First YouGov polling response to the lockdown changes looks positive for the ministers
First polling response to the lockdown changes look positive pic.twitter.com/b6my26yx9C — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) June 23, 2020
Johnson’s big gamble – setting a time table for the lockdown regulations to be eased
Lockdown bandit Cummings and his team have certainly been hard at work briefing the media on the changes in the lockdown regulations that are due to be announced by the Prime Minister in House of Commons today The papers, as can be seen above, are pretty positive and are giving the changes the big treatment because, clearly, any easing of the strict controls that people have been living under since March is massive news. This, of course, represents a big…
Twenty thousand excess pandemic deaths could be Johnson’s political legacy
How’s this going to play at the general election? Whenever the pandemic is over and we return to normal life the politics of what has happened over these last few months are going to dominate the political agenda perhaps until the next general election. A big question is whether Johnson’s government was too slow to act. The main story on Guardian this morning under the headline “Enforcing UK lockdown one week earlier ‘could have saved 20,000 lives’ sets out an…
PB Nighthawks Cafe on the evening Trump said that he’d been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln – who, of course, was assassinated
We haven’t spent much time of late looking at some of the wacko things that Trump comes out with. The latest is an assertion that he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln. The obvious response is that Lincoln was murdered. What could be worse than that? There’s little doubt that COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on the WH2020 race with primaries cancelled or postponed and the Democrats having to put back their convention till August. The impact on…
Biden still trails in the WH2020 betting in spite of opening double digit poll leads over Trump
By far the biggest development so far in WH2020 has been Trump’s comment a few days ago that people could inject themselves with bleach to fight the the coronavirus. This has been widely ridiculed and there have been reports from many parts of the US of people actually ingesting bleach and other such liquids and having to be treated by the emergency services. Of all the crazy things that this President has said so far during the campaign this is…
The vibes are that the lockdown could be set to be eased
It was inevitable that there was going to be a more positive mood emanating from Downing Street following the return of the prime minister, Boris Johnson. Most of the front pages reflect this although a move at this stage to relax the lockdown could be a very big gamble and cost thousands of lives. Certainly the latest numbers of the total fatalities are down sharply and if this does indicate a trend then clearly the time might be right for…
The Monday night PB Nighthawks cafe with some positive news about a vaccine
As just about the whole world waits for a vaccine to be available there’s some positive news tonight about what’s going on in Oxford in the New York Times. The report notes that: “…scientists at the university’s Jenner Institute had a running start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations — including one last year against an earlier coronavirus — were harmless to humans. That has enabled them to leap ahead and schedule tests of their…
How the Tories are still paying the price for Cameron’s failure to win a majority in 2010
The coalition concessions continue to shape Britain’s politics On May 11th 2010, my birthday as it happens, David Cameron was able to enter Downing Street even though he’d failed to win a majority as a result of the coalition deal with Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems. Two aspects of the Tory concessions required to make that happen are still very much in place – the Fixed-Term Term Parliament Act and the doubling of the number of LD members of the House…