The latest drive to help halt the spread of Covid-19 has been criticised by senior scientists for placing insufficient emphasis on the issues of ventilation and the need to stay apart from others.

Sasha Swire’s diaries. Truth about the Cameron years – but not the whole truth. Not by a long shot.

www.conservativehome.com 

Extract:

….To judge from the extracts, the diaries are a mash-up of the perceptive and the delusional, bound together by a blithe disregard for discretion.  Which would make Swire a natural diarist.

A story, doubtless untrue, is doing the rounds.  That it was put to Hugo Swire, her ex-Conservative MP husband, that the diaries’ publication will [lose] them friends.  “I suppose so,” he is said to have replied.  “In which case, I’ll just have to buy some new ones.”

Whether apocryphal or not, that catches the flavour of the extracts: they paint a picture of a self-perpetuating elite which believed it was born to rule.  There is enough truth in the charge for the ever-alert George Osborne to have launched a salvage operation………

Local Tory “Foot Soldiers” (dotty as the church stalwarts in The Vicar of Dibley) and councillors (Toilet Seats) must be waiting anxiously for publication of the “Secret Diaries” on 24 September to see whether their hard work for the party has “earned” them a name check. 

If they have been ignored this time, all is not lost because:

Sasha Swire has plenty more embarrassing diaries to come

David Sanderson, Arts Correspondent www.thetimes.co.uk

Westminster, take a deep breath: Sasha Swire has years of diary entries still to be published.

With the dust refusing to settle after the serialisation of Lady Swire’s diaries, it can be revealed that there is plenty more where that came from.

The wife of the former Conservative minister Sir Hugo Swire has already embarrassed swathes of the body politic with her indiscretion-heavy memoir, which is due to be published next week.

Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power, which was serialised in The Times, revealed the sex-laden jokes and drinking habits of David Cameron as well as insights into the behaviour and relationships of those surrounding him during his years in power.

Mr Cameron acknowledged this week that revelations about his behaviour in private being “splashed all over the place” were embarrassing.

He insisted, however, that he could not remember walking behind Lady Swire on a coastal walk and telling her: “The scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones. It makes me want to grab you and push you into the bushes and give you one.”

Lady Swire’s literary agent, Caroline Dawnay, confirmed yesterday that more embarrassing details about Britain’s ruling classes could lie ahead.

“She has diaries from before and after,” Ms Dawnay said. “But she has not decided whether to publish them. She will definitely write something brilliant again though.”

The published diary begins on May 12, 2010, days after the general election, which had resulted in a hung parliament, as Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg, then the leader of the Liberal Democrats, put together their coalition government.

The next day Sir Hugo, an Old Etonian like Mr Cameron and Boris Johnson, is appointed a minister in the Northern Ireland Office. He later becomes a minister in the Foreign Office. The memoir ends in late 2019 after Sir Hugo’s retirement as an MP.

Lady Swire confesses to being “a secret journal writer since childhood”. She says in the preface to her forthcoming memoir that she had never intended to publish them but after her husband’s retirement she had “somewhat foolishly” shown Ms Dawnay extracts and was swiftly “swept up into a publishing tornado”.

While Sir Hugo’s years in government only began in 2010, he was in the Conservative inner circles for many years beforehand.

The former Sotheby’s director was elected to parliament in 2001 and two years later became an opposition whip. In 2004 he was promoted to shadow culture minister, a position he lost in 2007 after a suggestion that the Conservatives would scrap the policy of free entry to the national museums.

Lady Swire was his part-time political researcher during the period.

Boris Johnson‘s close friends and colleagues say the ‘subdued’ and ‘moody’ Prime Minister is worrying and complaining about money after his earnings shrank from over £350,000 a year down to £150,000.

Jack Wright www.dailymail.co.uk

Those in contact with Mr Johnson claim the embattled premier, usually jovial and ebullient, has ‘misery etched on his face’ as he struggles to cope with ever-growing political and personal pressures.

The Prime Minister is understood to detest being ‘at the helm in rough seas’ as his ‘longstanding tendency for dark moods’ is exacerbated by coronavirus and Brexit – which threaten to jeopardise his standing at the next General Election. 

Meanwhile friends allege that he is worrying about money, having sacrificed his Daily Telegraph column (£275,000) and lucrative speaking engagements for his prime ministerial salary (£150,000).

Mr Johnson is complaining about supporting four of his six children through university and coming out the other side of an expensive divorce from his ex-wife Marina Wheeler. His use of the flat he shares with fiancee Carrie Symonds above No 11 is taxed as a benefit in kind, while he also has to pay for food sent up from the Downing Street kitchen. All of this has left the ‘badly served’ Prime Minister in a foul mood, without a housekeeper and ‘worried about being able to afford a nanny’ for baby Wilfred, his friends claim

Though this is a tidy sum of money for most, Mr Johnson is complaining about supporting four of his six children through university and coming out the other side of an expensive divorce from his ex-wife Marina Wheeler. 

