coronavirus
Masks in schools: how convincing is the government's evidence?
Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced…
Boris Johnson rejects lockdown (again)
Boris Johnson latest Covid press conference was slightly confusing. The Prime Minister spent nearly an hour saying nothing particularly new.…
The problem with 'vaccine equity'
‘A stain on our soul’. That was how Gordon Brown, in his latest missive on the subject, described the failure…
Remember panic-buying? Here's what will happen next time
It’s post-Christmas, and there are already murmurs about supermarkets with empty shelves. Just as with the petrol shortage in September and…
The churches must stay open
Hooray for Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who used the one day of the year when his pronouncements are amplified by the…
Sage modellers start to accept that Omicron is milder
Public health officials in Britain and South Africa were on different planets for about a fortnight. While those in South Africa…
Sage memo makes the case for lockdown
On Monday, Covid restrictions were rejected after the cabinet debated the issue robustly for the first time since the pandemic…
Should businesses receive more Covid support?
As government considers whether to lock us down once again, should it put economic support for businesses affected back on…
Is Omicron now falling in South Africa?
Man makes Covid predictionsand God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is…
How the BBC lost its way on Covid
I have been a BBC journalist for many years, and in that time I have been committed to impartiality and…
Don’t underestimate the Omicron variant
As the Omicron variant makes its way through the population of the UK, the Chief Medical Officer’s warning that we…
My Twitter conversation with the chairman of the Sage Covid modelling committee
The latest Sage papers have been published , envisaging anything from 200 to 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron depending on how…
Our growing unwillingness to understand the past
I was recently reading the works of the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, who at one point mentions a ghost craze…
It’s not up to Boris to save Christmas – it’s up to us
How well-behaved have you been in the second year of Covid? I wouldn’t say I’ve been perfect but I haven’t…
The Covid dissidents who’ve made my Christmas merrier
A few years back, a hackneyed journalistic come-hither led me to a sober reckoning: would I write about someone alive…
What musicians like me learned from the pandemic
My mother died earlier this year aged 85. She left me her old pianola. These were popular in the 1920s…
‘Politics exacts a very high price’: an interview with Michael Gove
Michael Gove on levelling up, Plan B and the price of politics
The PowerPoint plot against Joe Biden
If the revolution won’t be televised, the counter-revolution will at least be on PowerPoint. A series of 36 corporate-style PowerPoint…
Lockdown, protests, parties and Matt Hancock’s kiss
January The United Kingdom found itself in possession of a trade agreement with the EU. Coronavirus restrictions were tightened. The…
Omicron is now Britain’s dominant Covid strain
If you test positive for Covid now in Britain, the odds are that it’s Omicron: it’s now the dominant strain…
Boris is in deep trouble
This evening feels eerily familiar to anyone who remembers the meaningful votes of Theresa May’s premiership. The Tory rebellion on…
The ethics of the Omicron travel ban
The Omicron variant had not even been named when the government’s reflexes sprung into almost involuntary reaction last month, and…
Vaccine passports may prove a pointless distraction from Omicron
Sajid Javid ditched vaccine passports when he became Health Secretary but he now has to bring them in again, albeit…
Should we be scared of the Omicron variant?
Why is the government so scared of the Omicron variant? So far, most of the evidence we have for transmissibility…
Punishing the unvaccinated threatens everyone's liberty
How should we treat the unvaccinated? Should we stop them from participating in normal life? Castigate them in the media?…
