The Week UK 26 12 2020

68 Pages·2020·10.56 MB·English

26 DECEMBER 2020 | ISSUES 1311-1312 | £4.99

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THE WEEK 26 December 2020

The main stories…

It wasn’t all bad

The plans for a Christmas reprieve were drawn up a month
ago, said The Independent, “during one of the Government’s
periodic episodes of unwarranted
optimism”. The assumption was that
November’s lockdown and the tier system
would have brought infection levels
sufficiently under control by now. Alas,
they did not, and it’s clear that relaxing the
rules is misguided. “A rethink is needed,”
agreed The Guardian. The UK should
heed the example of Germany, Italy and
the Netherlands, which have all had
second thoughts about their planned
easing of restrictions over Christmas.

On the contrary, said The Daily Telegraph,
the right approach is the one taken by
Johnson: to make families aware of the risks and trust them
to use their judgement. For once, the Government is prepared
to rely on people’s “good sense”. Besides, the review of the
tiering system showed that the incidence of Covid is actually
falling in some parts of the country. And if the PM called off
Christmas at this late stage, said The Sun, who would enforce
all these strictures? Johnson can’t win on this one, but he has
taken the most sensible path by choosing “simply to reinforce
what most responsible people will do anyway”.

Boris Johnson last week defied calls to
cancel the five-day relaxation of Covid-19
rules over Christmas, but urged the public
to keep gatherings small, short and local.
He said there had been “unanimous
agreement” at a meeting of the leaders
of the four nations of the UK that they
shouldn’t “criminalise people’s long-made
plans”. However, the UK-wide approach
to the festive season broke down soon
after the meeting. In Wales, the number of
households that can form a “Christmas
bubble” was cut from three to two, while
Scots were urged to meet for just one day
and to avoid overnight stays. Wales and
Northern Ireland announced strict post-Christmas lockdowns.

With Covid cases rising across most of England, ministers
moved several more local authorities in the east and southeast
into Tier 3, a state of “very high alert”; and there were
growing reports of hospitals running short of beds. Services
were reported to be coming under particular strain in London,
where researchers predicted that one in 86 people would be
infected with the virus by Christmas.

What happened
What the editorials said

A tough Christmas

The Covid Christmas

Trump’s quest to overturn the election result has been nothing
short of “quixotic”, said The Economist. The president’s legal
team launched more than 50 legal challenges
in the past six weeks, and won just one. Now,
after two Supreme Court defeats in a week,
Trump has finally run out of options. His
own refusal to accept defeat is hardly surpris-
ing, said The New York Times. This, after all,
is a man who created a coat of arms for his
Scottish golf course emblazoned with the
words Numquam Concedere – never concede.
But what is shocking is that so many other
Republicans went along with his lies, under-
mining trust in government during a pandemic
which has killed over 311,000 Americans.

It has been a depressing spectacle, agreed The Wall Street
Journal. But outraged Democrats would have more credibility
if they hadn’t spent the past four years claiming the Russians
got Trump elected in 2016. They must share the blame for a
worrying loss of public confidence in the system: just 20% of
Republican voters think Biden’s win was legitimate – and half
still think Trump will be inaugurated in January.

Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential
election was formally confirmed last week,
all but ending Donald Trump’s hopes of
overturning the result. After a process that
is traditionally a rubber-stamp exercise
– but which took on extra significance
owing to Trump’s refusal to concede
– the Electoral College awarded Biden
306 votes to the president’s 232. “The
will of the people prevailed,” Biden
said afterwards. Senior Republicans
including Senate majority leader Mitch
McConnell belatedly broke with Trump
to congratulate Biden on his win – as did
several foreign leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Attorney-General William Barr resigned his post last week,
rather than see out Trump’s full term. Once among the
president’s most loyal supporters, he had recently broken
ranks to declare that he’d found no evidence of irregularities
in November’s presidential election.