His use of the flat he shares with fiancee Carrie Symonds, with whom he had newborn baby Wilfred this year, above No 11 is taxed as a benefit in kind, while he also has to pay for food sent up from the Downing Street kitchen.

The couple are even presented with a bill by the Government if they want to host friends at Mr Johnson’s Chequers country retreat.

All of this has left the ‘badly served’ Prime Minister in a foul mood, complaining about money and worrying about ‘being able to afford a nanny’ as he invests all his time and energy into governing, his friends have claimed.  

One friend told The Times: ‘Boris, like other prime ministers, is very, very badly served. He doesn’t have a housekeeper – he has a single cleaner and they’re worried about being able to afford a nanny. 

‘He’s stuck in the flat and Downing Street is not a nice place to live. It’s not like the Élysée or the White House where you can get away from it all because they’re so big.’

Senior Conservatives who meet regularly with the Prime Minister said the twin crises of coronavirus and Brexit have knocked his confidence and usual optimism……….  

………….’This is all weighing very heavily on him. I think you can see it even in some of his public appearances – the sort of misery etched on his face. He doesn’t seem to be enjoying being at the helm in rough seas,’ a Tory said.

‘He just seemed subdued. He was engaged but he certainly wasn’t as lively as you’d expect,’ said another. ‘You can speculate – does that go back to the illness? Is it the weight of responsibility or is it maybe just a recognition that he’s not always very well briefed on things? Most likely it’s some combination of all those.’ 

German discount supermarket chain Aldi is planning to open a store in Axminster.

Chris Carson www.midweekherald.co.uk /

It hopes to build a foodstore as part of a planned mixed-use development on surplus land on the Axminster Carpets estate, off Musbury Road.

In a statement Axminster Carpets Limited (ACL) has said: “ACL Properties is proposing to develop surplus land on the eastern part of the Axminster Carpets estate.

“This is the first phase of a long-term plan for the consolidation and regeneration of the estate and modernisation of the carpet business.

“The proposal is for a mixed-use development featuring a new Aldi supermarket foodstore and a number of houses fronting Musbury Road.

“We would like to share these proposals with those living and working in the area and invite views on the proposed development before submitting an outline planning application to East Devon District Council later this year..

“Due to the current restrictions on public gatherings, the consultation will be held online.”

Further information on the proposals and a survey can be found at http://www.axminsterregeneration.co.uk from Monday (September 21). Paper copies can also be requested from Avril Baker Consultancy on 0117 977 2022 or e mail info@abc-pr.co.uk

“Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, who leads the Covid symptom study, said the data suggested a second wave of Covid had begun. “The data from the app is painting a worrying picture, with cases on the rise across the UK, with the only exception to that rule being the south-west, where we see numbers staying low,” he said.”

Nicola Davis www.theguardian.com 

Coronavirus cases in England almost doubled in the space of a week, with infections becoming more widespread across all ages, leading one expert to say a second wave had begun.

Almost 60,000 people are thought to have had the virus from 4 to 10 September 2020 – one in every 900 people – with about 6,000 new cases per day, according to the ONS survey of randomly selected people in the community.

The previous week, about 1 in 1,400 people are thought to have had the virus, with 3,200 new cases per day. “The estimates show that the incidence rate for England has increased in recent weeks,” the ONS team writes.

There was evidence of higher infection rates in north-west England and London. The R figure – the average number of people one infected person infects – was also revealed to be 1.2-1.4 in England and 1.1-1.4 UK-wide, up from 1.0-1.2 last week.

Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, who leads the Covid symptom study, said the data suggested a second wave of Covid had begun. “The data from the app is painting a worrying picture, with cases on the rise across the UK, with the only exception to that rule being the south-west, where we see numbers staying low,” he said.

Prof Steve Riley from Imperial College London said the ONS findings were consistent with data from the recently released React-1 study, which suggested cases of the virus in England were doubling every seven to eight days. “This is additional evidence supporting the need for reduced social contact to avoid future increases in Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths,” he said.

The ONS figures also confirm that, in the week that schools returned in England, cases appear to be have risen most among primary-school-age children and adults under the age of 35.

However experts said the data also showed some increase in older adults, with the average percentage of individuals testing positive for Covid-19 rising from 0.04% to 0.12% among 50- to 69-year-olds between 19 August and 10 September – although the ONS cautions there is uncertainty around the true size of this increase.

The figures come the same day that Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England, stressed the virus was not confined to the young. “We’re seeing clear signs this virus is now spreading widely across all age groups and I am particularly worried by the increase in rates of admission to hospital and intensive care among older people.”

The government has applied tighter restrictions to nearly 2 million people living in north-east England, including a 10pm curfew for venues such as bars and restaurants and a ban on people socialising with those from other households. Similar restrictions are set to be rolled out in the north-west, the Midlands and West Yorkshire from Tuesday.

