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Yesterday’s post covered Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as First Minister of Scotland on February 15 and the reasons for it.
The story continues.
More reaction
When Jacinda Ardern stood down in New Zealand, British conservatives wondered if Sturgeon would follow suit.
After all, the metropolitan elite adored both female ‘saints’, mothers of their respective nations.
On Thursday, February 16, The Telegraph‘s Jenny Hjul pointed out (emphases mine):
In her eight-plus years as Scotland’s First Minister, Sturgeon has been loved and loathed in equal measure at home, something she acknowledged in her press conference. But beyond her domain, she has been regarded in many circles as an almost saintly presence, a pioneer of progressive causes, and a beacon of pure, strong leadership.
To the frustration of her critics in Scotland, she has been able to pull the wool over the eyes of London liberals in particular and garnered a good press over her botched handling of everything from Covid to the fall-out from Brexit.
In her parting, parallels will no doubt be drawn with that other recent quitter, and Sturgeon idol, Jacinda Ardern. Like the former premier of New Zealand, the SNP leader’s attempt to portray her departure as an honourable exit will be taken at face value by those who understand little of the domestic politics that have made her position untenable in the long-term.
Sturgeon, like Ardern, banged on about running out of steam, about the pressures of the job and the constant scrutiny. And she flagged up what she saw as her achievements (“Scotland is a fairer country”), while regretting that she could not bring more rationality to politics. “If all parties were to take this opportunity to try to de-polarise public debate just a bit,” she pleaded.
This is rich indeed from a politician who has thrived not just on driving divisions between Scotland and the rest of the UK but on polarising opinion north of the border.
Far from being democracy’s champion, her party has shut down dissenting voices while claiming to represent the whole of Scotland. Under her tenure, Scotland has become all but a one-party state, with many public bodies, and civic and cultural organisations captured by SNP groupthink.
Sturgeon said her decision to stand down had crystallised over the past few weeks, perhaps since Ardern’s resignation showed that even great (by their own reckoning) leaders have their limits. But more likely it is because her grip has gone – over her party, which is divided and growing rebellious, and her country, which is further away than ever from voting Yes …
To her wider fan club, she may have relinquished her crown with grace, but to those who know her better it is her final face-saving gesture.
The Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which the British government vetoed by using Section 35 provisions for the first time, has caused a split within the Scottish National Party. On Thursday, February 16, The Times reported that Party members’ views are divided on the legislation:
The Scottish government has until April 17 to decide whether to appeal against the UK government’s veto of the legislation, which would allow people to self-identify their gender and lower the age of transition to 16.
The SNP’s ruling national executive committee will meet tonight to decide the rules and timetable for the leadership contest, raising the prospect that there may not be a new first minister in place before the key call has to be made …
“I think it dies in its current form,” a senior SNP source said. “The sensible approach would be [for the new leader] to get round the table [with the UK government] and find a compromise on the bill.”
The party is split on the bill, meaning whatever happens it will be controversial. Opening talks with Conservative ministers will anger those who lobbied for the bill to be pushed through with little compromise.
However, there is a significant number of elected representatives and grassroots members who are concerned about fighting a court case when a recent poll found that 50 per cent of voters in Scotland back the UK government’s position …
Mixed reactions
When Liz Truss was Prime Minister, she labelled Nicola Sturgeon an ‘attention seeker’ and, as such, someone to be ignored. She never contacted Sturgeon.
Rishi Sunak was different and got in touch soon after he entered No. 10. He was rather gushing on her departure:
President Trump, on the other hand, viewed Sturgeon differently:
The day she resigned, he posted a statement on his 2024 campaign website:
Good riddance to failed woke extremist Nicola Sturgeon of Scotland! This crazed leftist symbolizes everything wrong with identity politics. Sturgeon thought it was OK to put a biological man in a women’s prison, and if that wasn’t bad enough, Sturgeon fought for a “Gender Recognition Reform Bill” that would have allowed 16-year-old children to change their gender without medical advice. I built the greatest Golf properties in the World in Scotland, but she fought me all the way, making my job much more difficult. The wonderful people of Scotland are much better off without Sturgeon in office!
Catalogue of failures
Is Trump right?
While he is no fan of the former US president, Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross would agree with those sentiments.
On the morning of February 15, the sun was shining in the north east of Scotland, where Ross, an MP and MSP, was campaigning for candidates in an upcoming by-election. The sun was shining:
That was at 9:46. In just over an hour, the sun would shine even brighter with the unexpected news of Sturgeon’s resignation.
The following tweet represents the political disconnect among the Scottish public between those who thought Sturgeon was a disaster and those who thought she was a saint:
I will certainly miss First Minister’s Questions which always began with a Sturgeon-Ross face-off. In the last two sessions, Sturgeon was unable to answer Ross’s question about sexual identity — 12 times, no less.
The evening that she resigned, Ross wrote in The Telegraph about her catalogue of failures:
She is, rightly, regarded as a formidable politician. But equally, it’s hard to dispute that, by obsessing over independence, she has always governed in the nationalist interest, rather than the national interest.
Any rational analysis of her record as First Minister would have to conclude that it’s one of failure.
On education, the policy area she asked to be judged on, it’s dismal. Scotland tumbled so far down the international league tables that we were withdrawn from them to save face.
For a self-avowed “progressive”, Nicola Sturgeon’s abject failure to eradicate the poverty-related attainment gap, as promised, is a damning indictment of her reign.
Then, there’s the increased violence in our classrooms and the first teacher strikes in almost 40 years.
On her watch, Scotland’s NHS is on its knees with record waiting times for treatment and burnt-out, exhausted staff. The root cause is dismal workforce planning by successive SNP health secretaries, including Nicola Sturgeon who cut the number of funded places for homegrown medical students at Scottish universities.
Similarly, on transport, the ledger is grim. The ferries scandal is the most egregious case of wasteful public spending in the devolution era, with the latest cost estimates (£450 million) showing it’s set to overtake the Scottish Parliament building as a money pit.
But it’s about so much more than taxpayers’ cash being squandered. It bears two other hallmarks of the Sturgeon government: remote Scotland being an afterthought and secrecy.
Meanwhile, the death toll on two of Scotland’s vital trunk roads, the A9 and A96, continues to rise while the SNP, in thrall to the anti-car Greens, drag their heels on long-standing promises to expand the dual carriageways, and our trains remain over-priced and unreliable under nationalised ScotRail.
The First Minister has grown increasingly out of touch with the public mood in recent months, leaving her successor with dilemmas over whether to ditch or amend flawed policies, such as the National Care Service, the Deposit Return Scheme and, of course, gender self-ID.
By tying herself in knots over the latter, she was left in the absurd position of being unable to refer to a double rapist as a man.
That, coupled with her dismissal – indeed, smearing – of those who warned that her Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill threatened women and girls’ safety betrayed her “I know best” arrogance.
Arguably, Nicola Sturgeon’s greatest failing is Scotland’s drug death epidemic, which has mushroomed to such an extent under her that fatality rates are now the worst in Europe by an enormous margin.
“We took our eye off the ball” was her slip-of-the-tongue mea culpa for those appalling statistics. But it could, and should, serve as her wider epitaph.
Coronavirus measures
Ross did not mention, or perhaps he agreed with, Sturgeon’s draconian coronavirus policies.
From the start, she did things more radically than Boris Johnson. For whatever reason, the BBC televised her lengthy lunchtime coronavirus press conferences throughout the UK, when her policies pertained only to Scotland.
Her right-hand woman was Devi Sridhar, an American public health researcher who is the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. The BBC frequently interviewed Sridhar for all the UK to see and hear, a subtle attempt to get every other Briton on board with Scotland’s draconian policies.
In April 2020, the SNP’s then-Westminster leader Ian Blackford MP wrote to Boris to delay full Brexit because of the pandemic.
On Sunday, April 5, The Express reported:
In his letter, Mr Blackford urges Mr Johnson to seek an extension to the current transition period in a bid to focus resources and efforts on tackling the pandemic – claiming failure to do would be “beyond reckless”. He added: “We are not asking you to change your views on Brexit – we are simply asking you to recognise reality.”
“This isn’t about fighting old battles or rehearsing old arguments – it’s about recognising the needs of people right now.”
Fortunately, Boris ignored him.
However, that same day proved that the SNP was not whiter than white. Sturgeon’s chief medical officer Dr Catherine Calderwood had already broken lockdown restrictions twice by travelling to her weekend home from Edinburgh.
Sturgeon did not act and even initially refused Calderwood’s resignation.
If she had stayed then Ms Sturgeon and, probably the British government too, would have had to face the fact that for many politicians, the media and for huge sections of a terrified and angry general public, it will be this doctor – and not the nation’s battle against a killer virus – who would have become the main issue. Dr Calderwood would have been the story, not coronavirus. And in the harsh world of politics, that’s what ultimately counts.
She admitted that not once but twice she drove the 40-odd miles to her second home at a time when she is on our TV screens and in our newspapers constantly urging the rest of the population to stay at home and not to go off on non-essential trips to the countryside.
Whichever way you cut it, and although the First Minister insisted that she still depended on this lady’s medical support, her foolish actions threatened to drive a coach and horses through the official advice – advice that Dr Calderwood helped draw up – on which the nation depends to beat this virus.
Ms Sturgeon was extraordinarily generous in refusing initially to accept Dr Calderwood’s offer to resign and for insisting, somewhat ingenuously, that everyone makes mistakes. That is true, of course, but the reality is that for this senior official, this was no ordinary slip-up.
On the contrary, on two successive weekends Dr Calderwood decided to get into her car and do what she’s been telling the rest of us not to do – and take a non-essential trip away from the city of Edinburgh to her holiday home in the Fife seaside village of Earlsferry. Trips that earned her an official and extraordinary warning from the police …
Moreover, what is already sticking in the craw of many people is that this is someone who has been a firm advocate of the severe restrictions imposed on the rest of the population who has decided to ignore them to visit her second home.
That this second home is in one of Scotland’s most expensive seaside villages, much favoured by Edinburgh’s better-off classes, will also not be lost on her critics.
SNP politicians said the doctor had to go, at which point Sturgeon relented:
She hoped that would have enabled the doctor to hang onto her position albeit in a backroom role but I’m certain that this experienced politician would have known that it was a hopeless situation.
That view was magnified by the ferocious level of protests she received from leading SNP politicians who said they were reflecting serious unease amongst the party faithful about Dr Calderwood’s behaviour.
The hypocrisy of it all!
That month, an allegation surfaced that England was stealing Scotland’s PPE supplies, a claim which Sturgeon retracted mid-month but, according to one Conservative MSP, allowed to continue spreading north of the border. On April 15, The Express reported (with a video of one of her press conferences):
At Ms Sturgeon’s daily briefing, she promised to seek urgent clarity on reports that Scottish care homes were being given a lower priority for supplies of personal protective equipment. Claims of PPE priority for England surfaced on Monday and came from Donald Macaskill, the head of Scottish Care, which is the body representing private care homes in Scotland. He told BBC Radio Scotland the UK’s four largest suppliers had said they were not sending to Scotland and instead prioritising “England, the English NHS and then English social care providers”.
Andrew Neil mocked the First Minister of Scotland and tweeted: “Nicola Sturgeon told GMB [Good Morning Britain] that she accepts assurances that NHS England did not demand PPE suppliers give preference over Scotland …”
Jamie Greene, Scottish Conservative MSP for West Scotland tweeted: “They’re still spouting the story, contrary to the language now being used by the FM, Health Secretary, and Clinical Director.
“If you’re going to manufacture a grievance, at least coordinate it. Even their target audience is boring of the needless (dangerous) scaremongering.”
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock spoke to health ministers from different UK nations on Tuesday afternoon and insisted it had not instructed any company to prioritise PPE for one nation over the others.
Sturgeon often wanted to appear to be ahead of the curve as a means of scoring political points targeting Boris’s policies for England. Unfortunately, he caved in all too often and followed suit.
On April 23, The Mail reported:
Ms Sturgeon has repeatedly gazumped Number 10 during the coronavirus crisis as she has moved on key issues before ministers in London.
Previous examples include announcing a ban on large social gatherings, closing schools and saying that the original three week lockdown would be extended.
That article laid out Sturgeon’s plans to reopen Scotland soon.
Three days later, she was unable to give any further clarity, despite her announcement. As the reply says, when Boris hesitated, he was accused of obfuscation while Sturgeon was praised for her notional transparency:
Incredibly, on May 5, Sturgeon was pictured shaking hands with Bill Gates. It was okay for them, when no one else was allowed to do so. And look how close they were to each other. More hypocrisy:
Then it emerged that, like Boris, who at least had the excuse of attending Brexit transition meetings, Sturgeon also missed COBRA meetings about the pandemic. In fact, she missed six of them. This came from one of the Scottish papers:
England and Wales effectively re-opened by early July, although with masks, social distancing and some visiting restrictions in place. Scotland lagged behind.
Already on July 10, it was becoming clear that Scotland’s coronavirus policies were not working, as Tom Harwood wrote in The Telegraph:
Looking at Nicola Sturgeon’s polling popularity it’s easy to forget that the Scottish First Minister presided over a care home coronavirus death rate double that of England. It’s easy to miss the fact that Scotland has been significantly behind England when it comes to the rate of testing too. As Labour’s Shadow Scottish Secretary Ian Murray told a private zoom meeting at the end of May, “all of these things in Scotland are in a lot of instances worse than what’s happening in England but Boris gets the blame and not Nicola Sturgeon.”
How then has she managed to get away with it all so unscathed?
One answer is simple. The Westminster media bubble is so often so busy naval gazing that politicians elsewhere in the country escape the scrutiny placed on No 10. Few in the Westminster village are concerned with what’s going on 400 miles north in Holyrood. This obviously allows much Scottish scandal to slide under the radar when it comes to national attention. But this explanation is to downplay the cunning strategy of the SNP Government, and its not so secret weapon. Nationalism.
Sure enough, on July 12, Sturgeon announced she was considering a mandatory quarantine of all English visitors to Scotland. Guido has the video:
On July 23, The Spectator published ‘Nicola Sturgeon’s care homes catastrophe’:
Nicola Sturgeon is fond of telling Scots that the prevalence of Covid-19 is ‘five times lower’ in Scotland than in England. Or at least she was, until the Office for Statistics Regulation released a statement calling her data source ‘unclear’ and adding that ‘we do not yet have evidence to support the validity of these comparisons’. The SNP has been retailing the notion that Sturgeon’s response to the pandemic far outstrips that of Boris Johnson. The public may be on her side, but the facts are not.