What happened
What the editorials said

Biden: it’s official

Trump runs out of options

Sir Leonard Blavatnik has
donated £10m to the Courtauld
Institute of Art, to enable it
to refurbish its gallery at
Somerset House in London.
The Ukrainian-born billionaire,
who made his money in oil,
petrochemicals and plastics
following the collapse of the
Soviet Union, is a long-standing
supporter of the arts in Britain:
he has already given more than
£50m to Tate Modern, and £5m
to the V&A. In 2018, Blavatnik
also bought the Theatre Royal
Haymarket.

A sledge and flag used on
Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod
expedition to the South Pole
(1907-1909) have been acquired
for the nation, thanks to a grant
from the National Heritage
Memorial Fund. The artefacts
were at risk of being sold to
a buyer abroad. Instead, the
sledge will be housed at the
National Maritime Museum in
Greenwich and the flag at the
Scott Polar Research Institute in
Cambridge. Shackleton’s team
got to within 100 miles off the
Pole, closer than anyone before
them, and were the first to
reach the magnetic pole.

A rare ocean refuge
for coral where species
are thriving, despite
warming waters
nearby, has been
discovered off the coast
of Kenya and Tanzania,
reports The Guardian.
Teeming with spinner
dolphins and rare
dugongs, the reef
complex lies in a
150-square-mile “cool
spot”, where cooler water seems to protect coral from the impact
of global warming and warming events such as El Niño. The cool
water comes from deep channels formed thousands of years ago
by glacial run-off from Kilimanjaro and the Usambara mountains.
Scientists described the area as a “jewel of biodiversity”.

COVER CARTOON: HOWARD MCWILLIAM

© SIMON PIERCE/CORAL REEF IMAGE BANK

NEWS 3

26 December 2020 THE WEEK

…and how they were covered

What next?

Governments everywhere have been caught out by the twists and turns of this pandemic, said
Martin Kettle in The Guardian. The record of Johnson’s team is patchier than most, but the
PM’s Christmas strategy – allowing the planned easing of rules to go ahead, while amping
up the warnings – is a “pragmatic compromise”. It strikes the right balance, agreed Patrick
O’Flynn in The Daily Telegraph. A “mass flouting” of overly strict rules would only undermine
the effectiveness of future public health messages.

Faced with a choice between proceeding with a “grave policy error” and making a “U-turn that
will disappoint millions”, Johnson is belatedly seeking to split the difference, said Ailbhe Rea in
the New Statesman. But he hasn’t “laid the groundwork” for this approach. The Government
should have led a public conversation over the past few weeks about how people could best
prepare for safe family gatherings by, for instance, self-isolating in the run-up to Christmas. It
all feels so last-minute. That’s Johnson’s style, said Rafael Behr in The Guardian. He doesn’t
deal with problems until circumstances force him to. It’s no way to tackle a pandemic, although
the method does have the advantage, from the PM’s point of view, of making him the star of
political dramas, as the nation waits, with bated breath, for him to act. “That bathes him in an
aura of power, but it is not leadership.”

No politician wants to be accused of trying to “cancel Christmas”, said David Aaronovitch
in The Times. It would be madness, though, if the country went ahead with “five-day family
superspreading get-togethers” just before those most at risk from Covid are about to be
vaccinated against the disease. Some 138,000 Britons were given the Pfizer jab in the first week
of the roll-out. The aim is to ramp that up to 300,000 a day so that, by the end of January, a
significant proportion of the vulnerable will have received jabs, and by the end of February
most of them will be immune. “That, essentially, is how long we have to wait this thing out.”
Why run the risk of a lethal third wave for the sake of a “movable feast”?

What the commentators said

In a sign of the mounting
alarm about the potential
consequences of Christmas
socialising, the Education
Secretary, Gavin Williamson,
announced that the return to
secondary schools in England
after the holidays would be
staggered, to give schools
time to set up a new mass
testing system. Most pupils
will now be remote learning
until 11 January.

