Five things we learned this week
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The Times and Sunday Times
Saturday March 6 2021
Red Box
Patrick Maguire
By Patrick Maguire
Good morning,
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You've got until Wednesday, gives the working parents among you two whole days to get a covering letter and CV in before Gavin Williamson shuts the schools again.

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Thanks for your company on these strange weekend mornings. We'll be back very soon.

Today's trivia question: There are two serving parliamentarians who stood for election against Roy Jenkins, who enjoyed an unexpected return to the spotlight this week. Who are they? Answer at the bottom of today's email
Patrick Maguire
Red Box reporter
Twitter icon @patrickkmaguire
 
The weekend
  • After another promising week of coronavirus data – remember that? – positive news abounds on the front of today's Times. The top line: new variants are "very unlikely" to stop a return to normality by summer, the government scientist in charge of identifying them has said. In the Saturday interview, meanwhile, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng says all adults could be offered a vaccine by June – a month earlier than planned.
  • Three days on, is the budget already falling apart? The stand-off between Whitehall and NHS workers escalated yesterday as nurses threatened to strike. Labour will hope it undermines the chancellor's painstakingly polled and carefully crafted messaging, which the parliamentary team explore in today's in depth-read on the making of Brand Rishi, and Sunak's designs on No 10.
  • And ahead of the great reopening of English schools on Monday, we reveal the extreme lengths - and expense - headteachers are taking to reassure parents that their children are safe, from doorstep canvassing to TikTok-style public information campaigns.
  • WHO'S ON THE SUNDAY SHOWS? On The Andrew Marr Show (BBC1, 9am): Gavin Williamson, education secretary; Jon Ashworth, shadow health secretary; Dr Susan Hopkins, Public Health England.
  • On Sophy Ridge on Sunday (Sky News, 8.30am): Gavin Williamson; Lisa Nandy, shadow foreign secretary; Amanda Spielman, chief inspector, Ofsted; Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women; and Mhairi Black, SNP MP.
  • On G&T (Times Radio, 10am): Gavin Williamson; Lisa Nandy; Kevin Courtney, general secretary of the National Education Union; Amanda Spielman; Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Commons Speaker; and Dame Jenni Murray, broadcaster.
Five things we learnt this week
1. Austerity is back - and ministers face a scrap on NHS pay
As Rishi Sunak delivered his difficult second budget on Wednesday I was struck by a thought that sounded like great analysis at the time.

If one went back in time to 2014 with the text of the chancellor’s statement and told an MP that Brexit had happened, they might, I thought, assume a Labour-Ukip coalition had been elected in 2020: raising tax, sending civil service jobs to the regions, a green investment bank, etc, etc.

I still think there’s something in that comparison. But it’s less a description of the budget than of the political complexion of the government itself.

Indeed, what a lot of the immediate reaction missed was – despite Sunak’s unwanted reputation as the nation’s cash machine – the fact that austerity returned.

Much was made, rightly, of that fact that the chancellor’s deferred corporation tax rise tore up a decade of Osbornite orthodoxy and abandoned the belief that lower rates would encourage investment by business.

But in another respect he went against the grain and returned to the politics of his political lodestar and predecessor-but-two. NHS spending was cut from £148 billion to £139 billion year-on-year, while £4 billion was cut from day-to-day spending on public services.

In other words, the healthcare workers subject to so many homilies from ministers this year aren’t about to be handsomely rewarded. Where the unions demanded a 12 per cent pay rise, the government offered only 1 per cent.

Some suspected a ploy by Matt Hancock to rain on the chancellor’s post-budget parade, but the health secretary threw his weight behind the modest increase at last night’s Downing Street presser. "We've proposed what we think is affordable to make sure that in the NHS people do get a pay rise," Hancock said.

The language of tightened belts returns. No 10 had an even harder line, insisting that a 1 per cent increase was a real terms increase (of 0.1 per cent, admittedly) and returning again and again to that word – affordability. Or, if you're health minister Nadine Dorries, "pleasant surprise" will do.

A handful of Tory MPs fear that ministers have badly misjudged the mood on this one, as they did with Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign. Then, as now, Labour sought to harry the government into a U-turn with the help of Tory rebels.

This time, however, there is the threat of strike action by nurses and a great deal of union opprobrium. But where is the backbench backlash to Hancock’s attempt to stiff workers who Starmer has taken to calling “our Covid heroes”?

Sir Roger Gale, one of the biggest moaners of this parliament, popped up on the Today programme yesterday to demand more cash. Others who spoke to The Times branded it “inept” and questioned why Downing Street had dug in rather than leave itself space to U-turn.

But most of his colleagues resent Starmer’s opportunism and believe, all things considered, public sector workers had it much easier than those in the private sector.

Privately, senior government sources have suggested the proposed pay increase could be a preliminary offer ahead of further negotiations. The government has made its affordability assessment to independent pay review bodies, which will make recommendations to ministers in May.

Before then, however, a strike in an already pressured NHS may reveal the damage done.
2. New variants won't derail the lockdown roadmap
It became one of the more wearying rituals of the summer. Enter pub, grope for mask, fumble for phone, scan barcode, and pray to hear nothing more of it ever again. And very few of us did: on Thursday we learnt that hundreds of millions of check-ins via the NHS Test and Trace app at pubs, restaurants and hairdressers were effectively ignored.

