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A new study suggesting the number of coronavirus infections has fallen by almost a third during the lockdown in England has raised hopes that the second wave of the pandemic is being brought under control.The React survey of 105,000 people by Imperial College, London, and pollsters Ipsos Mori showed a 30 per cent drop in cases between 13 and 24 November, with big falls in the northwest and northeast.  Yet the findings are a mixed blessing for ministers. The timing was hardly helpful, coming as Boris Johnson tries to limit the size of a Commons rebellion by Conservative MPs on Tuesday against the three-tier system of restrictions that will replace the lockdown on Wednesday.   More

In the run-up to the last Scottish referendum, Jean Chretien, the former prime minister of Canada, warned British politicians of the need to win hearts as well as minds if their union was to stay intact.  Born in Quebec, he led his country the last time his home province held an independence referendum.  The result was incredibly tight.  The people of Quebec voted to remain a part of Canada by a margin of less than 1 per cent.  In the years that followed, he, like many Canadian politicians, had a lot of time to think about the nature of that result.  I spoke to him in London in 2013, after he had been asked to give a speech on his experience in Whitehall.   More

What was it that Mario Cuomo, probably the most successful politician to come out of New York, used to say? Ah, yes: “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”. Wise words, and they come readily to mind when assessing Boris Johnson’s first year after his famous election win last December. No 10 has been, at best, dysfunctional. To borrow another bit of wizened political wisdom, such internal feuds and ego-fights usually turn out to be even worse than they are portrayed in the press. “Princess Nut Nut” and a media team on non-speaking terms probably isn’t the half of it. If so, it is no great surprise the country is where it is today, and why the prime minister’s personal approval ratings have slumped. The arrival of the prime minister’s new chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, a former Treasury civil servant of a solid, professional disposition, marks a shift towards a more prosaic style of government, in the best sense of the term. No more moonshots, perhaps.What both Mr Johnson and his now ex-chief adviser Dominic Cummings were brilliant at was campaigning, as witnessed in the European referendum and the last general election (as well as Mr Johnson’s unlikely run at the London mayoralty). They revelled in pithy poetic phrases, lurid rhetoric and soaring ambition. They seem to have been much less successful in the arts of government. Attempting to redesign the machinery of government in the middle of a pandemic and with Brexit to get done was probably a strategic error. It led to briefings against, and the departure of, permanent secretary Sir Mark Sedwill; as well as the departure of then-chancellor Sajid Javid, who tried to appoint his special advisers, part of a wider move to take control of the Treasury.  Dominic Cummings might claim that putting real-time data flows and analysis at the heart of governmental decision making, in and around No 10, was in fact the best way to tackle any crisis. He might also be right that the Treasury is too powerful and narrowly focused, in some abstract sense. Perhaps his modernisation of British government was in the end stymied by vested interests in the NHS or HM Treasury, but in any case it mostly failed and mass testing remains undelivered and the economy, partly as a result, is a mess. Test and trace might be ready by the spring, about a year after the pandemic got going and when the vaccines should be coming through.   More

From Dominic Cummings to Priti Patel, this government is failing to practice what it preaches – and the public has noticed, writes Sean O’Grady More

All this has happened before, but mostly a long time ago. George Barnes, who was Labour leader 1910-11, and who served in David Lloyd George’s wartime coalition cabinet, had the whip removed in 1918 when the rest of the Labour Party left the coalition. He stayed on in government and held his seat at the 1918 election, which he fought on a “coalition coupon”. Ramsay MacDonald, who was Labour leader and sitting prime minister when he formed the National government with the Conservatives in the economic crisis of 1931, was expelled by his party. Arthur Henderson, who succeeded him as Labour leader, disagreed with the decision and refused to sign the letter expelling him. Michael Foot is the other Labour leader who had the whip removed, but that was in 1961, when he and four other Labour backbenchers voted against defence spending, 20 years before he became leader. The whip was restored to them after two years.  More

As the National Audit Office (NAO) report into the award of Covid-19 contracts suggests, the reasons for the apparent waste of billions of pounds and ignoring the usual rules about probity and value for money were twofold: panic and cronyism. One is perhaps understandable; the other rather less so. And the £18bn of questionable contracts identified by the unimpeachable public sector auditors may not be the final sum total, given that consultants are still being employed and contracts remain open…The panic arose because of the near total lack of protective equipment, ventilators and intensive care beds and associated kit. By March, the nature of Covid had become clear, with its potentially lethal consequences for older people and those with pre-existing conditions. With no therapeutic treatments, let alone a “cure” or vaccine, the possibility that the NHS would be overwhelmed became obvious. A lockdown was imposed and money was thrown almost indiscriminately at the problem. Hence the unlikely manufacturers engaged to make masks and ventilators, some of which were never delivered. Beyond the scope of this NAO study would be the £12bn expended on developing a mass test and trace system, and the billions more on Treasury job protection schemes that were open to fraud, exploitation and in any case poorly targeted, such as the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme. That one may actually have been counterproductive in public health terms by encouraging people to congregate indoors.   More