… In England and Wales, deaths in care homes have accounted for 28 per cent of all fatalities involving coronavirus. In Scotland, the figure is 47 per cent. English and Welsh homes have lost 3.7 per cent of their residents to the virus while homes in Scotland have lost 5.6 per cent. This is all the more remarkable since the care home population south of the border is almost 12 times the size of that in Scotland.
One explanation is the SNP government’s hive-like mentality. Dissenting views were pushed aside or ignored altogether …
Far from supplying an exemplar for others to follow, the Scottish Government has demonstrated the consequences of wrong-headed policy-making, spurning of expert counsel, and a failure to be transparent. The case for a public inquiry into what went wrong in Scotland’s care homes, and in the decision-making at the top of government, is surely undeniable. With Covid-19 apparently under control at present, now is the optimal time to review policies and processes in case a second wave is looming down the line.
On July 31, Sturgeon announced a travel ban between Scotland and the north west of England:
She announced on the BBC:
I am today advising, strongly advising, people in Scotland to avoid travel to the areas affected in England… and also to ask people from these areas from these areas not to travel to Scotland.
Guido noted:
1,892 years on, Hadrian would be delighted she’s picking up where he left off…
On August 5, Sturgeon effectively locked down the City of Aberdeen, although she did allow people to go to work and educational institutions. According to one person, this was because one bar was not following the rules:
On October 1, Sturgeon was slow to act on then-SNP MP Margaret Ferrier (now an Independent), who travelled by train from London to Scotland and back again, even though she knew she had the virus. By the time this appeared, Ian Blackford had suspended the whip:
The whole of the UK knew about Margaret Ferrier, who remains an Independent to this day. People were angry:
On October 7, Sturgeon announced a semi-lockdown, although she said schools would remain open and adults could leave the house:
On October 11, Sturgeon’s government was failing to use its full testing capacity. It was only using half:
While hospitality establishments in England and Wales had been serving alcohol indoors since the summer and, later in 2020, with food only, Scotland opted to ban strong drink altogether until October 27 that year. Devi Sridhar probably played a role in that, too:
On November 23, Sturgeon closed the Scottish border to the rest of the UK.
Guido told us:
This weekend, in what must have been a dream come true to nationalists, Scotland closed its border to the rest of the UK. The move came as the most densely populated parts of Scotland moved into ‘Tier 4’ – lockdown in all but name. It is currently illegal for anyone from the rest of the UK to enter the country without a reasonable excuse. Scots are also forbidden from traveling to other parts of the UK. A dream come true for the more extreme SNP supporters.
People who enter or leave Scotland illegally are now being hit with £60 fines. Travel within Scotland is also restricted, with those living in Nicola’s Tier 3 or 4 areas prohibited from leaving their local authority without a reasonable excuse. Guido gets the feeling some political tribes are secretly enjoying this pandemic…
On December 17, Sturgeon got stroppy with the Scottish Mail‘s political editor Mike Blackley for asking whether the self-isolation time could be cut, as was planned in the rest of the UK.
Sturgeon shot back:
Yeah, because that’d really help ’cause that would spread infections even further and that would not be doing any favours to businesses.
Guido has the video:
On December 22, Sturgeon was photographed maskless chatting to two women at a pub. They did not have masks, either, but at least they were eating, so had an excuse. Sturgeon apologised only because she was sorry she got caught:
The story caused quite a stir:
The following day, Sturgeon apologised in Holyrood:
She said she was kicking herself harder than her worst critic would:
The author of the Scottish blog Lily of St Leonards pointed out the hypocrisy not only of the mask violation but, more importantly, Sturgeon’s criticism of Boris’s continuation of Brexit negotiations:
Sturgeon is not merely a hypocrite about masks, she is also a hypocrite about transition periods.
Imagine if Sturgeon had been given her wish and there had been an independence referendum in 2018 and she had won it. There would have been a transition period. Let’s say it was due to end in March 2020. Scottish Independence Day would have been April the First. Would Sturgeon have really extended the transition period because of the Covid outbreak? But what if she had extended it and Scotland had continued to receive money from the Treasury? When would the transition period end? When we no longer needed the money? It’s another word for never.
While condemning the British Government for not extending the transition period with the EU due to Covid, Sturgeon is still planning an independence referendum for 2021. If we must extend the transition period because of Covid, why does she suppose it is sensible to have a referendum on breaking up Britain? We have had four years to prepare for leaving the EU. Sturgeon doesn’t even have a plan for independence that takes into account the economic damage of 2020.
Brexit is massively easier to achieve than Scottish separatism. It doesn’t involve setting up a new state. It merely involves us returning to what we had been for centuries until the early 1970s.
The winter saw a resumption of semi-lockdowns throughout the UK, in England as well as in the devolved nations.
Schools had to close just as pupils and students returned from Chrismas holidays in January.
It was thought that President Trump, having lost to Joe Biden, would be taking a golfing trip in Scotland in order to avoid handing over the presidency to him. Sturgeon put her foot down.
On January 5, NPR reported:
Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says President Trump wouldn’t be allowed to visit Scotland to golf during its pandemic lockdown, responding to speculation that Trump might travel to a Scottish golf resort rather than attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“We are not allowing people to come in to Scotland without an essential purpose right now and that would apply to him, just as it applies to anybody else,” Sturgeon said after being asked about Trump on Tuesday. “Coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose.”
Sturgeon was responding to questions spurred by a report in the Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post, which cited a source at Prestwick Airport as saying the facility has been told a U.S. military Boeing 757 aircraft will arrive on Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s term expires and Biden is inaugurated …
As for the chance that Trump might use an international trip to one of his golf resorts to avoid the handover of power, Sturgeon said she has not been told of any of Trump’s travel plans.
In the event, the whole world knows that Trump stayed in Washington …
Also on January 5, Scotland had not decreased the required number of days for self-isolation, as Guido reminded us:
On 22nd December, England’s Covid rules changed so infected individuals can stop isolating after seven days rather than ten, so long as they test negative on day six and seven. Six days ago Wales followed suit, and a day later Northern Ireland copied the change. Leaving one obvious outlier…
It now looks like Sturgeon will confirm the cut, with a statement expected later today and her deputy John Swinney saying yesterday that their administration is “actively considering” reducing the self-isolation period.
Meanwhile, the vaccine rollout began.
On January 28, The Mail reported that Sturgeon sided with the EU in saying that the UK had too many vaccine doses and the EU too few:
Nicola Sturgeon was accused of taking the EU’s side in the bitter vaccine row today as she vowed to publish details of the UK’s supplies despite Boris Johnson ordering her to keep them secret.
In an extraordinary move, the First Minister risked undermining Britain’s position, with Brussels heaping pressure on firms to give the bloc a bigger share of the stocks.
Despite the PM warning that the information must be confidential to protect the rollout, Ms Sturgeon told Holyrood she will release it from next week ‘regardless of what they say’.
The timing of Ms Sturgeon’s intervention was particularly provocative given that it came as Mr Johnson was on an official visit to Scotland to make the case for the Union.
Tory MPs vented fury at Ms Sturgeon – who wants Scotland to be independent and rejoin the bloc – saying she is ‘obviously more inclined to help the EU than she is the UK’.
Tory MP Peter Bone told MailOnline: ‘The simple truth is she has a tendency to support the EU rather than the United Kingdom.
‘It is wrong, her behaviour. I would have thought she would praise the success of the UK because Scotland shares in that. If she was in the EU and not part of the UK she would still be waiting for her vaccines. Get behind the UK government and stop playing petty politics.’
The row erupted as tensions between Britain and Brussels over vaccine supplies escalated again as the EU warned drug companies it will use all legal means to block the export of jabs from the continent unless manufacturers deliver the shots they have promised.
The EU’s vaccination rollout continues to lag far behind the UK’s, with the bloc now desperately scrambling to boost supplies – but deliveries have slowed due to production problems.
Brussels has publicly slammed AstraZeneca for failing to deliver on its contract with the bloc and has even asked the firm to divert jabs from Britain.
Now it has emerged that European Council President Charles Michel has said in a letter to four EU leaders that the EU should explore legal means to ensure it receives the jabs it has bought.
On March 9, the Scottish Sun reported that Sturgeon was relaxing social gatherings — provided they were small, outdoors and close to home:
NICOLA Sturgeon has confirmed plans to allow four adults from two households to meet outdoors from Friday.
The First Minister also revealed older children can mix again in groups …
“And, in addition, we will make clear in our guidance that this will allow for social and recreational purposes, as well as essential exercise.
“Meeting will be possible in any outdoor space, including private gardens.
“But please, do stick to the new rules. Gatherings must be a maximum of four people, from two households. And you should only go indoors if that is essential in order to reach a back garden, or to use the toilet.
“And, for now, please stay as close to home as possible.
“We hope to be in a position to relax – at least to some extent – travel restrictions within Scotland in the weeks ahead, but it is not safe to do so just yet.”
By April 2021, with the UK’s schools still closed, Sturgeon was planning a phased re-opening in Scotland. In 2020, there were problems in marking exams with so much of the school year out the window. To be fair, other UK nations implemented similar policies with similar disastrous results. In 2021, Sturgeon stipulated that no exams were to be set. Understandable, but teachers needed some sort of assessment for pupils and came up with something called the Alternative Certification Model, which allowed teachers to mark pupils on what they observed in class. Sturgeon did not like the proposal and offered no alternative solution, leaving head teachers to come up with their own plans while trying to avoid the word ‘exam’:
At that time, booze and most hospitality was once again off the menu. Although Sturgeon followed Wales’s Prif Weinidog (First Minister) in relaxing some restrictions, hospitality was not one of them:
This was less than a month before local and national elections (for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) took place.
On April 13, Guido Fawkes noted that Scottish hospitality was suffering badly (red emphases his):
Sadly for Scotland’s hospitality sector, Guido’s tip-off that the Scottish government was to bring forward its unlocking of hospitality didn’t materialise. Last night, Scotland’s hospitality sector was warning the two-week lag north of the border would cost up to £20 million…
While Sturgeon often boasted at her televised briefings that Scotland had the best plan and the lowest infection rate as a result, it turned out that she was wrong.
On April 30, Guido posted that Scotland had the highest infection rates per capita in the UK:
Guido told us:
Statistics from the ONS this afternoon reveal Scotland is lagging significantly behind England, Wales and Northern Ireland in their Covid prevalence rate. Wales has the lowest rates by far, with one case per 1,570; followed by England’s 1,010; and Northern Ireland’s 940. Scotland, however, is well behind the rest of the country’s progress, at one in every 640. Sturgeon’s so-called ‘good pandemic’ has always been a smokescreen of spin, rather than epidemiological success…
On May 21, Sturgeon forgot to be politically correct and call the Indian variant by another name:
Guido observed:
A rule which apparently never applied to the Kent variant in the first place…
The Spectator thought along the same lines:
… newly appointed health secretary Hamza Yousaf was on hand to claim that ‘a reason why we are calling it the April-02’ variant is because it is ‘important for us not to allow this virus to divide us as communities and people.’
Clearly the SNP feel no such qualms about doing so with the people of Kent.
On May 27, Boris’s former adviser Dominic Cummings explained to a parliamentary select committee how Sturgeon sabotaged UK-wide coronavirus COBRA meetings.
Nicola Sturgeon undermined the UK’s four-nations approach to tackling the coronavirus crisis by “babbling” about high-level meetings, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
Boris Johnson’s former senior adviser accused the first minister of undermining meetings of Cobra, the disasters committee, by announcing the outcome of discussions at media briefings.
Sturgeon held her televised briefings daily at 12.15pm during the pandemic, so they were often directly after a UK-wide crisis meeting.
Cummings told the Westminster science and technology committee and health and social care committee that the online Cobra meetings became shams because other participants feared what Sturgeon would say on TV. This resulted in decisions not being made because of distrust, he added.
“The last Cobra meeting I can even remember downstairs in the Cobra room was essentially a Potemkin [fake] meeting because it was with the DAs [devolved administrations] and what happened was, as soon as we had these meetings, Nicola Sturgeon would just go straight out and announce what she wanted,” Cummings said.
“So you had these completely Potemkin meetings without anyone actually digging into the reality in detail, because everybody thought, as soon as the meeting is finished, everyone’s going to just pop up on TV and start babbling.”
On June 1, Sturgeon said that the scheduled reopening of Scotland could be delayed because not enough people had been vaccinated. Once these people get hold of maximum control, they don’t give it up easily:
On June 9, Sturgeon backed out of a Scotland-specific coronavirus inquiry, as did Mark Drakeford for Wales. A UK-wide inquiry would go ahead instead:
Guido pointed out that the SNP’s May 2021 local/devolved election manifesto had promised one (because of the high rates of care home deaths):
Both Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon are facing backlash after seemingly cowering out of conducting their own, nation-specific Covid inquiries. Despite it being in the SNP manifesto, Sturgeon is now being warned not to break the pledge after backtracking away from the commitment. The SNP manifesto promised a Scotland-specific inquiry “as soon as possible after the election”, however the first minister’s spokesman told the press on Sunday that the government “was yet to decide whether Scotland needed an inquiry at all, insisting she would first wait to see the terms of reference of a proposed UK-wide probe instead.” As slippery as a Sturgeon…
In Wales, Mark Drakeford didn’t commit to an inquiry in his election manifesto, and is sticking to his refusal. Being pressed during first minister’s questions yesterday, he told Tory leader Andrew RT Davies that the UK-wide inquiry being set up by the PM would be sufficient.
On June 29, Sturgeon had another travel ban in place between Scotland and the north west of England. Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham forced her to overturn it. She never consulted him on the matter.
Burnham called the ban hypocritical:
Guido explained:
… Health secretary Humza Yousaf confirmed in Holyrood today that the ban between Scotland and Manchester, Bolton and Salford will lift tomorrow. Sturgeon brought in the ban without approaching Burnham and without consultation. Mad with power…
Yousaf claims the restrictions are being removed “due to changes in the epidemiological position for those areas.” The ban on travel between Scotland and Blackburn will remain in place, however. Guido imagines locals in Blackburn won’t be too keen to travel to Scotland anyhow, given it’s experiencing its largest Covid wave since the start of the pandemic…
On August 3, Sturgeon began lifting restrictions throughout Scotland. However, as Guido reported, some would stay in place for quite a while:
… the “number of mitigation measures” include
-
- Mask mandates which Sturgeon expects will ‘likely (…) be mandated in law for some time to come.”