The ONS has also reported on the situation in Wales, revealing that about 1 in 2,000 people are thought to have had the virus in the week from 4 to 10 September 2020, an increase from 1 in 2,600 people the previous week.

However the ONS team say they detected very few positive tests and the results show no clear sign of a rise. “Our modelling suggests that the number of Covid-19 cases in Wales is currently relatively stable,” they write.

A rise in cases has also been reported by researchers behind the Covid symptom study app, which revealed cases to be highest in the north of England and the Midlands.

While the ONS survey captures symptomatic and asymptomatic cases, the Covid symptom study from Spector focuses on people with symptoms, but covers the whole UK.

Based on 8,124 swab tests, results suggest that over the two weeks up to 13 September there were an average of 7,536 daily new symptomatic cases of Covid in the UK. The team add that the data indicates almost 70,000 people in the UK currently have symptomatic Covid – almost twice the figure of 35,248 from the week before.

Responding to the ONS figures, Dr Kit Yates, a senior lecturer in mathematical biology at the University of Bath, said the situation was concerning. “The time between the reporting periods for the ONS’s latest figures was five days rather than the usual seven. Since these changes occurred over a five-day period we might expect that the doubling time is even faster than a week.”

According to the latest R data, only the south-west has an R number that could be below 1; the Midlands and the north-west have the highest values, with both having an R number thought to be between 1.2 and 1.5.

The UK government is facing legal action over Boris Johnson’s “moonshot” project, which could involve up to £100bn being spent on an attempt to increase Covid-19 testing capacity to 10m per day.

Robert Booth www.theguardian.com

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, and the minister for the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove, are named in a case that alleges the project, as described in leaked papers, is unlawful because it ignores scientific evidence, involves potentially huge private contracts that may not have been tendered and breaks the government’s own value-for-money rules.

The project has been widely criticised as a misdirected effort when between 3 and 9 September, only 571,400 people were tested for infection in England in NHS and community settings, according to official figures. Community testing has been getting slower, with the median time taken to get a result at local test sites increasing from 24 hours to 35 hours.

Supporters of the project say it is the kind of ambitious thinking required to enable life to return to normal until an effective vaccine can be rolled out.

The legal action is the latest in a series of challenges aimed at government handling of the Covid crisis by the Good Law Project, a not-for-profit membership body that has issued proceedings about the award of contracts for personal protective equipment.

Now it wants a judicial review of the moonshot plan, alleging the government should have consulted the National Screening Committee, which advises on mass testing and screening programmes, and that the possibility of the programme generating large numbers of false positives risks “personal and economic harm to tens of thousands of people”. It claims that private contracts should be publicly tendered.

Leaked documents obtained by the British Medical Journal and the Guardian showed that the accountancy firm Deloitte had been identified as a key partner in the project, alongside potential partners including G4S, Serco, Boots, Sainsbury’s, AstraZeneca, GSK and Smith and Nephew. The project promises “a huge new operational infrastructure” with testing available in pharmacies, schools and workplaces as well as health settings.

A pre-action letter sent to the government’s lawyers cites concerns that ministers are effectively “punting unprecedented sums of public money on technology that does not exist”.

It states: “As far as we are aware, no public consultation has been undertaken in respect of this decision to approve and commit £100bn of public money to Project Moonshot and no documents recording the decision-making process leading to the decision have been published by the defendants, or otherwise released into the public domain. At present, it is unclear (and there is no transparency) as to what considerations and evidence have, or have not, been taken into account by the defendants in making the decision(s)”

The action could flush out government papers about decision-making around moonshot, HM Treasury’s involvement in approving plans for the spend and how far the companies said to be involved initiated proposals for contracts.

Maugham said: “This is a staggering sum of money – a generational-sized millstone of debt. Yet we know nothing about who has made the decision to spend it, or with what safeguards, or with whom, or why with them. There is the sense about it all [being] a bet made at the whim of a single unelected Svengali.

“What we do know is that all the experts – Sage, the Royal Statistical Society, the National Screening Committee, the World Health Organization, all of them – have grave concerns about whether it is the right thing to do.”

The Department of Heath and Social Care and the Cabinet Office have been contacted for comment.

“If I were starting a business school I would offer an honours course in vanity infrastructure.”

Simon Jenkins www.theguardian.com 

Poor Wylfa. The nuclear power station nestles in a landscape of bliss in north Wales, but it was never glamorous enough for Westminster. This week the Japanese firm Hitachi failed to get sufficient government subsidy for its rebuilding, and pulled out. Wylfa lacks the political magnetism of the only other spearhead into Britain’s new nuclear age, Hinkley Point.

Hinkley Point was different. It was blessed by France’s then economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, and seen as talisman of the “golden era” of Anglo-Chinese relations under David Cameron and George Osborne. This was despite doubts over its security and a blistering national audit report on its £22bn cost and £50bn lifetime energy bill surcharge. The project was not about money or energy but about preening diplomacy. Wylfa could eat its heart out.

