One of the big gambles that Johnson and his team has made has been to pre-order tens of millions of vaccines spread out across different potential suppliers. The big one is for the Oxford jab which is now going through its final tests with the expectation that it will soon be available. This afternoon’s news is that approval of the Pfizer vaccine, which has also be pre-bought by the government, is set to get the thumbs up in days and…
But it’s a task singularly ill-suited to Boris Johnson TV used to be so much simpler. When I was growing up, there were only three, then four channels (though Channel 4 didn’t start up until mid-afternoon). If you wanted On Demand, you had to use a Video Recorder. Viewing was entirely through the box (and TVs were boxy) and the only thing resembling an internet was Ceefax and Oracle. They were also almost entirely passively consumed: no ‘e-mail, text or…
At Cornell University they have the world’s most powerful microscope called the transmission electron microscope, this microscope is so powerful that you can actually see images of the atom, the infinitesimally minute building blocks of our universe. You could use this microscope on some of the past winners of Sports Personality Of The Year and you still not find any personality in them. Yes I’m looking at some past winners like, inter alia, Brits Nigel Mansell and Sir Andrew Murray,…
It was Anti-Bullying Week. It was also 17 years since the notorious Section 28 was repealed. The government came out and admitted that last March it stopped funding schools anti-LGBT bullying programmes, despite knowing the harm that such bullying can cause. Perhaps they misunderstood what the “anti” bit actually means. After all the Home Secretary had some difficulty understanding what counter-terrorism meant. Maybe her staff were too scared to tell the fragrant Priti for, yes, she was found by an independent…
To listen to some Conservatives, you would have thought that Carrie Symonds had slain the wicked witch of the west with a click of her shoes. Excitable munchkin MPs are cavorting with joy at the sudden fall of Dominic Cummings. These MPs, who divide equally between cowardly lions, tin men without hearts and scarecrows with no brains, all now expect a return to true Conservative government (though they disagree about what this would mean in practice). Let us be clear. This is…
This really is the end of an era The big UK political news this morning is that it appears that Dominic Cummings is on the way out as Johnson seeks to reset his team in an effort to try to pull his party’s and personal ratings back up. There’s nothing official yet but when asked about his future plans he replied “My position hasn’t changed since my January blog.”. In that lengthy post he had written “We want to improve…
Above is the market from Smarkets, the betting exchange that unlike Betfair settled Biden bets at the weekend, on whether there’ll be a UK deal with the EU by the end of December. Undoubtedly what happened on November 3rd in the US and the prospect of President Biden has impacted on punters. The chances of a quick deal with the US in the event of a no-deal Brexit must have greatly diminished and that is something that the UK and…
Boris Johnson is losing the support of his party. There are enough straws in the wind now to indicate his perceived usefulness is coming to an end, and his popularity is rapidly diminishing in the country. If there’s anything more likely to confirm MPs worries it’s the polling, and the most recent show him behind Keir Starmer as best Prime Minister and his support fracturing in the Red Wall. Many have had concerns about Boris all along, and many more…