- An ongoing requirement for indoor hospitality venues to collect the contact details of customers.
Sturgeon added:
It is important to be clear that it does not signal the end of the pandemic or a return to life exactly as we knew it before Covid struck.
On August 25, Sturgeon announced that Scotland would be conducting its own coronavirus inquiry, independent of the UK-wide one. A change of heart from what she said earlier.
Nicola Sturgeon has said Scotland will launch its own judge-led public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic by the end of the year …
One of its central aims will be to investigate “events causing public concern” — specifically the excessive death rate in Scottish care homes.
Sturgeon and Jeane Freeman, the former health secretary, have both admitted that discharging 1,300 elderly people from hospitals into care homes without robust testing at the start of the pandemic had been a mistake. More than 3,000 people died in care homes, a third of all the deaths in Scotland …
Sturgeon said the Scottish government would continue to liaise with the UK government about its own inquiry.
Did that ever take place? I don’t know. Certainly, no questions that I’ve heard have been asked in Holyrood.
Eventually, Scotland re-opened, long after England and some time after Wales.
Conclusion
From this litany of errors, including nationalism, hypocrisy and power-grabbing, we can see that Nicola Sturgeon was — and is — no saint.
More to follow on her other mistakes next week.
It’s been a week full of news, which is unusual right before Christmas. Yet, here we are.
Omicron death
The person who died with Omicron was an unvaccinated man in his 70s:
I, too, would like those questions answered.
The man’s stepson called into Nick Ferrari’s LBC show to say that he was a germophobe. He had everything delivered to his door and never left the house unless he had to post a letter:
Guido Fawkes has more (emphasis in the original):
Speaking to Nick Ferrari, the stepson of the man who died earlier this week claimed that he had been taken in by “conspiracy theories”, and refused to take the vaccine despite being in his early 70s:
He thought it was a conspiracy. He was an intelligent man but it’s all these different things you are getting from online and different media things… He wasn’t vaccinated at all.
According to the latest figures, there are currently 15 people in hospital with Omicron, an increase of 5 since Tuesday…
Chris Whitty’s Omicron projections
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson held a press conference with Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Officer Prof Patrick Vallance.
Whitty predicted Armageddon with a chart showing unbelievably high projections of Omicron cases.
A good friend of mine said he hoped that chart would come back to bite Whitty in the proverbial. I couldn’t agree more.
However, when Whitty appeared before the Health and Social Care Select Committee on Thursday, December 16, he changed his tune when giving evidence to MPs.
The Telegraph reported (emphases mine):
Britain may be “better off” with omicron than it was with the delta variant, thanks to the booster programme, Prof Chris Whitty has suggested.
Giving evidence at the Health and Social Care Select Committee, the Chief Medical Officer for England said that vaccines appeared to be holding up well against omicron and said boosters may even be preventing transmissibility and infection …
“It is possible that with a boost, we’re better off with omicron than we are with two vaccines with delta for severe disease,” he told MPs.
Prof Whitty said he was expecting omicron to cause an “impressive” rise in cases, which could lead to daily peaks in admission bigger than seen in the January wave, when hospitalisations hit nearly 40,000 a day.
However, he said that cases may begin to fall quickly and that a milder illness may mean people would stay in hospital for a short period, reducing the overall burden on the health service. Fewer people may also need intensive care, he added …
“I think most people think on the positive side, that there will be some preserved immunity, particularly on the non-antibody side, such as T-cells. Therefore it is likely someone who has one or two vaccines already will have some protection and with a booster considerably more protection against hospitalisation and death.
“It does look as if boosters restore some of the ability to actually reduce infection and transmission, at least for a period of time.”
Then he told MPs that he was reluctant to give the public projection numbers, yet he did just that at this week’s press conference:
“I have resisted putting forward projection numbers into the public domain because I don’t think they are reliable and you can’t put enough caveats on them.”
We don’t think they are reliable either, Prof Whitty.
Health and Security Agency’s Omicron projections for England withdrawn
The UK Health and Security Agency also backtracked on their projections because of a change in public behaviour. I wonder:
If only they would lift Plan B …
… because it is really hurting the hospitality sector.
Michel Roux Jr has tweeted about his daughter Emily’s London restaurant Caractère, which is suffering from a rash of sudden cancellations:
Her restaurant is not the only one. Omicron has everyone running scared.
But, what if it ‘cases’ did double every two days and what if we all caught Omicron? Would it confer herd immunity? We’ll know if the following extrapolation is true by Twelfth Night:
The Queen cancels Windsor Castle pre-Christmas lunch
Because of the Omicron scare, our sovereign has cancelled her traditional pre-Christmas family lunch at Windsor Castle. ITV’s Chris Ship reports:
South Africa, however, remains relatively relaxed about Omicron, as the Daily Mail‘s Dan Hodges points out. Note the reply, which shows Chris Whitty contradicting himself yet again. Either boosters help immunity or they don’t. Which is it, Chris?
The elusive NHS GP can be seen — privately
Our NHS GPs have been elusive since last year. If you’re lucky, you can get a telephone or an online appointment. Very few patients are able to see them in person.
However, if one goes private, one can see one’s GP:
It looks as if the Mail on Sunday is investigating this situation. Good!
Killing off ivermectin as coronavirus prophylaxis
In more medical news, we discover how ivermectin was effectively killed off as a prophylaxis for coronavirus in the UK and the US.
Thanks to my reader dearieme for the Vox Day link, which leads to a World Tribune article summarising the incident from Robert Kennedy Jr’s New York Times Bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the global war on Democracy and Public Health.
Excerpts follow:
Andrew Hill, PhD, is a senior visiting Research Fellow in Pharmacology at Liverpool University. He is also an advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation. As a researcher for the WHO evaluating ivermectin, Hill wielded enormous influence over international guidance for the drug’s use.
Hill had previously authored an analysis of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 that found the drug overwhelmingly effective.
On Jan. 6 of 2021, Hill testified enthusiastically before the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidlelines Panel in support of ivermectin’s use. Within a month, however, Hill found himself in what he describes as a “tricky situation.” Under pressure from his funding sponsors, Hill then published an unfavorable study. Ironically, he used the same sources as in the original study. Only the conclusions had changed.
Shortly before he published, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Director of the Evidence-based Medicine Consultancy in Bath, England, and one of the world’s leading medical research analysts, contacted Hill via Zoom and recorded the call (transcript below). Lawrie had learned of his new position and reached out to try to rectify the situation.
In a remarkable exchange, a transcript of which appears on pages 137 – 143 in Kennedy’s book, Hill admitted his manipulated study would likely delay the uptake of ivermectin in the UK and United States, but said he hoped his doing so would only set the lifesaving drug’s acceptance back by about “six weeks,” after which he was willing to give his support for its use …
The two scientists discussed ivermectin’s positive results in combating coronavirus:
… the number of preventable deaths incurred by such a delay would be staggering — as many as 504,000.
Hill declined being listed as Lawrie’s head author on the paper with the positive results. Instead, he published the negative findings.
This is why he did so:
Four days before publication, Hill’s sponsor Unitaid gave the University of Liverpool, Hill’s employer $40 million. Unitaid, it turns out, was also an author of the conclusions of Hill’s study …
… when pressed he admitted his sponsor, Unitaid, was an unacknowledged author of conclusions.
“Unitaid has a say in the conclusions of the paper. Yeah,” he told Lawrie …
Dr. Pierre Kory, of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, commented, “Andrew is apparently making a living now accusing the doctors and scientists who support ivermectin of medical fraud.”
Regulatory acceptance of ivermectin did not delay only six weeks. Instead, almost a year later, it has still not been approved by health agencies in the United Kingdom or in United States. Instead The WHO, CDC, NIH, and FDA have suppressed the drug’s use.
Instead, we are taking notional vaccines. Who knows what they are doing to our bodies?
Boris’s daughter’s name
Boris and Carrie Johnson have named their infant daughter Romy Iris Charlotte. She is shown with her brother Wilfred:
Romy is a ‘rainbow baby’ because she followed a miscarriage.
Best wishes to the Johnsons.
Conservatives lose safe seat for first time ever
In less cheery news for Boris, the Conservatives lost Owen Paterson‘s former North Shropshire constituency for the first time ever — nearly 200 years:
Paterson resigned a few weeks ago over sleaze allegations. He had a 23,000+ majority in the 2019 general election.
Failed candidate Neil Shastri-Hunt, who had been parachuted in from outside the constituency, said he planned to get some sleep and:
go and give my 8-week old a bit of a cuddle.
My commiserations to anyone who took this misguided betting advice:
The by-election took place on Thursday, December 16. The Liberal Democrats won by a landslide, as I thought they might:
Also note how low the vote for Labour was, despite party leader Sir Keir Starmer refusing to admit he is a socialist:
Conservative Party chairman Oliver Dowden MP admitted his party ‘got a kicking’ but added that such by-election results are not unusual when a Prime Minister is halfway through his or her term in office:
Therefore, this protest vote might be a one-off. Let us hope so.
However, in order for that to happen, Boris must be more of a Conservative and less of a Green Blairite.
Courier’s employees throw parcels against wall
And last, but hardly least, we have distressing news about some Christmas home deliveries.
Hermes is the UK’s worst courier company, but we have to put up with their delayed, sometimes damaged, deliveries.
A reporter from The Times did a brief stint with Hermes and found a group of disgruntled employees, some of whom threw parcels against a warehouse wall. The reporter is shown with his car boot open:
Hermes will investigate but says this is not typical behaviour of its employees. The company is at the bottom of the national delivery league table:
Meanwhile, I have been noting the rather downbeat Christmas notes we have received with our cards this year.
I hope that 2022 brings us far better tidings.
The UK’s biggest topics that truly matter to everyday people are coronavirus, COP26 and the fishing row with France.
Coronavirus
On Wednesday, November 10, the BBC news site featured an article on mothers and babies over the past year and a half: ‘Coronavirus births: “My baby’s first word was mask”‘.
How sad is that? My first word was ‘Da-da’.
The BBC interviewed Leanne Howlett, who gave birth to a daughter in March 2020, during the first lockdown. Poor woman.
She said (emphases mine):
“Overnight, home appointments [from the perinatal mental-health team] dropped away,” she remembers.
They would be over the phone instead, she was told, causing her panic about how she would cope.
Nurseries were closed, she couldn’t see family and getting through the basics of each day was a huge struggle.
“I dipped to rock-bottom,” says the 34-year-old.
“You cannot bring yourself out of it – you think everyone is better off without you” …
Leanne started to feel better last summer, when childcare bubbles were allowed and her husband took time off work, but she believes the impact on her daughter, Miley, now two years old, has been profound.
“She is not at all sociable – she didn’t see anyone but us until she was nearly one.
“All those missed activities, photos, and all those firsts,” laments Leanne.
When she did go to her first baby group, all the mums wore face coverings, she says.
“My baby’s first word was mask.”
Black taxis
Prior to the pandemic, Uber was more popular than the traditional black taxi, especially in London.
In fact, Uber drivers from as far away as Manchester drove to the capital every weekend to reap the largesse.
On October 30, The Guardian posted an article on the new-found success of black cabs: ‘Black cabs roar back into favour as app firms put up their prices’.
It begins with the story of a young man who had been stood up by Uber and another app-oriented service, Bolt:
The young man was frantic, trying to get to a third date with a woman he already knew he wanted to marry. But four Bolt drivers had let him down, and when he tapped his Uber app, it was asking for triple surge pricing. In desperation, he did something he’d never done before – flagged down a black London taxi.
“He was trying to open the front door to get in. He wanted to give me a postcode – it was the usual thing you get from the ones who’ve never been in a cab before,” said Karen Proctor, a London taxi driver for more than a decade. “I told him ‘the postcode’s not going to help – just tell me where you want to get to’. It was a restaurant. And we got there seven minutes early, at about a third of the cost. He was converted.”
Tales like that are why, after nearly a decade of Uber-induced gloom, things are looking up for cabbies. Trade has roared back into life since the end of Covid measures in July, with many talking with some astonishment about their best-ever takings.
I hope the marriage proposal met with success.
I am a big champion of black taxis. London drivers have to pass a three-year course called The Knowledge, where they regularly go in at least once a week to be quizzed by a veteran taxi driver on how to get various places in and out of the capital. This requires memorising routes, including all the requisite street names. I saw a three-part documentary on it several years ago. It looked and sounded daunting.
During lockdown, some black taxi drivers sold their vehicles and left the road for good. Some firms are buying up those taxis and renting them out to licensed drivers:
While drivers with a cab talk of people running towards cabs when they stop to let out a passenger, arguing about whose taxi it is, or queues of 100 people outside Victoria train station or Liverpool city centre, there are plenty of licensed drivers without a vehicle.
“People are coming to us every single day looking for a cab,” said Lee DaCosta, a founder of Cabvision which runs payment systems for taxis and also rents a fleet for drivers who don’t own a vehicle. “We’re having drivers turning up literally walking the streets from garage to garage going ‘got any cabs?’”
Transport for London (TfL) figures show there were 13,858 licensed taxis in London on 24 October, compared with historic levels of about 21,000.
The rapid decline is partly due to Covid. During the pandemic, when drivers had no prospect of earning money and some were ineligible for government support, some were forced to sell their cabs and take up other jobs. It led to the sight of hundreds of cabs being stored in unused car parks and fields around London.
But some of the decline pre-dated the pandemic, and DaCosta says TfL’s policy of forcing older, diesel taxis off the road has not been accompanied by enough support for electric cabs.
As Uber demand returns to normal, however, drivers are fewer on the road than before. Some were EU nationals who went home and never returned. Others have opted to drive delivery vehicles instead.
No doubt everything will stabilise in time.
COP26
It appears that COP26 did not do much for Glasgow’s hospitality sector.
On Wednesday, November 10, The Times reported that the anticipated uplift didn’t happen. The conference ends this weekend:
While hotels across Glasgow are fully booked to accommodate the thousands of delegates, the hospitality trade is understood not to have seen any uplift in trading since the event began on October 31.
