public services, US-level taxes, anyone?), a factor that’s often forgotten when some are baffled why Johson is so popular.

The return of ordering at the bar (instead of table service) is seen by some of the PM’s allies as sacrosanct, both because it is vital to the economics of the pub industry and more importantly vital to some sense of normality and boosted morale after months of lockdown. There’s a view in government that this simple change would buy the PM enough political capital to keep in place other restrictions, like working from home and mask wearing on public transport.

The difficulty again is that while that may seem sensibly proportionate to the risk, a disproportionate response to the Indian or “delta” variant may be what’s really needed. The latest data from Public Health England, confirming the delta variant’s higher transmissibility, its “significantly higher risk of hospitalisation” and its higher vaccine escape, could force firmer action from No.10.

A short, two-week delay (which I’ve talked about before) for all the June 21 measures is gaining traction in Whitehall as perhaps the better solution, not least because it gives time for ramping up more jabs.

As the PM had his second dose today, he must have thought just how much safer the nation would be if as many over-50s as possible had the same protection before further unlockdown. That delay would be disproportionate to some, but may be just smart public health policy as much as smart politics.

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