Another triumph for Dido Harding, then, who will surely be remembered as having overseen one of the most glaring failures of the state’s response to the pandemic. So battered is its reputation that when Matt Hancock announced with some brio that a single case of Covid-19 had been located in Croydon last night, one could have been forgiven for assuming that locating even one infection now counts as a success. Boom boom

.It did, of course – because the case in question was the unidentified sixth case of the vaccine-resistant Brazilian variant. Remarkably, Hancock said, there does not yet appear to have been any onward transmission: the carrier isolated as recommended. Door-to-door surge testing, deployed to great effect in areas hit by the South African variant last month, is now under way.

The risk posed by new variants capable of reducing the efficacy of vaccines is one of the reasons that Boris Johnson’s timetable for easing lockdown is a strikingly cautious one. But thus far cases have been isolated quickly and, for now at least, there is no question of them dislodging the dominant Kentish mutation.

Only 295 cases of the South African variant have been found in Britain – a rise of only seven over the course of last week. And there is another important number to consider too: 40 per cent. That, the health secretary said at No 10 last night, is the proportion of UK adults who’ve now had at least one vaccine dose.

The upshot of both of those numbers? There is reason to be optimistic that new variants less susceptible to antibodies won’t have a chance to gain a significant foothold in Britain and, as a result, won’t prolong our exit from restrictions.

Sharon Peacock, the executive director of Genomics UK – the government-backed body sequencing the genetic code of Covid-19 cases so as to identify new variants at the earliest possible opportunity – tells The Times today that variants are “very unlikely to send us back to square one”.

I’m very optimistic that the vaccines will be rolled out, they’ll be effective, and that we’ll be in a better place by summer and autumn,” she said. “I think we've got the capabilities to stay ahead by adapting vaccines, and so I'm an optimist.”

Better still: “The vaccines we have at the moment are very effective against pretty much everything that's circulating.” Booster shots, Peacock said, will be required to refresh the waning immunity of the vaccinated anyway – and that it is entirely feasible that they can and will be adapted to whatever variants begin to circulate.

It may be too early to celebrate. But bad news is an increasingly rare thing.
 
3. Liz Truss is on the up
Sunak and Hancock spend a lot of time scrapping over Covid-19 policy – and the spotlight. But there is no question as to which of the two MPs hold in greater esteem. But for a few principled exceptions, more or less all hacks heard from the Tory benches this week was cooing over the chancellor.

That much was expected in the week of budget that was, politically at least, a resounding success. Yet it overshadowed a not insignificant amount of excitement among Conservative MPs around the exploits of another minister: Liz Truss, the international trade secretary.

On Thursday, the Biden administration suspended millions of pounds in tariffs on UK exports – most notably whisky – in an unexpected de-escalation of a trade dispute that had rumbled for years. Until this week set at 25 per cent, Scotch is now subject to no tariffs at all for four months.

Truss had binned UK tariffs on American imports in December, but the Trump White House didn’t reciprocate. Their successors having belatedly done so, the hope is that both sides might now resolve a bitter – and bigger – dispute over subsidies given to Airbus and Boeing when the UK was a member of the European Union.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, however, it has saved the whisky industry £30 million a week in the immediate term and given Truss’s standing among colleagues a boost.

It has also proved something important to Downing Street: that the Biden administration is willing to deal with the UK on trade. That, too, was far from clear mere months ago.

Despite a somewhat chequered ministerial record, the international trade secretary has struck a series of deals overseas over the past eighteen months – largely out of sight of the lobby – and has won plenty of admirers among MPs in the process.

Her brand of industrial-strength libertarianism has always had its supporters, particularly among the 2017 intake of Tory MPs, but there is a quiet and growing consensus across the government benches that this “proper Conservative” is among the more reliable performers in a lacklustre cabinet.

Tory members agree, too. Not even Sunak can dislodge Truss from the top of ConservativeHome’s monthly poll of grassroots views towards cabinet ministers. MPs have noticed that too.

You will catch few of them tipping her as leader, granted. But nor is there much doubt that her cabinet career – the joint-longest of any serving minister, alongside Michael Gove – is unlikely to end at the next reshuffle. And that is a prediction few would have made upon her appointment in 2019.
 
4. Loyalist tempers are flaring in Northern Ireland
One of the many striking things about the budget was its failure to engage with or evangelise for Brexit. Regardless, the most significant announcement the government will make this year on that front had already been made that Wednesday morning.

News is seldom made at Northern Ireland questions. Often journalists only turn up with a view to securing a decent spot for PMQs, immediately afterwards. Not so this week.

Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland secretary, announced to MPs that the government had chosen to unilaterally extend the grace period that exempts supermarkets from checks on goods sent from Great Britain to Northern Ireland for six months.

Brussels, unsurprisingly, called that a “violation” of the much-maligned Northern Ireland protocol and a breach of international law, which is an example of the uncompromising style we can expect from Lord Frost, the cabinet's new Brexit minister. In response Brussels threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on the City.