There are even suggestions the event has led to a reduction in trade for some operators. Footfall in the city centre is said to have been affected as people try to avoid the demonstrations.
There is also thought to be a number of delegations which have stayed outside of the city, with Edinburgh hotels among those which are busy.
Oli Norman, whose Ashton Properties owns venues such as Brel and Sloans, said he had heard of some publicans and restaurant owners who have seen their trading fall by up to 50 per cent, and added: “It should have signified a resurgence in the local economy but if anything it has been a damp squib.”
Fishing wars
Any Englishwoman hoping to keep relations smooth with the French during the fishing wars in the Channel would do well to support her adopted country, as Samantha Brick, who lives in France, wrote in The Telegraph:
“Fishing wars” isn’t a phrase I’d ever suppose would have an impact on my marriage – or indeed on my status in France – but in these strange times I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
After I recently strutted through arrivals at Bergerac airport I was pulled up sharp at passport control. While my documents were checked, I was casually asked what I thought about the issue of French fishing trawlers being unable to go about their business in British waters.
Noting my French passport was still in the hands of the uniformed officer, I swallowed my pride and, after a bit of inconclusive waffle, I was told I should be proud of my French passport and those fishing trawlers. I feebly replied: “Vive la France” …
Not since Brexit has my other half been so fired up about Anglo-French relations. The right to fish is something that the French get very, very angry about. Pascal routinely shouts at the breakfast and lunchtime television (frankly OTT) news reports of the French fishing industry being stymied by brazen Brits and a dozen or so of our fishing boats.
Crustacea, I’ve learnt, is a French human right. The right to gorge on seafood is taken so seriously that drones and police on horseback are deployed to patrol and protect Atlantic oyster farms.
Her husband Pascal’s household does not sound either women- or Anglo-friendly:
My brother-in-law is also married to an English woman. She isn’t mad about the dozen or so oysters the family get in per person each Christmas either; note, we Brits have to compare notes outside the home on this as speaking in our native tongue at home is banned.
In fact, food is probably the area of most contention in our marriage …
… the French are pretty rigid when it comes to anything and everything at the kitchen table. There are centuries old traditions and behaviours which have been silently passed down the generations.
In the early days I once stood up, noticed I’d not finished my rosé and then drained the glass. Pascal was in turn speechless and outraged afterwards. This is, apparently, something no French woman would ever do. Women are supposed to nurse just one glass of wine throughout the evening …
… one rule he is immovable on is not clearing your plate. The motto – which is drilled into every house guest – is “you eat what you take”. The French cannot abide waste.
Sounds dire.
I don’t remember my academic year in France being like that and I was a fairly regular guest in French households, either for parties or for sleepovers concluding with Sunday lunch.
Look before you leap, ladies.
Conclusion
We in the UK are at a strange crossroads at the moment.
Everything we were told not to worry about has become of increasing concern: children’s development post-COVID, Glasgow’s resurgence during COP26 and the nothing-to-see-here fishing wars. At least the taxi trade is prospering.
The cost of coronavirus in England has been immense.
There is no end in sight for some restrictions and, as I wrote earlier in the week, there will be no Freedom Day on July 19, except for theatres and nightclubs.
London
On July 15, The Telegraph‘s Tanya Gold wrote about London’s ongoing ghost town appearance (emphases mine):
It is too early to say that London is dying, but something is wrong with the city and Covid has accelerated it. Certainly, there is a sense that things are slipping out of control …
I was in central London last week, and it felt ever more ominous. Perhaps it was the weather – again, the rain was monstrous. Or perhaps it was the silence: the department stores in Oxford Street were glassy and empty …
What will happen if offices shutter forever, and most people work from home? This will work for the affluent with spare rooms for offices, and gardens; or they might just leave for Amersham and its Britain in Bloom awards stacked on posts. For those renting in inner cities, it won’t; employers will pass a business expense onto an employee, one whose home is already small.
Will central London’s beautiful buildings become flats? John Lewis [a nationwide department store chain] is moving into housing. Will anyone want to live in them if the city declines?
Restaurants
On the topic of London, Mark Hix, one of Britain’s best chefs, has had to close his two restaurants in the capital.
He has moved back to Dorset and opened a restaurant there.
Hix Soho in Brewer Street is now a taqueria and Tramshed, his old 150-cover restaurant in Shoreditch (East London), will become a furniture showroom.
He wrote about the two establishments for The Telegraph.
The owners of the El Pastor taqueria invited him to visit, which he did:
My strongest feeling was not one of regret, or even missing the time when this place was my flagship, but rather of pleasure at seeing it busy and buzzy again. It has a new lease of life. And therefore I wished them well, especially with the landlord, the same greedy one who had doubled the rent when I was the tenant and began the collapse of my London chain of restaurants because we just couldn’t make any money at the rate he was charging.
We have all learnt some important life lessons these past 16 months of Covid. Perhaps the landlord has too in the new business climate it has produced. Most of all, though, what that walk down memory lane did was give me courage.
As for the Tramshed:
I’ve got a date in my diary to go back to the kitchen at the Tramshed, my old 150-cover restaurant in Shoreditch. It is going to be less return in triumph and more fond farewell, for my presence there is, as the theatre posters put it, ‘for one night only’. The guys who have been running it since my business went into administration are moving out and are staging one last hurrah with my help.
Lockdown has killed the place off and it is going to be converted into a furniture showroom of some description. When I took it on in 2012, this handsome building had been used for chemical storage, so I suppose it is a case of back to the future. Which rather neatly sums up my life story since I handed back the keys in March of last year after breaking the news to the staff there that they had lost their jobs.
He foresees a difficult return for hospitality:
I’ve come back to Dorset, where it all started, and am now building a new future. All being well, on Monday we will be taking one more step towards that with the lifting of all Government restrictions on how we trade, but the hard work of repairing the damage done by Covid has only just begun. The road back to prosperity for the whole hospitality industry remains a long one.
As I write, Hix is taking a brief fishing break in Iceland, a country on the Green list.
However, a question remains over whether he and other restaurant owners will be able to trade freely on Monday with the lifting of restrictions.
Hospitality chiefs are still trying to interpret what Boris Johnson said on Monday, which sounded to me like a U-turn on what he said on July 5. The Times says that masks and outdoor service are still recommended, as is checking customers in with contact details. That is what is in place today.
Furthermore, coronavirus passports, which the Government had previously denied would be recommended, are, in fact, on the table.
On Wednesday, July 14, The Telegraph reported:
Ministers on Wednesday published delayed sectoral advice for businesses on how to operate when the country moves to step four of the Prime Minister’s roadmap out of lockdown next Monday …
The Government was accused of widening the net of companies encouraged to use domestic coronavirus passports, after Boris Johnson initially signalled on Monday that they would be recommended for nightclubs and venues with “large crowds”.
The Prime Minister said relevant firms should show “social responsibility” and “make use” of the NHS Covid pass app, which shows proof of double vaccination, a recent negative test or natural immunity, as “a means of entry”.
The updated guidance sparked a backlash among Conservative MP and hospitality chiefs, after advice specifically for restaurants, pubs, bars, nightclubs and takeaway services encouraged the use of Covid passports.
It stated: “Consider the use of the NHS Covid pass to reduce the risk of transmission at your venue or event.”
So far, only Steve Baker MP (Con) has spoken out against this recommendation:
I am simply astonished that after everything the Prime Minister and Michael Gove said in the past about ID cards that they are advancing this fast down this really quite appalling path.
Kate Nicholls, the head of the industry body UK Hospitality, expressed her disappointment and said:
the guidance for pubs and restaurants was “disappointing” in the wake of a select committee of MPs and a Cabinet Office consultation “acknowledging that this was a very difficult thing to implement in a domestic hospitality setting”.
She said ministers needed to provide a “whole suite of guidance” to explain how Covid passports should work in the sector “for us to decide whether we are willing to adopt this on a voluntary basis”.
Predicting few businesses would adopt the measure by Monday, from which date the guidance is meant to apply, she said: “I don’t think anybody would be able to introduce this on a voluntary basis from Monday until we have clarification.”
Ms Nicholls added that “more work is needed by the Government” and warned that there were “real concerns” around equalities legislation, and “practical issues” around the type of testing that qualifies and how businesses should handle customers’ personal health data.
This is an unfortunate development.
Transport
Still on the subject of London, the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan (Lab), a strong opponent of his predecessor Boris Johnson, intends to continue with mask mandates on Transport for London (TfL) vehicles and the Tube as a condition of carriage.
Douglas Murray wrote an editorial for The Telegraph in which he says:
Sadiq Khan, for instance, has tried to look super responsible by insisting that even after the rules for mask-wearing are relaxed masks will be compulsory on public transport in London. Obviously, throughout the pandemic, there have been the rules and there has been what people do. I have seen plenty of people get on the bus with their mask on and then pull it under their chin as soon as they are in their seat. We have become used to the theatre of masks.
But the Mayor of London has ordered Transport for London to enforce mask wearing after July 19, making the prospect of a journey on the London Underground even more enjoyable. Citizens of the capital not only have to pay the highest fares of any commuters in the world for one of the world’s worst services, but must now mask up under threat of the London Transport Police if they do not. What a wonderful way to get the capital moving again.
Agreed. It makes no sense, and Khan has complained for months that TfL’s finances have been dire since lockdown started last year. It’s pure political theatre just to oppose Boris Johnson’s government.
Office work
On July 5, the Government encouraged office workers to go back to their workplaces.
This Monday, they backtracked because they got complaints in the media.
The Times has an article about the travel company Tui, which has told its employees they only need to come into the office one day a month, regardless of what happens on July 19.
Other companies have followed suit. However, in the United States, fully-vaccinated employees are expected to be back at their desks by September:
Other businesses adjusting their working practices include KPMG, the accountancy firm, which has told its 16,000 UK staff they should work in the office for up to four days a fortnight. In the US, by way of contrast, Bank of America yesterday followed Goldman Sachs in telling all fully-vaccinated staff to be back at their desks by September.
The policy director of the Institute of Directors says that the Government’s advice this month has been confusing:
Roger Barker, policy director at the Institute of Directors, said: “Like everybody else, businesses across the country having been awaiting ‘freedom day’ with bated breath — but we have had a series of mixed messages and patchwork requirements from government that have dampened enthusiasm.
“Return to work or continue to stay at home. Throw away your masks or continue to wear them. The guidance has done little to dispel that confusion.
“Business leaders are understandably confused as to the legal status that this guidance has and are concerned about vulnerability under health and safety legislation, as well as the validity of their insurance.
“Government needs to inspire confidence in businesses and the workforce that we can all return to work safely.”
School
We have little idea of exactly how much school-age children have been suffering over the past year.
One mother and her ex-husband saw how their daughter’s scholastic performance had been declining and put her in an independent school, with financial help from both sets of grandparents.
The mother, Mel Sims, told The Telegraph her story, beginning in the Spring of 2020:
My daughter was in Year 5 when the first lockdown brought her education to an abrupt halt. A bright only child, mature for her age because she spends so much time with adults, she’d been doing very well in the classroom. But then the state primary she attends in our village in Essex closed its doors to all but key worker children. I’m a 49-year-old single mother. My daughter’s father lives in Durham. I had no choice but to become her full-time teacher.
While some of her friends in private or religious schools were receiving a whole day of live Zoom teaching, my daughter’s school was very disappointing. What they did provide was an email every Monday morning, packed with multiple different lessons for parents to print off, somehow quickly get their heads around, then teach to our children as best we could.
My business – a children’s play centre – shut down along with the schools, so I was at home. I found myself teaching my daughter from 9.30am until 4.30pm every day. Other than the weekly email, we received no contact from the school, which, like many, lacks funding and has class sizes of 30-plus. My daughter’s after-school club, where she mixed with older children, was closed. Extracurricular dance classes went on hold and the swimming pool was shut.
Since Covid, my daughter has received very little or no homework as the teachers seem to feel the children already have enough on their plates. I don’t know what happened to her foreign language lessons. My previously high-achieving daughter was starting to fall behind the level she had been at before – not just a little, but dramatically. By the end of each week of lockdown, her maths and English were worse. She’d lost interest in doing better; any desire to excel. It was heartbreaking to see her sliding backwards.
This caused tension between the mother and the school:
Friction began to develop between us and the school, as they resented me trying to push her beyond the slow pace at which her class was moving. Many of the families in our village didn’t even have enough computers for their multiple children. My daughter’s academic success was riding on all the other local parents’ capabilities, and that felt deeply unfair on her.
Schools reopened last autumn then shut down at the end of January 4, 2021 for several weeks. By then, the cumulative negative effect had kicked in:
When the second lockdown arrived, my daughter was in Year 6 [the year before secondary school]. This time, there was at least a school registration every day, which took place over Zoom. But my daughter gained little from it, as everyone on the call was at such different levels both academically and behaviourally. There wasn’t the opportunity for much academic input from the teacher and my daughter quickly grew bored.
Fortunately, the girl had passed her 11-plus exams, which opened up more education opportunities. Her parents decided that she would have to go to an independent day school, but, even pooling their savings together, they could not afford school fees of £5,500 per term. With the help of the girl’s grandparents, they are able to meet the cost of the new school.
Mel Sims concludes:
We’ll all be making big changes. But we’ll do so in order that, if schools do close again, our daughter’s education will not grind to a halt. The new school staff have already assured me that if we go back into lockdown, exactly the same learning will continue over Zoom, full-time and unaided by parents.
I never thought it would come to this. Pre-pandemic, I’d always believed we didn’t need private school; that whatever happened at state school, we could get our daughter through.
School closures have changed all that. Yes, we’re paying a price. But I feel we’ve had to invest in a lockdown-proof education. With so many children off school again even now, as their “bubbles” have burst, it seems we have made the right decision.
Care homes
Recently, Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare, a group which runs 45 private care homes in England and one in Wales, wrote to Sajid Javid, the Secretary of State for the Department for Health and Social Care to ask that mask mandates be relaxed.
On Thursday, July 15, The Telegraph reported that:
some of these measures are now damaging the well-being of care home residents.
