26 DECEMBER 2020 | ISSUES 1311-1312 | £4.99 ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS theweek.co.uk People of the year Page 10 Christmas double issue THEWEEK 52 9 771362 343999 2 NEWS 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 Subscriptions: 0330-333 9494;