In Northern Ireland, where DUP ministers have already suspended construction works on border inspection posts, the umbrella organisation for loyalist groups wrote to the prime minister to formally withdraw their support for the Good Friday Agreement.

Today David Campbell, a spokesman for the Loyalist Communities Council, tells The Times of fears that more militant members are seeking to reactivate the former terrorist organisations.

That threat - which the former first minister Lord Trimble branded "deplorable" yesterday - is a reminder that this high-stakes game of diplomatic brinkmanship is having real and dangerous consequences on the shores both sides are professing to protect.
 
5. Labour MPs are heading to TikTok
It is an edict that will baffle backbenchers beyond a certain age (and that age is quite possibly as low as 30). Yesterday, Labour ordered all of its MPs to sign up to TikTok, the Chinese social network beloved by teens, in a belated attempt to prevent parliamentarians from falling foul of online pranksters.

Opposition officials wrote to all Labour MPs to ask them to “secure your username” on the video-sharing site after a spate of malicious parodies.

Sir Keir Starmer is among those whose identity has been appropriated by users of varying levels of artistic ability. The party is now lobbying TikTok to remove the accounts.“

We are aware of a number of parody MP TikTok accounts that have been set up recently,” officials wrote. “We would encourage all MPs to create a TikTok account (even if you aren’t planning on using it) to secure your username.”

Starmer had better hope that his MPs don’t get hooked to the app’s algorithm. From bitter experience I can tell you that it is the easiest way to waste an hour. Or several.

Several users are impersonating Starmer, the most prolific of which gently chides the Labour leader using parodies more often used to mock the middle-aged mothers of TikTok teens. The garish caption on one such video reads: "day out to #bigtesco".

An account registered in the name of John McDonnell, who served as shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn, bears the provocative if pithy biography: “UP THE IRA.”

One video posted under McDonnell’s name with the soundtrack Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead invites users to “like if Thatchers dead” [sic]. The Hayes and Harlington MP, 69, is not connected to the account.

While embarrassing and in some cases deliberately offensive, none of the accounts in question have managed to muster more than a few hundred followers.

The dancer Charli D’Amelio, by far the most popular TikToker with 108.7 million followers, can sleep easy.

Labour does boast a small, legitimate presence on the site, however. Zarah Sultana, the 27-year-old MP for Coventry South, is a regular user, sharing dispatches from behind the scenes of Westminster.

This week Sultana disabused her 78,000 followers of the notion that the parliamentary life is a glamorous one. In a video accompanied by the Spice Girls, she revealed that she had contributed to a virtual Commons debate in a pair of Liverpool FC pyjama bottoms.

All a good laugh, of course, but there is also potential for a proper row. Any mass migration to the platform by Labour MPs is likely to rile China hawks in the Commons, several of whom have called for the app to be banned amid concerns that its owner, ByteDance, could share user data with the Chinese intelligence services.
 
Chart of the week
At last, a mildly interesting poll. This week the Conservatives extend their lead to a healthy five points.
It's been a slow week for vaccinations among Red Box readers. 78 per cent of you have now had one dose, up three per cent from last week; four per cent have had both (no change); four per cent have an appointment (no change here either), and 14 per cent of you have had neither a dose nor an appointment (down three per cent).

In yesterday's poll, meanwhile, 42 per cent of you thought Labour stood no chance of winning the next election. 46 per cent of you modestly said it was too soon to tell, while only 12 per cent you believe Keir Starmer can enter No 10. As prime minister, that is, not as a guest.
Have your say
Yesterday I asked for your preferred leaders of the opposition.

Bob Bell: "Sir Graham Brady is my local MP and is doing an excellent job as leader of the opposition – let’s keep him."

Mike and Jill Mahoney: "Max Headroom - why have Starmer when you can have the real thing? Plus, you never see them in the same room together, so... Just saying. Failing that - almost anyone, up to and including one of Monty Python’s Knights Who Say Ni, on the grounds that they’d be bound to have more warmth, judgment and charisma."

Bill Giles: "There is clearly nobody very effective on the Labour front bench so perhaps they should go for the sympathy vote with Anneliese Dodds."

Peter Tear: "Surveying the dull line up in the Commons, i would have to say David Milliband."

Kay Bagon: "I would pick Robert Peston! He should definitely enter politics, after all his father was a Labour peer. He could run rings round Johnson."

Michael Fairall: "Call for the Prince over the water - David Miliband."

Austin Fears: "Screaming Lord Sutch, obvs."

TODAY: Amid the growing row over NHS pay, who would you give a pay rise to? Email redbox@thetimes.co.uk and Esther will use some of the best on Monday.
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The cartoon
Today's cartoon from The Times by Peter Brookes
Today's trivia answer
Today's trivia question: There are two serving parliamentarians who stood for election against Roy Jenkins. Who are they?

Answer: Labour peer Lord Hoyle (who lost to Jenkins in the 1981 Warrington by-election), and SNP MSP Bill Kidd (who lost to Jenkins at Glasgow Hillhead in 1987).

Send your trivia to redbox@thetimes.co.uk
 
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