The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) is expected to issue updated guidance on care homes, and whether or not masks will be mandatory in them, later this week …
“For many residents, a visit from their family member has provided invaluable improvements to their well-being, but the requirement for these visitors to wear a face mask degrades the level of connection and therefore devalues the positive impacts their visits can have.
“This restrictive policy, along with various others from both the DHSC and PHE [Public Health England], should be reconsidered as we approach this next step in England’s roadmap out of lockdown.”
The letter said the success of the vaccination programme among care home staff and residents meant the majority of homes “are now set to confidently return back to an enhanced degree of normality”.
All 46 Sunrise and Gracewell homes have at least 90 per cent of residents vaccinated and all but one have more than 80 per cent of staff jabbed. This is the threshold that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) says needs to be met in each setting to provide a minimum level of protection against Covid outbreaks.
Helen Whately MP (Con) oversees social care provision. It is unclear as yet whether she will change any requirements for July 19. The Telegraph quoted her as saying:
I’m also really aware that there will be circumstances I’m expecting to continue in health and social care, clearly, where people will need to continue to wear PPE [personal protective equipment], which includes masks.
Conclusion
I find it concerning that the Left, whether in Parliament, SAGE and elsewhere have caused the Government to backtrack on Freedom Day.
As Douglas Murray says in his aforementioned article:
It is inevitable, perhaps, that politicians like Khan want to score some political points. But again what is so strange is that all the points are scored from that side. Putting aside a few MPs on the Tory benches there is no political pressure on us to go the other way. To do so – to advocate the path of greater risk and greater freedom – is still presented as though it is somehow irresponsible or otherwise risky.
But society is risky. Life is risky. The biggest leap towards normal life has already been taken. It is the success of the mass vaccination programme which this country has rolled out so well. But after that we do not need politicians and private companies policing us ever more. We need to take a different leap. Not into greater safety, but into greater freedom. Our allies and competitors are up for that. The question now is whether Britain is. An awful lot rides on the answer.
I couldn’t agree more.
On Monday, June 14, Prime Minister Boris Johnson postponed Freedom Day from Monday, June 21 to Monday, July 19.
Quelle surprise!
Although the data for hospitalisations and deaths look better than ever thanks to the vaccine rollout, SAGE modelling shows that if figures of cases — positive tests — continue to increase ‘exponentially’, then we could be in for a big problem:
However, the reality is more like this:
Incredibly, Britons support the delay:
Protest at Downing Street
Earlier in the afternoon, when it became clear that Boris was going to delay England’s reopening, a protest took place outside of Downing Street.
The BBC’s Nick Watt got caught up in it on his way to the mid-afternoon press briefing for journalists. I have no idea why the crowd harassed him, but the Metropolitan Police did not seem bothered:
Coronavirus briefing
Boris held his televised coronavirus briefing at 6 p.m.
Boris should have had Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, go to Parliament first to make this announcement, then give his press conference. Hancock poled up in the House of Commons two hours after Boris’s press conference. More on that below.
At the coronavirus briefing, Boris was accompanied by Sir Patrick Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty. Here are the highlights:
Sure, just as he announced June 21 would be a few months ago. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Some restrictions have been lifted for weddings and funerals:
The delay is partly because of the Delta variant from India:
Sure thing, Chris. By July, there could be another variant:
Even though Boris is trying to keep us hopeful, there is no way we would open in two weeks’ time instead of four:
This is because — as has been explained at previous coronavirus briefings — it takes four weeks for a full cycle of effects to complete before a decision can be made: cases, hospitalisations, deaths.
Keep in mind that our vaccination programme has been wildly successful. The elderly and vulnerable have had their second shot and 18-24 year olds are now invited to get their first inoculation.
The vaccines used thus far — AstraZeneca and Pfizer — are said to be highly effective against the virus, especially after two injections:
One of the three men said that we would have to ‘learn to live with this virus’. We know that, fellas, so open up.
We know that people are going to die, just as they do from flu:
That’s exactly what they said in April.
Labour are quite happy with an extension of restrictions. No surprise there:
Matt Hancock’s statement in the House of Commons
Matt Hancock announced the delay in the Commons that evening at 8:30.
Once again, the Government evaded going to Parliament first, followed by the media and public.
The Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was not happy. This is not the first time Hoyle has reprimanded Hancock:
Sir Lindsay said that he is ready to arrange a private meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss these continuing evasions of Parliament:
Hancock said:
That tweet is spot on. In March 2020, it was about ‘squashing the sombrero’ of hospital admissions, as Boris put it.
Then we had the rest of the list in that tweet.
Now it seems to be about zero COVID.
That’s quite a leap.
Hancock’s statement and the subsequent debate are available on Hansard. Excerpts follow. All MPs below are Conservative.
Jeremy Hunt MP, the chair of the Health and Social Care Committee and former Health Secretary, said (emphases mine):
May I start by saying that I totally agree with your expression of disappointment, Mr Speaker, that in a parliamentary democracy Parliament heard about this news after the media, and much as I respect my right hon. Friend it should be the Prime Minister who is here this evening?
I happen to support these measures and the caution the Government are showing, but may I suggest to my right hon. Friend that one of the reasons for the disappointment many people feel is the use of words like “irreversible”? Tonight, Sir Patrick Vallance said that we will be living with covid for the rest of our lives. If there is a vaccine-busting variant that threatens another 100,000 lives, these measures will not be irreversible, and we have a duty to be completely honest with people about the bumpiness of the road ahead. So may I urge the Health Secretary to be as cautious with the language we use as he rightly is with NHS bed capacity?
Mark Harper is one of the few MPs who wants England to open up now. He said:
Before I ask the Secretary of State my question, I should just say—as a former Government Chief Whip, it does not give me any great pleasure to do so—that I wholly associate myself with your remarks earlier, Mr Speaker. This statement should have been made to this House by the Prime Minister before it was made to the media. I hope that we do not see a recurrence of it and I wish you well in your meeting with him.
The Secretary of State has set out that it is not the Government’s policy to get to zero covid—indeed, that is not possible. Can he say whether it is the Government’s policy to maintain a low prevalence of this virus? If it is not, can he confirm the Prime Minister’s sentiments today that 19 July is a terminus date, and can he rule out bringing back restrictions in the autumn and winter when we see an inevitable rise in what is a respiratory virus?
Hancock replied:
Well, it is not inevitable—I do not think it is inevitable. It may happen, but it is not inevitable because we also have the planned booster programme to strengthen further the vaccination response. But it is absolutely clear, based on all the clinical advice that I have seen, that a goal of eradication of this virus is impossible. Indeed, there is one part of this country that tried it for a bit in the summer and found it to be impossible. Therefore, we must learn to live with this virus and we must learn how we can live our normal lives with this virus, so I reflect the Prime Minister’s words, which, of course, I concur with entirely, on 19 July. Our goal is to make sure that we get as much vaccination done between now and then—especially those second doses—to make sure that we can open up safely, even if there is a rise in cases, by protecting people from hospitalisation and especially from dying of this awful disease.
Steve Brine was, rightly, unhappy:
Last week, the Secretary of State told me:
“Our goal…is not a covid-free world…the goal is to live with covid”.—[Official Report, 7 June 2021; Vol. 696, c. 678.]
Well, you could have fooled me, and many of our constituents. There is dismay out there tonight. The reopening of the wedding industry is not a meaningful reopening and I think it is cruel the way some are being misled. The Prime Minister and my right hon. Friend have been very clear today that 19 July is not a new “not before” date but an end to all this, so will the Secretary of State tell the country his assessment of risk and personal responsibility and whether he feels that as a country we remotely have that right at this time?
Hancock replied (in part):
Once we have the offer of a vaccine to everybody, and once we have protected and mitigated the large part of that risk, we do need to move back to a world based on personal responsibility. That is right, and that is where we intend to go. I think that we have made steps already in that direction in steps 1, 2 and 3. This country is freer than almost any other in Europe in terms of our economy and of our society. That is partly because of the very rapid vaccination effort here, but I hope that my hon. Friend can take from that the direction we intend to go.
Peter Bone made excellent points on the Government’s disrespect for the Commons:
I am sure, Mr Speaker, that the Secretary of State for Health heard what you said at the beginning of this statement. May I ask the Secretary of State how we got ourselves into this position? He has been very good at coming to the House and making statements on covid, but on the biggest, most important day, the press were given an embargoed statement at 3 o’clock and the Prime Minister had a big showy press conference at 6, yet he could not be bothered to turn up until 8.30. This is a clear breach of the ministerial code. How did it happen? Who thought it was a good idea, and who actually broke the ministerial code?
Hancock had little to say in response but said he would continue answering questions.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown asked on what basis the decision to delay was made. Hancock said:
… Central to the judgment today is the fact that we are seeing a rise in hospitalisations, especially over the past week, and especially among those who are unvaccinated or have just had a single jab. Those people are not largely those who are unvaccinated out of choice; it is those who are unvaccinated because they have not yet had the opportunity because they are younger.
Until about a week ago, hospitalisations were basically flat. We thought that the link might have been completely broken between cases and hospitalisations or that it might be a lag. Sadly, hospitalisations then started to rise. For deaths, we have not yet seen that rise, which I am very pleased about; hopefully they will never rise, in which case the future will be much easier. It may still be that there is an element of it that is a lag, and we will be looking out for that very carefully over the couple of weeks ahead, but nevertheless our goal is to get those vaccines done in the five weeks between now and 19 July in order to make sure that this country is safe. I will commit to publishing anything further that we can that underpinned the decision, but I can honestly say to my hon. Friend that most of it is already in the public domain.
The morning after with talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer and guests
On Tuesday, June 15, Israel ditched its mask mandate:
They vaccinated quicker than the UK, which they could do as a much smaller country:
TalkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewed three interesting guests, whose videos are all worth watching.
Clearly frustrated by this delay, she asked her audience about their mood:
She opened her show with an editorial on selfishness, because many people say that her civil liberties stance is ‘selfish’. She turned the tables on her accusers:
She interviewed David Paton, the Professor of Industrial Economics Nottingham University Business School. He has been running his own models and studying the national statistics since the early days of the pandemic last year.
This is his take. He observes that we are doing much better than SAGE models suggest:
He also told Julia that we are doing much better than the SAGE models purport:
Next up was Hugh Osmond, the founder of the Punch Taverns chain. He said that the medical experts wanted to remove all joy from our lives. He also pointed out that hundreds of pubs have closed because of the government’s handling of the pandemic and that if the pub summer season is short this year, hundreds more will go to the wall by the end of 2021:
Julia’s next guest was Mark Harper MP, chairman of the parliamentary Covid Recovery Group, quoted in the aforementioned Hansard excerpt. I agree with him in that these restrictions might never end:
He cannot understand why the Government is not more positive about the success of the vaccine rollout. He also discussed the negative fear-mongering from the media. Note the reply tweet which is spot on re the G7 get-togethers:
Julia’s third guest in her coronavirus segment was barrister Francis Hoar, who has been anti-lockdown from the start:
Before his interview, he reiterated his concern about increased government control via a (Chinese style) social credit system:
He also retweeted the following:
This appears to be a quote from Sir Charles Walker MP (Conservative), who is also against lockdowns:
It is hard to disagree with him as the Government keeps moving the goalposts:
Francis Hoar told Julia Hartley-Brewer that Boris looked as if he had been taken hostage at last night’s coronavirus briefing and that he is deeply concerned about the future of young people today because of continuing restrictions. He is very much a supporter of having our personal freedoms restored yesterday:
Conclusion
I really do hope that England reopens on July 19. I wanted the nation to reopen on June 21.
However, if it does not, then it is unlikely to reopen until Spring 2022. That could be June 2022.
My reasoning is as follows. September is the month when schools reopen, so that is a risk factor. Then comes flu season when coronavirus will worsen. The experts and the Government will say that we shouldn’t have big Christmas celebrations at home, in the pub or in a restaurant because it’s just too risky. Winter is always a bad time for illness, and we don’t want to overburden the NHS, so we have to wait until sometime during the springtime.
Therefore, if reopening does not take place on July 21, 2021, then the next possible date is between mid-March (after the Cheltenham Festival, likely to be a ‘pilot’ event) and June 2022.
I hope I am wrong. I truly do.
In case you’ve missed the earlier posts in this series, here they are: parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.
The best known of the minority MPs from David Cameron’s premiership — 2010 to 2016 — is Rishi Sunak, who is Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He represents the Richmond constituency in Yorkshire.
Early years
Rishi Sunak’s grandparents moved from the Punjab province of India to East Africa. Rishi’s mother Usha was born in Tanzania. His father Yashvir was born in Kenya. Both are Hindus.
Both sets of grandparents migrated to the UK in the 1960s.
After marriage, Usha and Yashvir settled in Southampton, on the southern coast of England. Usha worked locally as a pharmacist. Yashvir was a general practitioner.
The couple have three children: Rishi, another son Sanjay, who is a psychologist, and a daughter Raakhi, who works on COVID-19 strategy for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
Rishi Sunak went to the renowned public (private) school Winchester College, founded in 1382, where he was head boy and editor of the student newspaper.
He then went to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a First in 2001 in PPE, which is nothing to do with hospital gowns, rather Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Whilst at Oxford, he did a brief stint at Conservative Campaign Headquarters.
During summer holidays he worked at a curry house in Southampton.
Sunak began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he worked as an analyst from 2001 to 2004.
He then decided to study for an MBA at Stanford University in California, where he met his wife, Akshata Murthy, the daughter of the Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, the man behind Infosys. The couple married in 2005. Sunak, a Fulbright Scholar, completed his MBA in 2006.
Sunak and his wife settled in England and have two young daughters.
Prior to entering politics, Sunak worked for two hedge funds and was also the director of one of his father-in-law’s companies, Catamaran Ventures.
Political career
Former Conservative Party leader William Hague represented Richmond, which has been a safe seat for the party for over a century.
Rishi Sunak was elected comfortably to his first term with a majority of 19,550 (36.2%). Once in Parliament, he was appointed to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee.
Sunak was also committed to Brexit and was an early advocate of free ports, having written a report on the concept in 2016, the year of the referendum.
In 2017, with Theresa May as Prime Minister, Sunak won re-election with an even greater majority of 23,108 (40.5%). In Parliament, he continued to support Brexit, voting for Theresa May’s deal and against a referendum on a final withdrawal agreement in 2019.
That year, Theresa May stood down as PM. Sunak supported Boris Johnson in the ensuing leadership contest.