If I were starting a business school I would offer an honours course in vanity infrastructure. In April, Boris Johnson finally issued “notice to proceed” on the most lavish construction project in Europe, Britain’s new railway, HS2. Its value for money was plummeting even before coronavirus, at just £1.20 for every £1 in cost, and possibly heading towards 70p.

Inquiries by the National Audit Office and Commons Accounts Committee were scathing not just at costs soaring from £34bn in 2010 to £106bn today, but at the morass of consultants, facilitators, conflicts of interests and dubious bonuses swilling round HS2 Ltd, its boss pocketing £660,000 a year. Supporters continued to weave and dodge between arguing the case for speedier journeys, more commuter capacity and a “boost for the north”.

What has been intriguing about HS2, like Hinkley Point, is its political invulnerability. From now on it will be charging British taxpayers over £100m a week for the scheduled 20 years of the project. The sums are so stupefying as to have an inverse effect. They are taken as a sign of political machismo, of “build, build, build”. Opponents have included even Johnson and his svengali, Dominic Cummings. Other ministers are only too aware that £100m a week cannot avoid impacting on their projects.

Over last winter, HS2’s still uncertain Whitehall champions were desperate to get it across the threshold where cancellation would appear more politically damaging than proceeding. Despite increasing evidence that the line would largely benefit rail capacity into London and may never go beyond the Midlands, they spliced it on to Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda and demanded a decision in April, in the midst of the Covid crisis. They won what is currently Whitehall’s most coveted prize, Johnson’s U-turn of the week.

The absurdities of vanity politics were no less evident at the other end of the spectrum in this week’s total closure of Hammersmith Bridge in London. The bridge’s owners, Hammersmith and Fulham council, had been screaming for years to London’s mayor about its deterioration, which they could not possibly afford to repair. The bridge was closed to traffic 18 months ago and the public is now banned from walking over it and even boats from passing under it. That scuppers next year’s boat race.

The chief target of the screaming was London’s previous mayor, Johnson. At the time he was splurging money on vanity projects, including a cable car, a giant helter skelter, rear-entry buses, police water cannon and a £175m “garden bridge”. By the time the garden bridge was halted by Johnson’s successor, Sadiq Khan, £43m of taxpayers’ money had vanished into the project. That is almost exactly the sum needed to stabilise Hammersmith Bridge.

Since closure coincided with that of London Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, the story was a gift to last week’s New York Times: “London’s bridges really are falling down”. The headline instantly had the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, racing to Hammersmith to declare himself “fed up” with Khan and promising urgent action to save the bridge. He seemed unaware that his boss was chiefly to blame. Now the cost of full restoration of the bridge has risen to £141m, or 10 days’ spend on HS2.

Business students will note the role the media plays in these projects. Whitehall has a formal audit monitoring of infrastructure projects, meticulously charting their value for money. This appears to have no bearing on what gets cabinet approval. Meanwhile, the Treasury’s traditional scepticism towards public extravagance, savagely austere towards local government spending, vanishes in a puff of glory when the rate of return is measured in headlines rather than public benefit. .

The assumption that all public infrastructure must be good is now holy writ. Every political speech, every party manifesto, bows before it. The Trades Union Congress and Confederation of British Industry cry in unison. Infrastructure is “investment” – in power stations, railways, prisons, schools. Anything built, its mere creation, implies a positive rate of return. No one questions priorities or asks who will pay for what goes on inside. As for Wylfa, it is clearly the Hammersmith Bridge of power stations. Perhaps it should call the New York Times.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

A meeting of East Devon District Council’s Strategic Planning Committee due to take place next Wednesday (September 23) to discuss Cranbrook Town Centre has been postponed following significant changes to the original proposals by developers.

18 September 2020 eastdevon.gov.uk 

A meeting of East Devon District Council’s Strategic Planning Committee due to take place next Wednesday (September 23) to discuss Cranbrook Town Centre has been postponed following significant changes to the original proposals by developers.

A key element of the meeting was to discuss the proposal put forward by the East Devon New Community Partners (EDNCp) who are the developers for the majority of Cranbrook and have control of the land in the town centre.

However, the proposals put forward by the EDNCp were significantly amended earlier this week. The scheduled meeting has now had to be postponed so that the proposed changes can be fully considered and councillors properly advised of the proposed deal and its impacts.

A new report for the Committee will now be written detailing the amended proposals from EDNCp and help Committee councillors and the community to understand the proposals that are being put forward. The report will be published at least five working days before the Committee meets.

Cllr Dan Ledger, the district council’s portfolio holder for Strategic Planning, said:

The council understands the need for services and facilities to be delivered in Cranbrook Town Centre as soon as possible and remains committed to moving forward with discussions as a matter of urgency.

It’s vital however that the discussions are informed by the most up-to-date and accurate information and that the proposals to be discussed are in the public domain and discussed in an open and transparent way. This would not have been the case had the scheduled meeting gone ahead.”