Health professionals warned
that the disruption to NHS
services earlier this year could
have serious consequences for
millions of people who were
unable to have potentially
life-saving scans. New figures
showed that, in England, at
least 4.4 million fewer scans
were performed between
April and September than in
the same period in 2019.

What next?

Remember all of those terrible things Trump was going to do, said Nathan Place in The
Independent? He was going to foment violence at the polls; get rogue state legislators to sabotage
the Electoral College; use his Supreme Court appointments to overturn the result. Well, none of
this has happened. In the end Trump wasn’t a “powerful fascist” who could bend the constitu-
tion to his will – “he had us all conned”. But then Trump is nothing if not a conman, said
Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. His latest ploy has seen him collect $200m in dona-
tions to fund “bogus” challenges to the election result – much of the cash being put aside for
future Republican campaigns. In the meantime, he’s “rage-tweeting” and plotting pardons for
his associates, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times. And, in a break from convention, he has
continued federal executions during the presidential transition period: if four more go ahead as
planned, he’ll have overseen the most executions by a US president in more than a century.

Biden, meanwhile, is taking a “glass-half-full” view of events, said Amber Phillips in The
Washington Post. Ever the pragmatist, he has given Republicans who echoed Trump’s cries
of fraud the benefit of the doubt, saying he’s confident that they’ll work with him when he takes
office in January. But many Democrats feel differently: “They want to ensure Republicans get
blamed in the history books for their actions.” That would be a mistake, said Edward Luce in
the FT. Biden won the election, but his party lost ten seats in the House of Representatives and
will be lucky to win next month’s run-off races in Georgia, which it must do to regain control
of the Senate: many white working-class voters – and increasing numbers of non-white ones –
are turned off by the “moral grandstanding” of left-wing Democrats. Once in office, Biden must
start fixing the economic woes that led 74 million Americans to vote for Trump in November.
And, whether his party likes it or not, that will almost certainly mean working with Republicans.

What the commentators said

Two run-off elections for
the Senate will be held in
Georgia on 5 January,
owing to no candidate
winning more than 50%
of first-round votes.
Republicans only need to
win one of the races to
retain control of the Senate.

A joint session of Congress
will be held the next day
to certify the results of the
presidential election. Some
Republicans have indicated
that they might use the
occasion to launch a final
challenge to the result.
But they have little chance
of success, said the FT,
because the Democrats
control the House of
Representatives.

As this grim year sinks to an end, any moment of good cheer comes
as a relief. And what has recently cheered me has been the conduct
of Labour MP Chris Bryant. During Prime Minister’s Questions last
week, the former priest created a mini sensation by spewing fury at the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle,
who’d upbraided him for lax social distancing. Bryant denies he mouthed the words “F*** off”, but
clearly he did engage in what one MP described as a “face pulling and finger pointing contest” – a
somewhat unfortunate lapse in standards for one who chairs the Parliamentary Standards committee.
Yet my object isn’t to jeer at Bryant. It’s to praise him. Last week he returned to the chamber to do
something we all find teeth-pullingly hard to do: saying sorry... and meaning it. What the papers lazily
characterised as a “grovelling” apology was actually a noble one. “Mr Speaker I am utterly mortified
by the events of last week... I did not treat the chair with due respect. That is unacceptable and I apolo-
gise unreservedly to the House, and to you personally Mr Speaker. I really wish none of this had ever
occurred.” Call me a softy, but each time I listen I’m moved by it, as by the Speaker’s gracious reply.
In the age of the non-apology (“Apologies you feel this way,” is how my accountant replied to my last
complaint) it stands out as a genuine act of contrition. But noble deeds in a minor key don’t fit the
template of newsworthiness, so we don’t hear of them. The world is a better place than it’s reported
to be. And on that buoyant note, may I wish you all a very noble Christmas.

THE WEEK

Jeremy O’Grady

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