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Government ministers and their top officials have been nervously wondering for several weeks where exactly the most damaging “Dom bombs” were going to fall.It’s now clear that Dominic Cummings had Matt Hancock in his sights – singling out the health secretary for heavy and repeated bombardment during Wednesday’s testimony to the joint inquiry of MPs examining the government’s response to the pandemic.Boris Johnson’s former senior adviser accused Hancock of “criminal, disgraceful behaviour” by interfering with the fledgling test and trace system and claimed that the minister fell “disastrously below” the standards expected during a public health crisis. More

Like an FA Cup Final or a WBA title fight, Westminster is greatly looking forward to Dominic Cummings’s appearance at the Health and Social Care Committee. Even though the rest of the country might have heard more than enough from the PM’s former chief adviser, what he says about what various senior figures did – and did not – as the Covid crisis mounted last year will make a difference to careers and reputations. He also happens to be great theatre, as his appearance in the sunny garden of Downing Street one year ago demonstrated, and as his high profile departure from No 10 in the shadows last year confirmed.So who might the losers and winners be?Losers More

Priti Patel is the sort of determined no-nonsense figure who tends to ruffle feathers, to say the least. As with recent accusations of bullying and perceptions of her behaviour, for which she apologised (sort of), her statements on immigration are usually controversial if not divisive, and if not deliberately provocative. Sometimes, she says, her own outlook and the attacks she attracts are influenced by her own background as the daughter of an Asian family expelled like so many by President Amin of Uganda in 1972. She gives no quarter. She takes great comfort from the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election as her mandate to implement what she takes to be the people’s attitude towards migration. That doesn’t mean that everything that emanates from her Home Office is automatically wrong-headed or impractical. Brexit, the loss of security for Hong Kong citizens, and the flow of migrants making their way across the English Channel in flimsy dinghies mean that immigration policy has to change. The New Plan for Immigration she has unveiled seems enough to keep even her substantial tram of civil servants occupied for some years. She has radical proposals, but almost concealed beneath the hardline rhetoric about life sentences for people smugglers, Patel has summarily scrapped the cornerstone of Conservative immigration policy for the past decade – the target, perhaps casually arrived at, to limit migration to the UK to the “tens of thousands”. She has buried it. More

The government this week unveiled major reforms to the way Britain’s railways will be run. There’s no doubt that these are significant changes and represent the biggest change to the industry’s structure since privatisation in the 1990s.Some commentators have suggested that the railways are effectively being renationalised, but this isn’t really correct. To understand why, let’s unpack the reforms.Before the pandemic, railways were operated by private franchise holders. Private companies bid for and won contracts to operate a certain franchise for a number of years, in a competition run by the Department for Transport (DfT). More

Although somewhat more optimistic at Prime Minister’s Questions about the government’s Covid roadmap, in recent days Boris Johnson has been a striking a cautious tone about the next significant date, 21 June. This is the moment when, according to the official roadmap guidance, “the government hopes to be in a position to remove all legal limits on social contact”. Specifically: “We hope to reopen remaining premises, including nightclubs, and ease the restrictions on large events and performances that apply in Step 3. This will be subject to the results of a scientific Events Research Programme to test the outcome of certain pilot events through the spring and summer, where we will trial the use of testing and other techniques to cut the risk of infection. The same Events Research Programme will guide decisions on whether all limits can be removed on weddings and other life events.”Much obviously depends on how effective the vaccine programme will be against the spreading Indian variant of the coronavirus, which is becoming more prevalent. Last Friday the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, gave this assessment of the danger: “There is now confidence … that this variant is more transmissible than B.1.1.7 (Kent variant), now the question in practical terms over the next two to three weeks is is this somewhat more transmissible than B.1.1.7 or is this a lot more transmissible and that will have implications for the long-term prospects of this epidemic in the UK and indeed the pandemic internationally?”Now, the prime minister says that there is “increasing confidence” about the vaccines’ ability to fight the virus, and to prevent severe illness in individuals. The evidence will need to be sifted carefully in the coming days. It will come from the piloted mass outside events; from an analysis of the general relaxation measures already taken; about the effects of more international travel; about trends in infection, hospitalisation and deaths; the geographical spread from the hot spots; the efficacy of the vaccines for Indians and the wider community; and a more precise idea about the specific characteristics of the Indian virus. More

The cabinet row about the putative UK-Australia free trade deal goes far behind its relatively modest macro-economic impact and right to the heart of the whole notion of what “Global Britain” is supposed to be about. On the one hand, representing the hard-pressed British consumer, we find Liz Truss, Secretary of State for international trade, who negotiated the draft deal. She wants tariff-free access to the UK for Australian goods, notably wheat, lamb and other foodstuffs, just as the EU enjoys, but cabinet colleagues are concerned about what such a deal would mean for British farmers – a double whammy, given some are already losing ground in EU markets.For Ms Truss, it is more than matter of pride and the cost of groceries. It is the first post-Brexit deal that is much more than a roll-over of a pre-existent EU deal, and with a historic partner with close ties to Britain. As Daniel, now Lord, Hannan, a prominent Eurosceptic commented,“if we can’t do a proper trade deal even with our kinsmen Down Under, we might as well throw in the towel”. He accuses “National Farmers’ Union officials, the Defra blob and a handful of Tory backwoodsmen” of trying to preserve the current subsidised regime of protection, inherited from the EU, with taxes on commodities from Australia and other revived trading partners. In his words: “If these deals with Australia and New Zealand don’t get done because of domestic opposition, that pretty much says the UK is not doing anything with global Britain. Because if we can’t do these, well, in truth, everything gets more difficult from here.” More