He added that the council will be looking to set a new date for the meeting in October.

On Claire from Harry Motram:

“…And yes I did spend the night with Sasha Swire while her husband watched – if only from time to time. It was election night in 2015 at the count in Sidmouth in Devon. We were all unsure of how the vote would go as the Independent candidate Claire Wright had been closing the gap on Hugo’s massive majority election after election. With one flick of her lustrous hair Claire could increase her vote by 10% at a time amongst men of a certain age, such were her seductive charms. And she was also a highly popular county councillor who had gathered support from all corners of the political spectrum by campaigning on local causes.

In the end Hugo’s vote just about held up on what turned out to be a good night for the Conservatives. I sat next to Sasha all night chatting away about life, families, Hugo and work as a journalist. Charming, fair and with a wicked sense of humour she was very good company. And Hugo wasn’t bad either – although he was on his best behaviour since the room contained several journalists.

I felt sorry for Claire who had made a spirited attempt to usurp Hugo’s very comfortable East Devon seat but Sasha wasn’t so compassionate. “All she wants to be is an MP,” she said, “she doesn’t care about anything else. Look at her counting up the votes as they come in. She’s not had a drink, a chat or a break. She’s obsessed.” Unlike her husband a very relieved Hugo of course who clearly didn’t want to be an MP as he worked the room thanking supporters and congratulating party members who were standing as councillors in local elections counted at the same time….”

Harry Mottram http://www.harrymottram.co.uk 

Now to the local Press which reports the comments of a well known local blog that the Swires probably regard as “scurrilous”  – Owl

Ex-Devon MP referred to local councillors as ‘toilet seats’

Colleen Smith www.devonlive.com 

The wife of former Devon MP Sir Hugo Swire has shocked Westminster with her explosive diaries – but they also lift the lid off the long-standing Tory MP’s attitude to local politics in East Devon.

Lady Sasha Swire’s new book reveals that she and her husband refer to a pair of diligent local councillors as “toilet seats” and that he launched a campaign to save Ottery Hospital – even though he wasn’t standing for re-election – “for no other reason than to annoy” independent Claire Wright.

Local voters rarely get a look-in and party supporters in East Devon are described as being as dotty as the church stalwarts in The Vicar of Dibley .

The diary casually lets slip snippets which show how much independent candidate Claire Wright had become a thorn in Sir Hugo’s side.

The diary entry from just prior to the December 2019 election says: “Hugo launches a campaign to save a local hospital for no other reason than to annoy an independent candidate in his constituency who’s been getting on his nerves……”

Sir Hugo announced his retirement from Parliament months before the General Election. He was Member of Parliament for East Devon from 2001 until 2019.

Claire Wright was supported by actor Hugh Grant and was widely predicted to be within a whisker of winning her election battle, but lost to Conservative Simon Jupp by 6,708 votes.

She said after reading extracts which were serialised in The Times: “Yes it will be an interesting one to read when it’s out although I have no intention of buying a copy.”

“Regarding that specific quote in the Times I think my reaction was firstly, yes I remember that very short-lived campaign and that I had thought at the time that was his motivation.

“I think it’s an insult to Ottery residents and confirms really what we all thought, that he didn’t ever really care about East Devon. I will read the book, if I manage to source one, with much interest.”

Martin Shaw, county councillor for Seaton and Colyton, said the diary entry proved that “the Tories don’t really care about our community hospitals”.

A war of words had broken out just before the election following the government’s announcement that Ottery St Mary Hospital’s future had been secured.

Sir Hugo said at the time that he hoped Ms Wright would not ‘stir up’ more anxiety about the building’s future.

The East Devon Watch local blog commented after republishing extracts from The Times: “We learn from “Sasha’s Secret Diaries” that Hugo was so in with Dave he was the first one Dave called to get drunk with after his defeat.

“So pally, yet Hugo couldn’t get him to do anything for East Devon. (Toilet seats too small to bother with?)”

The Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power is due out next week and the indiscriminate indiscretions have been described as “social suicide”.

The book — described as the most indiscreet political memoir in decades – has 500 pages of disclosures from the last 20 years of politics.

When Lady Swire was asked in an interview by The Times if she had been in touch with those mentioned in the book – her private diaries – for their permission, she blankly replied ‘Oh, I haven’t done that.’

Lady Swire is the 57-year-old daughter of the former defence secretary and one-time Lazard bank chairman Sir John Nott (who once confessed that he fancied Margaret Thatcher something rotten).

The book is creating a storm in the corridors of power, with many greeting it as the best insight ever into the last two decades of politics.

But there is also a backlash. Sarah Vine, writing in the Daily Mail, said of Lady Swire: “I certainly always got the impression that she thought the whole lot of us were utter fools, and that she and Hugo were the only people with any iota of sense. And I’m not sure she was even that certain about Hugo.”

