coronavirus
Portrait of the week
Home Coronavirus was on the increase. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 4 October, total deaths (within 28 days…
Diary
I first visited Orford in 1970, at peak Cold War when this stretch of the East Anglian coast was one…
Boris’s second wind
The centrepiece of Boris Johnson’s speech to Tory party conference this year was his Damascene conversion to the merits of…
Barometer
Vice squad Donald Trump catching Covid-19 has concentrated minds on what happens if a US president dies in office. Normally,…
Disunited Kingdom
The Covid divide is triggering political tensions
Boris Johnson’s human shield
At a Conservative party conference fringe event last Sunday, Lord Bethell, a health minister, was asked where he thought Britain…
How to be content
The Covid-19 pandemic is apparently causing a large number of mental health problems. On that subject, one could do a…
Duty of care: the trouble with America’s nursing homes
We can debate the value of sacrificing normal life to COVID-19. Personally I think the measures are increasingly destructive —…
The Covid testing trap
We are in a time where money has lost meaning and value, so perhaps the £10 billion plus spent on…
COVID-positive president won’t debate online
The droplets had barely settled after Wednesday’s vice presidential debate when next week’s head-to-head between Donald Trump and Joe Biden…
Our overstimulated president
Is Donald Trump feeling overstimulated? First he scorned stimulus talks with the Democrats, tweeting on Tuesday afternoon that he was…
The US election is Joe Biden’s to lose
Donald Trump is back at the White House after a scary three-day stay at the Walter Reed medical complex. For…
The media meltdown over Trump’s ‘Covita’ moment
What is Donald Trump’s greatest gift? Some say his finely honed instincts; others, his tabloid genius for publicity. But we…
The hypocritical oath
‘Please tell me you’re Republicans,’ President Ronald Reagan joked with his doctors as he headed into surgery after an assassination…
Sunak warns of hardship
When Rishi Sunak was appointed Chancellor in February, he must never have imagined that his first address to the Conservative…
Why Boris has his hopes pinned on spring
In a non-Covid world, next week would be the Tory party conference. Boris Johnson would march on to the stage…
A world apart
Plexiglass bubbles hover over diners’ heads in restaurants. Plastic pods, spaced six feet apart, separate weightlifters in gyms. Partitions of…
Portrait of the week
Home More than a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom (three-fifths of the Welsh, a third of the…
Too clever by half
Organs of the press are filled with opinion pages. The sublime confidence about Covid with which commentators advance these opinions,…
Barometer
Word for word US presidential debates are often traced back to the first televised debate, between Richard Nixon and John…
Letters
Lessons for the government Sir: James Forsyth suggests that the Prime Minister wishes to avoid sounding as if he is…
Lockdown fatigue
From the vantage point of Downing Street, Boris Johnson may feel reassured that the further measures against Covid-19 he imposed…
Cost of living
Why has much more been spent on saving lives from Covid than other conditions?
Hats off to Laurence Fox
From the moment I started criticising the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis people have been urging me to start…
Trump’s enemies badly want him to survive coronavirus
President Trump is being helicoptered to Walter Reed Hospital following his coronavirus diagnosis. The media are following the story closely…
