When Baroness Hallett published her Module 2 report of the Covid-19 Inquiry on 20 November, declaring that the government’s response was ‘too little, too late’ and that 23,000 lives could have been saved by locking down one week earlier, I found myself reflecting on the surreal years I spent as Head of Research for the […]
This week, the public inquiry into the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact, chaired by Baroness Hallett, published its second report on ‘core decision-making and political governance’. The investigation was established in 2021 under the Inquiries Act 2005 and Hallett, a former judge of the Court of Appeal, appointed as its chair […]
Boris Johnson and women. There has never been a shortage of revelations about the ex-Prime Minister’s relations with the fairer sex, but this week brought another: he didn’t have enough of them. Speaking at the Covid Inquiry, Johnson admitted that ‘the gender balance of my team should have been better,’ and ‘during the pandemic too […]
The long-anticipated Covid inquiry opened its first session this week, with much fanfare about WhatsApp messages. As ever with media coverage of serious events, it’s easy to let rather prosaic elements distract from the much bigger questions. For although it may now feel like ancient history, we must not forget that during the pandemic governments […]
For several reasons, the looming Covid-19 inquiry fills me with dread. For starters – and I accept that this is quite a personal one – it probably means several more years of having to write about Boris Johnson. CapX’s editor-in-chief Robert Colvile set out some more serious ones in yesterday’s Sunday Times: it will be […]
In 1979, researchers at Stanford University gathered 48 students for an experiment in social psychology. The students were not randomly selected: the researchers knew, from previous questionnaires, that 24 of them supported the death penalty, while the other 24 opposed it. The students were presented with two fictitious empirical studies on the deterrent effect, or lack […]
Sanobar and her son lived in a single room accommodation. The nine-year-old boy was so terrified of coronavirus that he wouldn’t go to school during lockdown, despite being entitled to as a vulnerable child. In fact, he would not leave the ‘four wall boundary’ for weeks and barely left the bed on which he slept, […]
It was all going so well for Rishi Sunak. A landmark deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol cast the PM in the role of international statesman and seemed to have won over even some of the most battle-hardened Brexiteers. This being British politics, however, fresh psychodrama was only ever a front page away. The Telegraph […]
Imagine if loads of your private messages were published online for the world to see. Would they show you in a better or worse light than before? The #LockdownFiles probably won’t change what people already think of Matt Hancock, or indeed many of the other characters caught up in the exchanges published by The Telegraph […]
The Conservative Party’s decision to withdraw the whip from Andrew Bridgen, following the MP’s decision to air views comparing Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust, was the right one. It ought to go without saying, but as this site’s Deputy Editor found out on Twitter, apparently not. We need not trouble ourselves with the lunatic fringe […]
One of the many unfortunate side effects of Covid is that society that has become increasingly, and irrationally, risk averse. Our institutions seem hell-bent on insisting that everyone be swaddled in cotton-wool – yet almost everything we take for granted today at one point involved taking significant risks. Even seatbelts faced a controversial battle before […]
Public protests in China related to the government’s Covid-19 restrictions have hit the news worldwide over the weekend, following a fatal apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang last week which killed ten people. Many internet users claimed some residents could not escape because the apartment building was partially locked down, though authorities denied this. There have been reports some demonstrators have […]
‘Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams’. Nowadays, 9/11 conspiracy theories are such a fringe preoccupation that it’s easy to forget how widespread they were in the early 2000s. The hugely popular homemade documentary Loose Change, released in 2005, pushed the idea that the mainstream theory of why the twin towers fell – al-Qaeda flew planes […]
When one of the highest ministers in the land admits the British public was deliberately ‘scared witless’ by the Government, it’s time to face the music. And what depressing music – its drumbeat was fear and the cadence was gloomy. In an interview in The Spectator, Rishi Sunak has revealed that the Government used targeted messaging to […]
Anything that’s had this much hype was bound to be disappointing. For months, ministers have been telling us that we must await the Sue Gray report like it was the opening of the seventh seal. In the end it was less Revelation than a bunch of stuff we already knew. Yes, there’s more detail about […]
Our parents think they had it bad with Watergate in 1972. Little did they know our generation would have to suffer through party-gate, birthday-cake-gate, beer-gate, curry-gate and all manner of other complex carbohydrate-fuelled political meltdowns, and all before the summer of ‘22 has even begun. Government lockdown breaches are in the news yet again this […]