And Marina Hyde in The Guardian says: “Sasha is married to the former MP and minister Hugo Swire, a Cameron-era Tory so obscure I’m amazed even his own wife has heard of him.”

Sasha reveals the nicknames she has for everybody. Former Prime Minister Teresa May is ‘Old Ma May’, George Osborne is ‘Boy George’ while Dominic Raab is ‘Raab C Brexit’. She dubs Donald Trump ‘a filthy, racist misogynist’.

She talks about the dinner at 10 Downing Street in August 2019, when Sir Hugo Swire informed the Prime Minister of his plans to retire as an MP.

During the evening, she reports watching Boris Johnson as he ‘stuffs in more mouthfuls and knocks back the cheapo plonk at an alarming rate’.

In 2019 when Michael Gove is caught in a hoohah about youthful drug-taking, Hugo is asked how he would respond if asked if he had ever taken drugs.

“Five-one-zero-three-nine-four,” barks Hugo. Why? “That’s my army number, the only thing I’m trained to give under hostile interrogation.”

Lady Swire recalls visiting the Camerons for a weekend at their Oxfordshire home, in the wake of the fateful Brexit vote in June 2016.

She claims that then Prime Minister David Cameron asked Sir Hugo Swire to bring ‘two fat Cohibas and plenty of booze’ and was ‘chomping on cigars’ over ‘endless bottles of wine’.

She adds that Samantha Cameron had to muster up some Dutch courage before joining her husband for his resignation speech, feeling unable to do so ‘without drinking a large negroni’.

She also reveals that Cameron is a huge fan of Devon’s own Agatha Christie, describing how he spent his downtime at Chequers watching Poirot murder mysteries.

She wrote how Cameron, in August 2011 while holidaying in Cornwall with the Swires, said: “What more do I want? A great day on the beach, I’m with my old friends and I’ve just won a war.” He was talking of Libya.

www.radioexe.co.uk 

It could be country’s highest or lowest

“Now what we want is facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” That’s Mr Grandrind, from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times in 1854. Jump through the best part of two centuries and the facts of coronavirus in the south west are somewhat dubious.

The rate of infection – the ‘R’ rate in the Uk could be the highest in England, at 1.6, or it could be the lowest at 0.9. These are the facts, known as statistics.

If the R rate is above 1, each person infects more than one other person and the disease spreads quickly. In every part of England except the south west (a large region that includes Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, as well as Devon), the range is one or above. Only here could it be 0.9.The south west range of 0.9 to 1.6 is the broadest of anywhere. In short, it’s likely to be one or more. That spells trouble. The range is broad when the number of cases of deaths falls to low levels or there is a high degree of variability in transmission across the region. For example, the rate could be different in rural Devon than it is in urban Bristol, Swindon or Gloucester.

Across England, the daily rate of infection is now as high as it was in April. Nationally the R rate is now between 1.1 and 1.4, with the number of cases rising by two to seven per cent every day.

The late summer sunshine has encouraged people out to Devon’s beaches, with many groups numbering more than six. Police and community support officers have been giving larger groups advice; which many groups have listened to politely before deciding it’s not advice they wish to follow. Some people suggest government messages have been rather inconsistent; chivvying people to eat out on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays and go back to offices so that sandwich shops, bars and restaurants have passing trade, whilst at the same time telling people to stay away from one another.

[Owl’s advice is to keep an eye on Tim Spector’s symptom tracking app. (the only real-time data we have). This still shows relatively low levels of prevalence across the South West but illustrates what is happening nationally – see graph below]

The government is preparing to shore up its £10bn coronavirus test-and-trace programme by drafting in teams of management consultants.

[Yet Dido Harding says “I strongly refute that the system is failing.” And Jacob Rees-Mogg attacks ‘endless carping’ about Covid testing shortages. False news? – Owl]

Josh Halliday www.theguardian.com 

The programme, where 90% of tests are failing to hit the 24-hour turnaround target, has been touted as a key way in which the country can return to relative normality in the absence of a Covid-19 vaccine and manage any second wave of the virus. However, the system has struggled despite the prime minister pledging earlier this year to create a “world-beating” service. It has been condemned as “barely functional” as it struggles to handle demand of up to four times capacity.

The Guardian has learned that “hundreds” of staff from consulting firms including KPMG have been put on standby to work on “back office” parts of the system “on a short-term basis” over the next six months. Other firms thought to have been contacted for help include EY.

While the government and the consulting firms are said to still to be negotiating contracts, the consultants are understood to be required in areas including programme management, data, project support and supply chain, and could start work in the next 72 hours.

One person with knowledge of the process said: “The government has gone out to a wide number of firms asking for support on this.”

It is not clear how much the consulting services will cost the taxpayer.

The move to hire hundreds of consultants to shore up the test-and-trace programme comes as millions of people across parts of north-west England and Yorkshire face bans from mixing with other families under tougher restrictions announced to control the spread of coronavirus.