That autumn, during the general election campaign, he appeared on a television debate, representing the Conservatives:
I am sure Sunak did better than Iain Dale gave him credit for:
He also participated in a seven-way debate on ITV.
On December 12, Sunak further increased his margin of victory at the polls to 27,210 (47.2%).
The coronavirus Chancellor — and some inside scoops
Then, in February 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson replaced Sajid Javid with Rishi Sunak as Chancellor:
He gave his first budget less than a month later, on Wednesday, March 11, which I wrote about at the time.
The following Monday, March 16, Boris announced social distancing rules and the closure of pubs, restaurants and events venues. Rishi spoke at one of Boris’s televised coronavirus briefings with news of a generous financial package:
Guido Fawkes posted the full video and remarked (emphasis in the original):
You wouldn’t guess he’s only been in the job for five weeks…
Full details are here. Sunak also issued a Twitter thread with a summary:
Then lockdown came a week later on Monday, March 23.
A few days later, Boris was struggling with his bout of coronavirus, as was Health Secretary Matt Hancock:
The Conservatives soared to record approval ratings in the polls:
Early in April, Boris was quietly rushed to St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Rishi did another coronavirus briefing to reassure an anxious nation:
The well-spoken, gentle Sunak appealed greatly to the folks at home. The Independent did not like that one bit.
Society magazine Tatler began running articles on Sunak in March. They could see he would quickly become a cult personality.
On March 18, the magazine posted an article by Annabel Sampson, ‘Everything you need to know about Britain’s new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak’.
It begins with this (emphases mine):
The virtues of 39-year-old Rishi Sunak have been extolled many times over; for his charming demeanour, his razor sharp brain and his acute financial sense. Now the man who has come to be recognised as the ‘Maharaja of the Dales’, thanks to his Indian ancestry and Yorkshire home, has been appointed to the highest office in the country, to Boris Johnson’s Cabinet in the role of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second biggest government job; and the second youngest person ever to take the position.
The appointment follows the ‘Cabinet Reshuffle’ that occurred in February when Savid Javid, the former Chancellor, resigned when he was asked to get rid – reportedly a request linked to Dominic Cummings – of his closest aides. Rishi Sunak’s star has been rising for some time now, so his appointment to the position will have baffled few.
The article has several photos, including one of Sunak in the Yorkshire countryside and one with his dog, which resembles Boris Johnson’s Welsh rescue pup, Dilyn.
Sunak and his wife had a traditional Indian wedding:
Rishi and Akshata were married in her hometown of Bangalore, in a two-day ceremony attended by 1,000 guests.
Akshata is a working mother:
Akshata runs her own fashion label Akshata Designs and is also a director of a venture capital firm founded by her father in 2010. Her designs are wonderful; she’s been profiled by Vogue India and been credited for creating clothes that are ‘vehicles to discovering Indian culture’ – comprised of chic silhouettes with bold, Indian design.
Did we know that the Sunaks throw great parties? We do now:
With their combined wealth, they understandably have a generously sized home in Northallerton, North Yorkshire (in Sunak’s constituency). The Daily Mail reports that their annual summer garden party is a county highlight; where uniformed staff loft around serving ice cold champagne and canapés (no doubt prepared by the prestigious Yorkshire Party Company).
Sunak is a natural at politics:
According to the Daily Mail, ‘While many MPs stutter and trundle their way through their maiden speech in the Commons, Mr Sunak’s at-ease manner provided a glimmer of what was to come’. One ally in parliament told the Telegraph: ‘He’s ferociously intelligent and thoroughly decent at the same time’ …
He was one of the few Conservatives who were let loose on the air waves (14 times in total) and allowed to make public appearances during the election campaign last year. He has even been dubbed the ‘Prime Minister-in-waiting’, we’ll see. His first big challenge was the March budget; and now he is juggling the unprecedented complexity of the impact of the coronavirus on the economy. The UK are in safe hands.
The article also has a photo of him supporting Yorkshire County Cricket at Edgbaston.
Early in July, Tatler‘s Ben Judah travelled to Sunak’s home town of Southampton and reported his findings in ‘Inside the world of Rishi Sunak’.
Naturally, Judah went to the curry house where Sunak worked during his summer holidays:
The kitchen at Kuti’s Brasserie, not far from Southampton docks, was not the sort of place, in August 1998, you would have gone looking for a future hedge funder, son-in-law of a billionaire and Conservative chancellor.
That summer – the summer of the France 98 World Cup and the Omagh bombing – Kuti Miah, the eponymous restaurateur behind the curry house, went to have a word with one of his waiters. ‘You’re going to be someone, Rishi,’ he said. The future UK chancellor flashed his famous smile. He was, adds Miah, ‘a brilliant talker’. Rishi Sunak, then 18, was about to go to Oxford, but that holiday he waited tables for Miah, a close family friend, to earn some pocket money. ‘I saw him grow up,’ says Miah. ‘His father used to bring him in his carry cot.’
Miah was fast friends with Yashvir and Usha Sunak, both Hindu Punjabis born in colonial Kenya and Tanzania respectively, whose parents had migrated from India. After India’s independence, both families left East Africa for Southampton in the mid-to-late 1960s. Yashvir and Usha met in Britain and married. He became a local GP and she ran a pharmacy. They were ‘brilliant conversationalists’ and ‘very strong believers’ who ‘worked very, very hard’, according to Miah, who also recalls that they were ‘passionately British’.
Rishi, the eldest of their three children, was cut from the same patriotic cloth. Not only did the young Sunak fall in love with the game of cricket, he fervently supported England over India at any opportunity. His career, too, has followed one of the most traditional and storied of England’s paths to power. Like five chancellors of the exchequer before him, Sunak was schooled at the ancient and distinguished Winchester College; and like three of those same Wykehamist chancellors, he went on, as was expected, to study at Oxford.
The article includes a photo of Sunak with his wife and in-laws.
Ben Judah had met Rishi Sunak before, in 2015, just before the general election that year. They met up in Northallerton, North Yorkshire:
We were a long way from London – from where Sunak had been ‘parachuted in’ for the seat. During the interview, I had a distinct sense of being the only person in the cafe who knew that this slight man in a Barbour jacket was running for parliament. ‘I tell this story when I’m out and about,’ he said, coffee in hand, ‘that you can come to this country with very little… My grandparents came with very little from a village in northern India, and two generations on, their grandson has this enormous privilege of running as a candidate for parliament. For my family, the route was education.’
Well said.
Sunak’s candidacy in 2015 raised some eyebrows:
He was vying for a seat once presided over by Tory grandees William Hague and Leon Brittan. But I had spent days in Richmond and the surrounding area, reporting on the resentment his sudden arrival had stirred up among certain local Tory notables, who felt the seat in the Dales was rightfully theirs. ‘There was a very acrimonious constituency battle,’ claimed one source, with a lot of hostility to an outsider coming in.
Sunak’s wife had also met with some resistance on the campaign trail, says Judah.
However, Sunak’s father-in-law enthusiastically flew to England where he helped to campaign:
Sunak’s billionaire father-in-law, NR Narayana Murthy, however, has been so enthusiastic about Sunak’s parliamentary career that he’d flown in, and had even been leafleting on his behalf, wearing a Rishi sweatshirt. ‘To be honest,’ said Sunak in Costa Coffee that day, ‘I think it’s patronising to assume minorities should only run in minority seats.’
The article discusses Sunak’s property profile:
On 7 May 2015, Sunak won, with more than 50 per cent of the vote (a Ukip vote of 15 per cent had appeared from nowhere). He put down roots in his new constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire, augmenting a £10 million property portfolio (metropolitan digs in London – a Kensington mews house, a flat on Old Brompton Road – and a place in California) with a £1.5 million Georgian manor in Yorkshire set across 12 acres, including an ornamental lake. Here, he now entertains the constituency membership with lavish summer parties at which uniformed staff serve champagne and canapés. He has been repeatedly dubbed by newspapers the ‘Maharajah of the Yorkshire Dales’.
The general public know less about those details. Nonetheless, Rishi Sunak has become a household name:
In a swift few years, Sunak has become known as many things: Dishy Rishi to the tabloids; one of the richest MPs in Westminster; the second-youngest-ever chancellor of the exchequer, presiding over a £350 billion package to boost the economy (the largest ever recorded in peacetime); and a former hedge funder whose profile has risen faster than stocks in a vaccine manufacturer.
However dazzling all of this is now, things were very different when Sunak entered Winchester College as an adolescent:
… Winchester would come at a price for the Sunaks. No sooner was he accepted than Rishi’s good fortune immediately foundered: he missed out on the expected scholarship. Desperate not to let the opportunity go to waste, his parents decided to take on the high fees themselves, picking up extra work and making what the chancellor has called considerable ‘sacrifices’. His brother would later follow.
One of his classmates discussed Sunak and described Winchester in the mid- to late 1990s:
Tim Johnson, now a lawyer, was in the boarding house next door. ‘Rishi was a good chap, in boarding-school idiom,’ he recalled. Sunak, he said, was a ‘reasonable cricketer’, who stood out in friendliness; and he was a solid, but never number one, student. ‘Rishi was always expected to do something,’ Johnson remembered. But exactly what, beyond Winchester, was vague. ‘He was always expected to be head boy as he was clever enough, reasonable enough and well behaved enough.’ This became Sunak’s thing – hard work and attainment, becoming the first Winchester head of school from an Indian background.
Sunak was different to other sixth formers in Winchester: a lifelong nondrinker, he wasn’t distracted by the allure of the pub. But there was something else that marked him out from the herd. He was a conservative in every sense: not only in his outlook and demeanour but in his religious attitudes, too – a practising Hindu who avoided beef. At school, where few boys were political, Sunak was clearly ‘associated with the Tories’, said Johnson. It was 1997, The Chemical Brothers were topping the charts and the mood was rebellious. Counterculture, New Labour and ripped jeans were in; the Conservatives were out. ‘That wasn’t his intellectual jam. Rishi didn’t play that game,’ Johnson explained.
‘Everyone was chipper about it when Blair won,’ Johnson said. But not Rishi. His family’s story was closer to Margaret Thatcher’s than that of his bourgeois Labourite classmates. Watching the early results of the landslide on election night 1997, Sunak sat down to write a gloomy article for the school magazine, The Wykehamist, lamenting the news. His main complaint: Europe. ‘He revels in the label of a patriot,’ he complained of Tony Blair, ‘but has plans for the possible break-up of the United Kingdom and membership of an eventual European Superstate.’ The seeds of Brexit were already in his mind.
‘Already,’ fretted Sunak, ‘the New Labour rhetoric sounds worryingly pro-European and avid pro-Europeans are being sent to Brussels’ …
Later, at Oxford, Sunak had a low profile, unlike his predecessor as MP, William Hague:
He was nothing like the young William Hague, who arrived at Oxford fêted and almost a Tory celebrity, or the young Boris Johnson, the blond beast who tore apart the Oxford Union. At Oxford, Sunak was a nobody, much like Tony Blair.
He continued to eschew strong drink:
Oxford acquaintances remember him as a nerdy teetotaller who was ‘just very clearly going into business’. He would ‘make this big thing’ out of drinking Coke in the pub. ‘Rishi was unknown to the student politicians, that gossipy overlapping world, who all knew each other,’ said Marcus Walker, then-president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, now a clergyman. Sunak was never a member.
It is hard to remember how irrelevant and demoralised Tory circles felt after 1997, but some do recall Sunak as a ‘Thatcherite’ and ‘Eurosceptic’. ‘That was absolutely par for the course,’ said Walker. ‘If you were still a Tory after 1997, you were a Eurosceptic. That was all you had left.’
Nevertheless, Sunak did develop a network from his Winchester College and Oxford days. Graduates from Winchester are called Old Wykehamists:
These days, socially, Sunak has been placed by some in Westminster’s Spectator set. He was best man to his lifelong friend and fellow Old Wykehamist James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator, at Forsyth’s politician-studded wedding in 2011, to Allegra Stratton, the national editor at ITV News – and gave what one guest recalled was ‘one of the most touching best man’s speeches I’ve ever heard’. (In fact, Stratton has recently announced she’s leaving ITV News for a job with Sunak at the Treasury. Some have seen this as very Cameron-esque in its ‘chumocracy’.)
Allegra Stratton, also a good friend of ITV’s Robert Peston, now works for Boris Johnson as his notional press secretary, although she has not yet begun to give press briefings, probably because of coronavirus.
Imagine the son of immigrants having ties to Britain’s two oldest — ancient — magazines: The Spectator and Tatler. Wow.
Tatler‘s Ben Judah also spoke with people who had worked with Sunak during his hedge fund days. They painted a similar character portrait of the Chancellor:
After two years in California completing a CV-topping MBA, he returned to London and Mayfair in 2006, where a new type of boutique finance was booming: hedge funds. He was hired by Sir Chris Hohn at The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI). It was a dream job: a big role at an activist firm off Berkeley Square at the peak of their fame. ‘He appears to have been trusted,’ said a source. Indeed, Sunak was made a partner two years later. Contemporaries remember him ever-ready to meet and greet; a mixture of a junior, deputy and a bag carrier; the perfect foil to Hohn’s bolshy swagger. ‘Ridiculously nice.’ ‘Affable.’ ‘Approachable.’ ‘Charming.’ These are the words that come up again and again among Mayfair types who knew Sunak. The charm was of a particular kind: ‘There are two kinds of people at hedge funds,’ said one source. ‘Handsome and thin smooth-talkers who are always on the phone or going out to lunch with clients, getting them to part with their money. And then quants in the back room with their shirts buttoned up badly.’
Sunak was one of the smooth-talkers, his charm honed on calls to investors, getting them on board with whatever drastic moves the fund wanted to make. The kind of charm that prizes clarity and persuades people to part with their money. It worked: but hedge-fund charm is designed to hide as much as it reveals. The atmosphere at TCI was buccaneering and bold; it both led and profited from a controversial banking raid that eventually meant a £45.5 billion public bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland. (The Treasury and TCI say Sunak was not involved in the deal.) He left when TCI split in 2009, and joined the breakaway hedge fund Theleme Partners. His new firm’s reputation took a knock when its founder was revealed to have used a notorious tax avoidance scheme. The Labour Party researched Sunak’s past during the 2019 election. ‘But he was too little known for us to use it,’ said one source …
His reasons for entering Parliament are equally obscure. Those who know him have different opinions as to why. One thing that everyone agrees on is his penchant for order:
Many in Westminster see his motivation as status. ‘He’s not an ideologue,’ said one Tory source. ‘He wanted to enter politics in that old-fashioned way, because it was seen as the good thing to do.’ Good, as in socially ambitious. Whether that’s true is another matter, because first came a stint at Policy Exchange, leading a unit researching black and minority ethnic attitudes. The scruffy but influential Conservative think tank world is seen as a de facto holding pen for future special advisers, but it was nonetheless an unexpectedly technical way into Westminster for someone with means.
