Barometer
Take cover The government has said it will make wearing masks compulsory in shops. Mandatory masks rather run against the…
Solution to 2463: Tongue Twisters
The unclued lights were all languages which are written from right to left, entered in that manner in the grid.…
Solution to 2462: Over and Out?
The seventeen entries clued by definition only required removal of the abbreviation BR ( = Britain), in keeping with the…
Letters
Police relations Sir: As a former Met Police officer, with a similar background to Kevin Hurley, I was surprised how…
Portrait of the week
Home Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced measures intended to stimulate the economy. Under a £111 million scheme,…
Home improvements
It is hardly a profound observation to say that the government has not functioned as well as it might have…
Barometer
Price of protest Greenpeace was fined £80,000 for defying a court order and occupying an oil rig in the North…
The chilling effect
The printed press is not a natural ally of Facebook. Silicon Valley publishers have hoovered up so much advertising that…
Letters
Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies,…
Portrait of the Week
Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he was ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’ and did press-ups to prove…
Barometer
Leicester lockdowns Leicester was forced to impose the first local lockdown, in response to a reported surge in cases of…
Solution to 2461: Hot off?
The unclued lights include the name of a British daily newspaper; 3/26A, 9/35, 12, 24, 28/31D and 34/21. First…
Portrait of the week
Home Pubs in England would be allowed to reopen for table service from 4 July, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister,…
Britain emerges, blinking
The Prime Minister’s announcement that pubs, restaurants and many other facilities will be able to re-open on 4 July amounts…
Solution to 2460: Sleaze
The word is TACK. In the order of the headwords in Chambers, except for the fifth, their meanings are indicated…
Barometer
Voyage into history How did the Labour government respond to the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948?…
Letters
Back to schools Sir: I share Lucy Kellaway’s enthusiasm for seeing school-life return and inequality gaps closed (‘A class apart’,…
Portrait of the week
Home Britain went into a frenzy of iconoclasm. The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was hidden by the…
Solution to 2459: 22 down
22D was TABLEWARE, and the quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson reads: ‘The louder he talked of his honour, the faster…
Time to recover
The discovery in Britain that a £5 steroid, dexamethasone, can be effective in treating Covid marks a potential breakthrough in…
Barometer
Made to measure The government started reviewing whether we should stay two metres apart while social distancing or whether one…
Letters
Hong Kong’s success Sir: Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are right to compare the UK’s Covid-19 response with Hong Kong’s…
Barometer
The Colston chronicles Who, exactly, was Sir Edward Colston? Colston was born into a family of merchants and spent the…
Take back control
There is a grim inevitability to the trickle of round-robin letters from scientists who feel aggrieved at the government’s handling…
Portrait of the week
Home The government lurched uncertainly in dealing with coronavirus. Not all years in primary schools would after all return before…