In response to the more stringent rules, the health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “I urge local people to isolate and get a test if you have symptoms, follow the advice of NHS test and trace, and always remember ‘hands, face, space’. By sticking to these steps, we will get through this together.”

Earlier this week, the Guardian reported how documents show that tracers are taking up to two weeks to contact friends, relatives and colleagues of people diagnosed with Covid-19 – the entire length of the self-isolation period.

Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesperson, said on Friday that the UK’s testing system “seems barely functional”, adding: “The testing system is in meltdown. People can’t access tests, turnaround times are down, cases are rising. The government is at risk of losing control of the virus.”

However, amid the growing anger and lengthening queues at testing centres, Dido Harding, the head of the test-and-trace programme, told MPs on Thursday: “I strongly refute that the system is failing.”

She said that a sudden increase in demand for the service had not been anticipated, even though capacity had been increased in anticipation of schools reopening.

“We’ve seen a very marked increase in the number of young children coming forward to be tested. So, a doubling of the number of children under 17 coming forward to be tested. And more than that in the ages of five to nine,” she said.

Well-designed and resourced testing regimes have the potential to reduce the reproduction rate of Covid-19 – the R number – by up to 26%, according to a study undertaken by Imperial College.

KPMG and EY declined to comment.

The Department of Health and Social Care did not respond to requests for comment.

“Where’s Boris?” asked this week’s Spectator, the weekly magazine the prime minister once edited and from which Johnson might once have expected a better press had it not been for the coronavirus crisis.

Dan Sabbagh www.theguardian.com

With a front cover image featuring a distant blond dot on a tiny boat bobbing rudderless and oarless on a stormy sea, the message of chaos and drift from the title was emphatic – a criticism of the prime minister’s leadership in the battle against the pandemic that is being replicated across an increasingly sceptical rightwing media.

“The question now is whether he can become a proper leader with a sense of direction and purpose,” said the magazine’s editor, Fraser Nelson, effectively arguing that Johnson’s premiership was at a crossroads, that a narrative was close to being set.

After a week in which Britain’s test-and-trace system – once intended by the prime minister to be “world-beating” – was at the point of collapse, Nelson asked “whether the pattern we have seen in recent months – of disorder, debacle, rebellion, U-turn and confusion – is what we should henceforth expect”.

Others writing in the same magazine put it more idiosyncratically. “What on earth happened to the freedom-loving, twinkly-eyed, Rabelaisian character I voted for? Oliver Hardy has left the stage, replaced by Oliver Cromwell,” said columnist Toby Young, complaining of a “lack of engagement with the detail”.

Earlier on Thursday, the same day the Spectator cover emerged, the Daily Mail had reached a similar conclusion. “Boris: We’ve Failed” the front-page headline blared, with the paper claiming it had warned of a “looming test crisis five months ago”.

The rightwing tabloid highlighted Johnson’s subdued performance the day before in front of parliament’s liaison committee, where he had been forced to admit that “the short answer” was that there were nowhere near enough Covid tests available.

Only a week earlier, the prime minister talked optimistically about a “moonshot” plan to test millions of people a day as way to return to pre-coronavirus normality. Now he had humiliatingly been forced to admit there were nowhere near enough tests for worried parents at a level closer to 230,000 a day.

“Too often the government has over-promised and under-delivered,” concluded a leader in the Times on Friday morning. “Policies have had to be swiftly abandoned after the exposure of entirely predictable problems,” the centre-right broadsheet continued, adding the A-level fiasco and the problems with the contact-tracing app for good measure.

The paper – perhaps with one eye on a promotion for the former Times journalist Michael Gove – argued that Johnson needed to appoint “competent deputies” before “the public come to a settled and unflattering view about his ability to do the job”.

It was a few months after another surprising general election win in 1992 that John Major’s reputation was shredded on Black Wednesday. But for all the growing criticism and pandemic policy failures the situation is nowhere near as grave for the current prime minister: the Conservatives remain ahead in polls at just over 40%.

Neither the Times nor the Mail nor other traditional rightwing titles are talking about switching support to Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer. And there remain good arguments that the British public takes far longer to change its mind than Britain’s fickle and fast-moving press.

Pollster Deborah Mattinson, author of a new book, Beyond the Red Wall, that analyses Johnson’s seizure of Labour strongholds in last December’s election, said: “Red Wallers, though disappointed, are more forgiving than you might expect. They have taken this big decision to leave Labour and are seeking to justify that.”

“Timing of the letter not ideal”

[What planet is Neil Parish living on? – Owl]

BBC News Devon today 1153 Claire Gilbody-Dickerson

“A Devon MP has written to the Prime Minister asking for the current cap on 30 wedding guests to be increased.

Neil Parish, who represents Tiverton and Honiton, said while the timing of his letter is not ideal, if venues had track and trace measures larger celebrations could be Covid-secure.”