Sunak quickly made an impression. ‘He’s got that Blair-like ability to hold your eye,’ says Nick Faith, who worked with him there. Sunak cut a snappy figure amid slovenly suits. ‘He’s into his clothing.’ His is not the fusty establishment Rees-Mogg or Nicholas Soames style, but more the wiry Emmanuel Macron look. Everything Sunak wears, many remarked, is immaculate, even at the end of a Treasury work day, and fits perfectly. Faith says that ‘everything, from how Rishi dresses to how he structures his life, is very well organised’. Sunak’s elegant house in London, with a touch of Indian decor, reflects that. ‘Nothing is out of place. For someone with two small kids, that’s quite an achievement.’
Having learned from his background in finance, Sunak also knows how and when to place his bets:
‘His mind works in Excel,’ said one City contemporary. But like all hedge funders, it also works in bets: and the two biggest bets that Sunak has made in his career have paid off spectacularly – Brexit and Boris. David Cameron knew the gravity of his predicament when Sunak came out for Leave. ‘If we’ve lost Rishi, we’ve lost the future of the party,’ he reportedly said. The same thing played out in reverse in June 2019 when Sunak came out for Boris in The Times with two other MPs during the party leadership elections. This was widely seen in Westminster as a decisive turning point: the one where Johnson won over ‘the sensibles’ and pivoted the backbenchers. The PM seems to agree: all three have been handsomely rewarded.
In Parliament, he keeps a low profile but, to those who know him, is loyal:
‘He’s unknown in parliament,’ said one MP. ‘He doesn’t play the parliamentary game at all.’ Tory Remainers are sceptical of him. ‘It’s Star Wars,’ said one MP, referring to the chancellor’s strange and classically ‘geek-chic’ hobby for minutely detailed models of spaceships and video games. ‘Most of his political philosophy comes out of the Star Wars trade wars that are about the independence of various kingdoms from the Empire. He’s not someone intellectual.’ Loyalty has been his strongest suit. Sunak is a No 10 man. ‘He’s a grown-up,’ said one MP. ‘The only grown-up in Downing Street, despite him being 20 years younger than them.’
… At the height of tensions over Brexit last year, he was cheerfully going around Westminster saying he would back ‘no deal’ if push came to shove. He struck the right note, in the right place, at the right time. Tensions between Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid’s teams exploded in February, when the then-chancellor resigned after refusing to fire his own special advisers and submit to an unprecedented joint team with Downing Street, effectively under the stewardship of Dominic Cummings. It was Sunak, with high skills and no clear agenda or faction behind him in parliament, whom Downing Street turned to. He quickly agreed to the joint team, once again becoming the perfect foil for an outsized boss.
Even now, it’s still too early to say whether Rishi Sunak will become a future leader of the Conservative Party and, as such, a possible prime minister. A week is a long time in politics.
When Boris’s erstwhile special adviser Dominic Cummings broke coronavirus rules in travelling from London to Durham and back during Boris’s time in hospital, Sunak tried to calm the ever-turbulent waters surrounding Cummings, who was never popular with the Remainer media. He tweeted this after Cummings’s lengthy press conference in May:
In June, Sunak was tactful about the reopening of shops and businesses in Britain after the first coronavirus lockdown:
He also warned that his generous financial package could not go on indefinitely:
A few weeks later, in early July, pubs were allowed to reopen:
The Government launched the Enjoy Summer Safely campaign. Pictured below is Piccadilly Circus:
On July 8, he issued a Summer Economic Update, with financial help continuing (more here):
This included the launch of his Eat Out To Help Out plan, which lasted to the end of August:
A lot of Labour MPs didn’t like the plan. I don’t know why. Leftists own restaurants, too.
He cut VAT for the hospitality industry, too.
He also issued a detailed jobs plan, including an apprentice scheme:
Some men in the media were taking a shine to Dishy Rishi, including the leftist Owen Jones of The Guardian and Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine:
At that time, the attention being given to Sunak and Boris Johnson got the better of Conservative MP Caroline Dineage, a Culture minister, who was questioned on masks, which were strongly suggested (mandatory only on public transport) but still optional in what now look like heady days. This was from a BBC interview:
… asked why the Prime Minister and Chancellor Rishi Sunak had not worn one in public, she snapped: “You’d have to ask the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that, with respect.
“But it is something that is advised and we keep it under review.”
At the end of September 2020, the coronavirus crisis dragged on. Talk intensified about a winter lockdown.
On September 24, Sunak issued a Winter Economy Plan, about which I wrote at the time. When he presented it in the House of Commons, he advised all MPs to live ‘without fear’.
By October 6, Sunak was being blamed for an uptick in coronavirus ‘cases’ (positive test results, not necessarily hospital admissions) for the Eat Out to Help Out scheme:
A US study, which did not cover Britain, showed that hospitality venues were shown to be responsible. However, the study did not cover workplaces or hospitals. Nonetheless, it is still a contentious point even to this day.
The Sun‘s Harry Cole rightly, in my opinion, defended the Chancellor’s restaurant promotion.
Then talk of hospitality curfews emerged. Fellow Conservative MP Matt Vickers defended the Chancellor’s Eat Out to Help Out programme, which had come to an end five weeks earlier.
The calls for a winter lockdown grew. The Chancellor rightly opposed them:
By then, more areas of England had moved into tiers, indicating more coronavirus cases. Sunak increased financial support to those cities and counties. He also offered more help to businesses, including the self-employed.
By November, some thought a storm was truly brewing between Boris and Rishi. Despite all the talk from the Government about people being able to meet loved ones at Christmas — for the first time in months, for many — a pessimistic undercurrent, which turned out to be accurate, seemed to be part of every news cycle.
Rumours circulated that Sunak was ready to resign. However, on November 1, the Daily Mail reported:
A source said there was a ‘collective decision’ to back a second lockdown, and that Mr Sunak ‘accepted it’ – and he did not threaten to resign, as some whispers around Westminster were suggesting yesterday.
The November lockdown was supposed to prevent a Christmas lockdown, but that was not to be. There was a brief re-opening before Christmas, and on December 19, the hammer fell once more.
Interestingly, the minority MPs in Cabinet shared Sunak’s concerns.
By the middle of December, Sunak was clearly worried about how long the borrowing could go on. On Saturday, December 19, the day when Boris announced Christmas was cancelled, The Spectator reported what the Chancellor said about borrowing and quantitative easing (QE):
‘Are you or anyone else going to guarantee me that, for the duration of this parliament, rates might not go back to 1 per cent?’ he asks, pointing out that this almost happened in March, before the Bank of England started printing money to bring rates back down. ‘There is this very large QE thing that’s going on. No one has done that before. There are plenty of smart investors who are also thinking about the risks of inflation over the next 12 months. Because we are now so levered, small changes have huge cash implications. If I have to come up with £10-£20 billion a year in a few years’ time because things have changed — well, that’s a lot of money.’
To Sunak, it’s not just an economic problem but a political one. ‘If we [Tories] think borrowing is the answer to everything, that debt rising is fine, then there’s not much difference between us and the Labour party,’ he says.
The media criticised him for going to his constituency of Richmond for Christmas. To be fair, he did work while he was there, visiting a local hospital and a vaccine centre. He did not rush back to London.
On February 3, 2021, Sunak rightly accused scientists advising the Government of shifting the goalposts regarding lockdown:
This might be causing a rift in Boris’s Cabinet:
On a brighter note, Time magazine has included Rishi Sunak on its list of 100 ’emerging leaders’. On February 17, the Daily Mail reported:
Under the ‘leaders’ category, Chancellor Rishi Sunak landed a spot on the list, being described as the ‘benevolent face of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic’ by Times reporter Billy Perrigo.
The Chancellor’s profile piece discussed the furlough scheme, describing how he approved ‘large handouts’ for people whose jobs had been affected by coronavirus.
The piece also paid respect to Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which the magazine described as an attempt to ‘revive the economy’ by subsidizing dining out at restaurants.
Although his profile acknowledges that Sunak bears more responsibility than most for his calls to ease lockdown restrictions, Time’s profile for the Chancellor admits he has earned himself a ‘legion of fans’.
Sunak’s accompanying profile points to a YouGov poll showing him to be the nation’s most popular politician and even tips him to be the bookmakers’ favourite as the next Prime Minister.
Again, a week is a long time in politics. We shall see about the future as and when it happens.
For now, Sunak is focussing on the budget, to be delivered on March 3. He is asking industry leaders for their thoughts.
Michelin-starred chef Gordon Ramsay was one of those leaders:
If Rishi Sunak ever tires of being an MP or Chancellor, a job in media awaits.
He is an excellent interviewer and researched Gordon Ramsay well. The 15-minute video is worth watching.
The list of minority Conservative MPs continues. All being well, more tomorrow.
On Monday, December 14, 2020, Matt Hancock, the UK’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, gave a statement in the House of Commons and later that afternoon held a press conference on new coronavirus restrictions for the London area:
Vaccine distribution in England and Scotland continues. Some GP surgeries in England are now allowed to distribute it. One care home in South Lanarkshire in Scotland has seen that one of its residents was inoculated.
However, Monday’s big news was that there would be new restrictions in Greater London and parts of surrounding counties taking effect at midnight on Wednesday.
The BBC reported:
London, as well as parts of Essex and Hertfordshire, will move into tier three – England’s highest tier of coronavirus restrictions – from Wednesday morning.
Unfortunately, some theatres in the West End had reopened, a few of them only recently, with COVID-compliant measures in place. Now they will have to close once more — possibly indefinitely.
Furthermore, Matt Hancock and the SAGE scientists, including Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Whitty, say there is a new variant of coronavirus. One supposes that, one year on, there would be.
The Sun reported (emphases mine):
In a bombshell announcement, Mr Hancock said the mutation was spreading at a quicker pace than the original virus.
But experts stressed that the new strain was not the cause of the tier changes.
Mr Hancock said: “We have identified a new variant of coronavirus which may be associated with the faster spread in South East England.
“It is growing faster than existing variants, with over 1,000 cases.
He told the Commons: “Initial analysis suggests that this variant is growing faster than the existing variants.”
There are over 60 areas affected, which is “growing rapidly” and similar strains have been identified in other countries, he said.
He added: “We’ve seen very sharp exponential rises of the virus across London, Kent parts of Essex and Hertfordshire.
“We must take fast and decisive action.”
At last night’s press conference he said the “rise in transmission and this new variant should be a warning to all” that “personal responsibility” was needed going into Christmas.
He warned: “Respect the rules where you are, don’t ease up on simple things.
“When the virus is growing exponentially, there is not a moment to spare.”
However, the Government insisted Covid rules will still be lifted for five days over Christmas.
Mr Hancock begged everyone to reduce their social contacts in the next few weeks to crack down on cases.
He also recommended Brits self-isolate as much as they can before seeing elderly or other vulnerable relatives over Christmas.
He told the Downing Street press conference: “Be extremely careful now about who you see. That’s the way to see loved ones in a socially distanced way.”
The new measures take the total number of people in Tier 3 in England to 34million, and he suggested more areas could be plunged into the highest tier later this week too.
There are hopes some areas in the North could be downgraded to Tier 2, which currently covers 21.5million.
He said: “This moment is a salutary warning for the whole country.
“This isn’t over yet.”
Professor Whitty insisted it was difficult to know if the new variant was spreading quicker or not – and that it would be “surprising but not impossible” it would not react to a vaccine.
And he suggested the reason Tier 3 has not worked in areas like Kent was because London – where many people travel in and out for work – was still in Tier 2.
He said there was no point in surrounding counties being in a higher tier than London while the capital’s cases are rising so quickly.
However, he slapped down suggestions that the reason the Tiers were being ramped up was because of the new strain – and insisted that cases were rising across the board.
The World Health Organsiation and Public Health England are continuing to look into the new killer strain.
But there was no evidence to suggest the mutation is more deadly.
Crucially, there is also no suggestion it cannot be beaten by the vaccine.
Read more here and a detailed list of areas just outside of London that ITV News provided.
Hospital admissions have been rising in the affected areas in and around London:
The new, severe restrictions harm not only the theatre sector but also hospitality:
Furthermore, people having others over outside their ‘bubble’ must meet outdoors:
Millions who live in the North of England will not be crying for Southerners. They’ve been under similar restrictions for months:
I agree.
The fact that parts of the North have been in Tier 3 for so long indicates that lockdowns, including tiers, do not work.
Is it any wonder that some people are suspicious of Hancock’s motives. References to Klaus ‘Great Reset’ Schwab follow:
What will happen six months from now? Heaven forbid:
The worst aspect is that overall deaths are pretty much in line with those since 1995. There have been ups and downs, but coronavirus is hardly the Black Death.
Yet, we have had our civil liberties taken away from us in a five-minute announcement on March 23 and there is no prospect of our regaining them any time soon:
Hancock has offered no alternatives, such as a prophylaxis (such as the one given to President Trump) that doctors or hospitals could administer to COVID patients or better ventilation systems (Government-sponsored) to pubs and restaurants:
We cannot even be sure that the Coronavirus Act 2020 is legally enforceable. That question has been hanging around since March 2020:
As usual, we have no concrete evidence of anything. Nor do MPs. Hancock and SAGE are forcing us to accept this on their say-so alone and, of course, under penalty of law.
It is unhelpful to say just because great swathes of lockdowns are going on everywhere else in Europe — and the US, for that matter — that somehow makes them okay.
It seems to me that putting millions of people out of work permanently is a dastardly move.
Again, this is not a plague. It’s a virus, the spread of which we can control provided everyone uses common sense.
Someone somewhere has an ulterior motive behind lockdown. What if the plan is to sell off vast swathes of our towns and cities to huge real estate investors or to foreign entities for redevelopment?
