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After a long period of drought, we are now halfway through a series of four parliamentary by-elections in quick succession. There had been no by-election since Brecon and Radnorshire in August 2019, won by Jane Dodds for the Liberal Democrats (who then lost in the general election four months later), until the Hartlepool contest last month.Labour’s defeat in Hartlepool was significant, crystallising the view that, although Keir Starmer had started well as leader of the opposition, he is struggling to make his mark against a vaccine-boosted prime minister.A second by-election a week later, by contrast, was barely noticed, as Anum Qaisar-Javed retained Airdrie and Shotts for the Scottish National Party after Neil Gray gave up the House of Commons for a seat in the Scottish parliament. More

“Keep politics out of sport” is a slogan we’re hearing a lot of again, thanks to the controversies over historical tweets by members of the England cricket team, and some booing of the “taking the knee” protests by the English and Welsh teams, though not the Scots, at the Euro football championship. The truth, though, is that sport and politics have always been tangled up, particularly at the international level. We can think, for example, of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Jessie Owens, the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa and the athlete Zola Budd, of the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and the Los Angeles games in 1984, when the US and Soviet blocs applied sanctions to one another, and right up to the design of the Ukraine football shirt at the Euros, depicting the Crimea as part of Ukrainian sovereign territory. Images such as an England football team making the Nazi salute at a “friendly” match in 1938, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute on the winners’ podium at the Olympics in 1968 remain stark and powerful decades on. Politics doesn’t stay out of sport for long. It can’t. Politically, “taking the knee” at the Euro football competition presents an acute difficulty for the government, and a familiar one – what should the line be, and how to make ministers stick to it. It poses particular problems for the Westminster government vis a vis the England team. Thus far, the government has played a poor game, its defence in disarray and its attack at best muted. There are three current versions of the policy. Boris Johnson has given the lead by indicating that the players have the right to make the protest, and make their feelings known, but has not actually said he supports it. Gillian Keegan, an education minister, says it is “divisive”, deriding it as “symbolism more than action” and adding, in an oddly oblique formulation that: “There are some Conservative MPs (that) are very much against it, why? Because Black Lives Matter stands for things that they don’t stand for. It’s really about defunding the police and the overthrow of capitalism, which is, you know, Black Lives Matter the actual political organisation.” More

In his four-hour long evidence session to MPs, the greatest compliment that can be paid to Matt Hancock is that he survived, he did not add to his own considerable difficulties, and his political career may not, after all, be over. You see, in the world of Hancock, it’s China’s fault. As a novel excuse he thus neatly plays into the current Sinophobia and increasingly credible suggestions that the new coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. In any event, the Chinese failed to close their borders and alert the world. This is but the latest mutation of a clever stratagem developed by the secretary of state for health and social care in recent months – to spread the blame for failings on Covid across as many possible suspects as possible, as if it were a game of Cluedo. The list of suspects is long, and pinning guilt on any of them tricky.In the past he has suggested that it was the public’s fault, because they disregarded lockdown rules, which were, of course, all perfectly clear and logical: “what matters is, yes of course, the rules that we put in place, but it is also about how people act” Hancock declared in January about the shortcomings in the tier system. Hancock also has the permanent all-purpose alibi that he was “following the science”, which is another way of blaming the experts for offering duff opinions. Plus, of course, there is the undeniable fact that the pandemic was “unprecedented” and therefore could not have been prepared for (despite evidence of planning that had taken place). The shortages of protective equipment and testing (and thus the care home scandal) can be explained away in that way. The plea that he and his department have been working incredibly hard has found some sympathy among non-partisan members of the public, though many would still be happy to see him fired immediately. For now, he remains insulation for Boris Johnson. More

There are few things more intrinsically funny than a sausage, and the very mention of a banger can defuse even the most fraught of political arguments. When the sausage becomes a symbol and cause of political dispute, as now with the UK-EU “sausage war”, it tends to raise a smile. Indeed, many years ago the satirical Whitehall sitcom Yes, Minister had a whole episode devoted to the imposition of a new EU directive that would have meant that the British sausage was to compulsorily be renamed the “Emulsified High-Fat Offal Tube”, with hilarious consequences. Jolly as all that may be, the “sausage war” is merely the latest symptom that Brexit isn’t working. As with so many of these arguments, it arises from the rushed UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement of October 2019, and in particular the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol. As was clear at the time, in order to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, Northern Ireland was left behind in the EU Single Market and Customs Union, as well as being inside the UK internal market – a complicated arrangement. It meant a trade “border” between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. More

During his gripping recent testimony to a Commons committee, Dominic Cummings shed a little light on the relationship between Britain and America. In a day of chaos when lockdown, the American bombing of Syria and a press story about the prime minister’s “girlfriend” and their dog vied for the attention of Boris Johnson, one outcome was that the British declined the US invitation to join in the air assault. In the past, during say the Thatcher or Blair premierships, joining in with such a limited but powerful symbolic action would have been almost automatic. But times are changing. “Special relationship” is, arguably, one of the most vexed and least useful expressions in the British political vocabulary. According to well-informed reports in The Atlantic, it seems that Boris Johnson is sceptical about its usage, and dislikes it because it makes Britain seem “needy and weak”, and pushed back on it when President Biden used it, no doubt thoughtfully, in an inaugural phone call to Downing Street in January. It might just be a sign that Johnson is attempting to make the best of what will never be a particularly warm friendship with the Biden administration, given the president’s public aversion to Brexit and devotion to the Good Friday Agreement. For the prime minister, it might also be simply a recognition that the “special relationship” has been, mostly, fetishised by a succession of British diplomats and politicians, but largely neglected or ignored in Washington. Sadly, that has largely been due to the long-term decline in Britain’s power and influence since the Second World War. Whether Brexit enhances or weakens the UK’s international status remains to be seen. It is, though, apparent that a UK-US free trade deal is as remote as ever. Despite his affinity with Brexit, Nigel Farage and Johnson, aka “Britain Trump”, Donald Trump’s trade policy was strictly America First and protectionist, and so is Joe Biden’s. When Barack Obama warned Britain it would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal if it voted for Brexit, he was merely stating the reality of the imbalance in the “special relationship”. Trade policy towards the UK has been more or less constant across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, and owes little to sentiment. More