Things are not what they seem.
What a week. It’s been full of coronavirus news here in the UK.
Vaccine
The UK was the first country in the world to distribute a coronavirus vaccine.
A 90-year-old grandmother, Margaret Keenan, was the first person to receive the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock wept. He’s never openly cried about those made unemployed and destitute during the coronavirus crisis for which he is largely responsible. Sickening:
Good Morning Britain‘s physician, Dr Hilary Jones, explained that Mrs Keenan could still get COVID-19 and transmit it:
It seems to work the way that a flu vaccine does. If one gets the virus, the effects won’t be as bad as if one weren’t vaccinated.
I wouldn’t advise thinking about that too much, because it could lead down a rabbit hole:
The great scientists of SAGE also said life would not return to normal (see Select Committee section below). We are likely to be in the same situation well into next year, probably the autumn. This is what the ex-barrister and co-editor of Conservative Woman says:
Continuing down the rabbit hole re the vaccine:
Wales
Meanwhile, in Labour-controlled Wales, coronavirus hospitalisations are higher than they were early this year — despite a short, sharp lockdown, ‘firebreak’, that recently ended:
Guido Fawkes opined (emphases in the original):
Lockdowns, even short ones, evidently temporarily drop cases. Yet selling them on the promise that they enable more things to open once they end, as Welsh Labour did, appears to turbocharge case numbers far more than having simple, predictable and steady rules. The psychology of re-openings could well mean that in the long run, Wales’ “short sharp firebreak lockdown” – modelled on Keir Starmer’s demand – did more harm than good…
The Prif Weinidog — that’s First Minister in Welsh — Mark Drakeford blamed his own countrymen for the failure of his ‘firebreak’:
I couldn’t agree more. Lockdowns, firebreaks — whatever one calls them — do not work.
Why would anyone trust a government to dictate their lives? This is a photo of Grenfell Tower (public housing) in London, which burned in June 2017 because of faulty cladding:
And that brings me neatly to the next topic.
PCR versus Lateral Flow testing
The UK Government rejected a petition about PCR (swab) testing because they said they are not responsible for it. Hmm:
This is the nub of the problem. The Government absolves itself of responsibility. So do the scientists. People actually believe this guff.
Where do Government ministers get the idea for lockdown and excuse potentially faulty test results if it weren’t for the scientists and health organisations working with them?
But I digress.
Returning to testing, a few weeks ago, nearly all of Liverpool’s residents took the Lateral Flow test in a pilot programme. The Lateral Flow test works similarly to a pregnancy test and could be used on a daily basis as an ‘all clear’ strategy to give people more freedom and certainty to go about their lives. If successful, its use could allow visits to patients in care homes.
Very few of the Lateral Flow results were positive. If I remember rightly, the figure was 0.3%.
No doubt if those same people had taken the PCR test, the results would have been very different.
Therefore, this is interesting:
I’m just posting it to show there is a huge question over which test is more accurate.
PCR could work, provided the cycle thresholds were lowered from 40 to 35. But that is not happening.
The scientists of SAGE: Susan Michie
Anyone who reads Guido Fawkes regularly will know that SAGE has some questionable members, including this woman who appeared regularly on BBC News during the first lockdown. She might still be appearing on the BBC. I only watched between March and June to watch the spin they put on the Government’s coronavirus briefings:
Michie’s mother was worth a fortune:
The Daily Mail said the owners of the painting were a mystery, until all was revealed (emphases mine):
The painting was in fact sold by 30-year-old Ms Murray’s mother, Professor Susan Michie. She and her two siblings had been left the picture by their mother, the celebrated IVF pioneer Dame Anne McLaren.
When she died in 2007 she left an estate valued at £52,105,910. The vast bulk of that sum represented the value of the painting.
In her will, the Mail can reveal, she stated that if her children chose to sell then ‘if possible it should be sold to an art gallery or museum in the United Kingdom’.
According to a source, family members were ‘disappointed’ at the decision to put the painting on the market. While the sale attracted a tax bill of £20million, that would have left the trio about £10million each — more than enough to share around other members of their extended family.
Three SAGE members appear before Select Committee
Moving on to other SAGE members, Sir Patrick Vallance, Prof Chris Whitty and Dr Jenny Harries appeared once more before the Science and Technology Select Committee on Wednesday, December 9, for a year-end review of lessons learned during the pandemic. Greg Clark MP, who heads that Select Committee, and MPs from both Conservative and Opposition parties asked probing questions. You can watch the three-and-one-half hour session here.
Unfortunately, Vallance, Whitty and Harries were no clearer about lessons learned. In fact, they were vaguer than they were in earlier sessions:
– The vaccine will not be a fix for coronavirus. Not everyone will be able to take the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine because it will not be suitable for them.
– Human behaviour (Harries’s speciality) is very hard to predict. Harries admitted that.
– Hospitality has been the scapegoat because that is where alcohol can be consumed.
– Conclusions on BAME communities’ susceptibility to the virus are unclear.
– Lockdown restrictions will be with us well into next year.
– The worst admission — and I have been saying this to my far better half for at least a month — was when Vallance said that self-isolation is better for the person who has a steady job and can work from home. Self-isolation, he said, is not suitable for someone in precarious employment who has to show up to work every day! (Who knew?) Good grief!
They have no real answers, yet they’re still ruling our lives via the Government!
Sky News suspends newsreader
Kay Burley, one of Sky News’s star newsreaders, celebrated her 60th birthday on Saturday, December 5, in London.
Unfortunately, the celebrations did not take place in an entirely COVID-compliant way.
Ms Burley was suspended until early January 2021. (See update below.)
Guido Fawkes has the story:
Some people won’t see that as big news, but it is.
It points out the hypocrisy of the media, who were clamouring for a lockdown in March then flout the rules when we are still in one via the tier system. London is in Tier 2.
This was Kay Burley’s apology:
The Guido Fawkes team delved deeper. This is what they discovered (emphases in the original). Guillaume Depoix (point 5 below) owns the Folie restaurant:
The trouble for Kay is that this statement does not address the whole story, and contradicts what the owner of the restaurant told Guido about the event yesterday. Either the restaurant owner was not telling the truth to Guido, or Kay has been fibbing…
-
- Her party at the “Covid compliant” club was made up of ten people, split across two tables. Yet the ‘Rule of Six’ apples to social events like birthday parties inside or outside. The only other gatherings such as business meetings can exceed it...
- Kay’s statement presumes she walked all the way to the restaurant Folie to spend her penny. Despite it being not exactly next door to the club she came from.
- Kay does not mention the other people who came with her into the second restaurant. Yet the owner admitted to Guido yesterday that “several people” came in to the restaurant.
- Guido was initially told by the restaurant owner that Kay and her friends had gone in to the second restaurant after curfew “to pay a bill, that was it”. Not to go to the loo…
- When Guido put to restaurant owner Guillaume Depoix that Kay and company had been in the restaurant for quite a while, “a couple of hours”, this was not denied. Guido certainly got the impression the group were there for a considerable amount of time.
- Kay does not mention the other people who came back to her home. Yet she didn’t deny it.
Whilst Kay’s statement tries to take all the blame, Guido has yet to hear what her Sky News colleagues and party guests Beth Rigby, Inzamam Rashid, and Sam Washington have to say …
On Tuesday, December 8, i reported (emphases mine):
Sky News presenter Kay Burley has been taken off air after she admitted to breaching coronavirus restrictions, i understands. She has been replaced on the breakfast show for her remaining shows this week and is already due on annual leave until 4 January …
The TV host is facing an internal inquiry for what she described as “an error of judgment”.
Sources told i the presenter was called into Sky’s headquarters in Osterley, west London, for an urgent meeting with bosses on Tuesday morning. The channel’s most senior staff, John Riley, head of news, and Christina Nicoletti Squires, director of content, were seen entering the newsroom at the time the meeting was due to be held.
Burley will be replaced by early morning presenter Niall Paterson on Wednesday and other presenters will cover her programme for the remainder of the week. Burley was already set to be on annual leave from next Monday until 4 January 2021.
A source close to the presenter said she “doesn’t have a leg to stand on” after breaking the Government’s rules, while being employed to grill politicians over the need to follow guidelines.
It is not clear if she has been removed from air as part of formal disciplinary proceedings.
When the news of the breach broke on Monday night, Burley was in Coventry, where she was due to anchor the news channel as the first Covid vaccines were administered. She was hastily replaced and ordered back to London for Tuesday’s meeting …
Too funny.
Burley, along with colleague and birthday guest Beth Rigby, were among the media stars who endlessly criticised Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings, who is staying on until the end of the year, for his lockdown breach during the first lockdown during the Spring:
Burley, who presents a daily breakfast show on Sky News, has grilled politicians on lockdown throughout the pandemic.
In May, she questioned cabinet minister Michael Gove on the controversy over Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle.
A Sky News spokesman said: “We place the highest importance on complying with the Government guidelines on Covid, and we expect all our people to comply.
“We were disappointed to learn that a small number of Sky News staff may have engaged in activity that breached the guidelines.
“Although this took place at a social event in personal time, we expect all our people to follow the rules that are in place for everyone. An internal process is under way to review the conduct of the people involved.”
Sky News declined to comment on Burley being taken off air.
This tweet shows Beth Rigby having a go at Dominic Cummings in May during his press conference:
The Guardian had more on the story:
All of the Sky staff are facing a review of their conduct by their employer, which said it was “disappointed” by the incident.
Burley’s usual 7am breakfast programme was presented from Coventry University hospital on Tuesday by Sarah Hewson. Burley is understood to have already been in the city, where the UK’s first vaccine dose was administered, when the decision was made. There was no mention of the reason for Burley’s absence when the show began …
Burley is understood to have blamed the situation on misunderstandings in planning and organising the event. But she did not address why a group of four people, including Rashid and former Sky News royal correspondent and Huawei PR executive Paul Harrison, returned to her home after the dinner, a claim that is not believed to be in dispute. Other Sky News staff are understood to be irritated by details of the event.
Under the tier 2 restrictions in London, indoor social gatherings of any kind are barred except among those who live together or have formed a support bubble. Groups of up to six can socialise outdoors. Police can impose fines of £200 for a first-time breach.
Under the rules, Burley’s initial gathering would only have been allowed if the two tables remained separate throughout and sat outside. It is not clear how many of the group went to the second venue, but Burley’s tweets suggested that the rules were broken during this part of the evening. A group of four gathering at her home would be against the rules unless they remained outside throughout.
Burley has been a stern interrogator of politicians who have been perceived as making excuses over lockdown breaches this year.
In May, she conducted a widely shared interview with the cabinet minister Michael Gove about the Dominic Cummings affair, repeatedly asking him to clarify what the government advice would be for a member of the public “struggling with Covid-19 and you think you’ve got a problem with your eyesight”, in reference to Cummings’ explanation of his trip to Barnard Castle.
She also interviewed the health secretary, Matt Hancock, after Prof Neil Ferguson was forced to resign as a government adviser and asked: “What did you think when you read it? Did you bang your head on the desk?”
Burley’s colleague Adam Boulton, the other star of Sky News, was deeply unhappy with her. The Guardian told us all about it in ‘Kay Burley row could undermine Sky News, warns Adam Boulton’:
The Sky News presenter Adam Boulton has warned that the row over a breach of coronavirus restrictions by his colleague Kay Burley has raised concerns over “the credibility of our journalism”.
With executives at the broadcaster weighing their decision over what sanctions are merited by the actions of Burley and three colleagues who attended her 60th birthday party last weekend, Boulton retweeted several posts about the story on Wednesday, including one that read: “Look at the state of Sky News. The morons spent all summer preaching to us and now look at them!”
Speaking to the Guardian, Boulton noted that his retweets did not necessarily constitute endorsements. But he went on: “That said, I retweet things because I think they’re of public interest, and certainly my feed has reflected a lot of people who are very concerned about the credibility of Sky News, and that I think is the important issue: the credibility of our journalism.”
The intervention from the station’s editor-at-large and former political editor is the first significant comment on the situation from a senior broadcaster at Sky News, where executives have been considering how to deal with the fallout from Burley’s celebrations since Monday.
Boulton said: “My view is that Sky has worked very hard during the whole Covid crisis and has taken a very clear line about public safety, and obviously something like this perhaps underlines [the importance of] that.” And he noted that he believed the matter to be “of widespread concern” to colleagues at the station.
Since Guido Fawkes broke the story on Monday, December 7, Burley’s fellow colleagues who celebrated her birthday have also been suspended:
Beth Rigby, Inzamam Rashid and Sam Washington have all been taken off air during discussions over what sanctions will be imposed. On Tuesday, Burley was withdrawn from consideration for a prestigious TV award, while two of the group signed non-disclosure agreements as Sky sought to limit damage from the row.
Other staff at Sky share Adam Boulton’s consternation:
“The situation is just excruciating,” one producer said. “The longer it goes on, the worse it gets and the harder it is to see this ending without serious punishment.”
Boulton noted that he viewed Burley as a “remarkable” journalist who deserved her success on the station. And he added: “Whatever happens next is not my decision and obviously it’s not up to me to criticise colleagues.”
Nonetheless, his comments will be viewed with alarm by executives hoping to keep staff concerns under wraps until they reach a decision, which is expected to be this week.
It appears that Burley had a safari holiday booked:
Burley herself deleted a tweet saying she was going on holiday on Friday to go “sit with lions”, adding: “They kill for food, not sport” – a possible reference to the media coverage of the situation.
Well, she can take her time and enjoy an extended safari holiday.
————————————
UPDATE: Early this evening, news emerged that Sky News has suspended Burley for six months! Excellent.
Furthermore, Beth Rigby has been suspended for three months; Sam Washington and Inzamam Rashid have also been suspended pending an internal Sky News enquiry. Result!
How pleased Kay and Beth were with themselves only a few days earlier …
————————————
It is a bit rich to defy coronavirus regulations then pole up to a hospital, especially one giving COVID-19 vaccinations:
I’m really glad this has come to light:
Agree. I don’t understand why people give these hypocrites any credibility.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
In late May 2019, John Cleese was touring Canada.
Here are his thoughts on the hospitality industry:
Call me ‘old school’, but I’m with John Cleese on these observations.
Churchmouse Campanologist 