The Guardian view on Boris Johnson’s second wave: made in Downing Street 

The prime minister’s over-promising and under-delivering has to end. If he tries to spin his way out of the looming coronavirus disaster it will cost the country dear

Editorial  www.theguardian.com 

The country is facing a second wave of coronavirus because the government is losing track of the outbreak’s spread. Testing capacity is being outpaced by an exponentially growing epidemic. Without testing the people who need testing, the authorities can’t see where cases are rising. With visibility of the disease’s extent obscured, its transmission is harder to slow. A second wave of Covid-19 could be more serious than the first. The NHS, still reeling from the disruption of the last few months, is dealing with a backlog of patients. Winter is coming and with it the possibility of a joint flu epidemic and Covid pandemic. Britain has been put in a dangerous place by Boris Johnson’s administrative failure.

The government messed up its Covid response in the first wave of coronavirus, making blunder after blunder. Britain had no mass testing capacity and was forced to impose a damaging lockdown that plunged the economy into its deepest recession in 300 years. England recorded the highest excess death rate in Europe. Ministers have had months to put things right. A new testing system was devised. The rationale of coming out of the national lockdown was that a functioning test-and-trace system would help the government to spot and suppress local outbreaks. This was the “whack-a-mole” strategy. But it only works if you know where the moles are.

There was little doubt that there would be a problem in autumn and winter. But we are barely out of summer and Mr Johnson’s system can’t cope. If the government can’t provide enough tests for people at this point in September, when ministers knew schools would be returning and have been actively encouraging people back to work, how will it achieve its “moonshot” ambition to process millions of tests a day? Mr Johnson, and his cabinet, do not look remotely up to the challenge. Instead of being open about the issue they alternate between being furtive, evasive and defensive. Public trust in the government’s Covid response is ebbing away: almost two-thirds of those polled think ministers have handled it badly.

The country has no option but for the government’s scheme to work. If it does not then we will face another damaging national lockdown. There needs to be a reset from the government in the way it acts and speaks. The over-promising and under-delivering by ministers has to end. One cannot spin one’s way out of disaster when there is a breakdown in frontline service delivery that affects millions of people’s lives. People are not at fault for demanding tests when they have been told to ask for them.

It is painfully clear that there has been a serious failure of the private laboratories that ministers created on the hoof to rapidly scale up testing operations. Ministers built the labs to run with itinerant PhD workers, who predictably caused staff shortages when they returned to their universities. The government needs to come clean about the mistakes it has made and demonstrate it has the leadership to put them right. A new political and communications strategy will be required to move the country on. Caution, not overconfidence, should be the order of the day.

Time is running out for Mr Johnson to show he recognises the danger ahead and is willing to prepare voters for difficult times. The government needs a humbler and more realistic way of going about things. Belief in a form of national exceptionalism led to lack of preparedness. Mr Johnson’s excessive self-confidence telegraphs hubris about the country’s ability to withstand a public health crisis. This may have been electorally successful but it has led to overreach and complacency. Britain’s painful Covid-19 experience ought to put a premium on competent and decent government. Yet Mr Johnson stokes Brexit’s politics of resentment to trump the politics of problem-solving. The country will pay a high price unless he changes course.

Hospitals and councils have been told to find extra beds for coronavirus patients within two weeks as the NHS braces for a second spike in cases.

By Tony Diver www.telegraph.co.uk

With hospital admissions beginning to increase following a steep rise in virus infections, isolation units in which Covid-19 patients can recover are being set up, freeing space on wards for those needing the most care.

More than 10 million people will soon be living in local lockdown areas after the North East became the latest region to impose curfews, with Liverpool and parts of the West Midlands expected to follow within days.

Chaos at testing centres (see video below) continued on Thursday as Baroness Harding, the head of NHS Test and Trace, admitted that up to one million people a day are applying for 230,000 available tests.

It also emerged that Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, is planning to adopt a national “traffic light” system for putting regions into lockdown, with local action being triggered when infection rates reach a set level.

A template for the so-called “escalation framework”, seen by The Telegraph, includes provision for “mandatory masks” at the amber level, suggesting face coverings will be legally required in even more settings than they are now.

The Telegraph understands that ministers will on Friday confirm that family visits to care homes will be paused in areas in which infections are highest.

While the proposals were still being finalised on Thursday night, they are expected to be included in the winter care plan aimed at reducing the spread of the virus among elderly residents.

Another 3,395 people tested positive for coronavirus on Thursday, with a further 21 deaths, as infection rates soared in much of northern England.

With cases reaching the highest levels since May (use the graphic below to find out about cases in your area) and the current trajectory pointing towards a second peak in the next two weeks, hospitals are preparing for a possible influx of patients after admissions tripled in a fortnight.

The numbers of people in hospital remain low compared with the first peak of the virus, however. 

Bolton, the coronavirus hotspot of England, has only two Covid-19 patients on hospital wards, according to the most recent NHS data. Across all 18 “intervention” areas listed on Public Health England’s watchlist, 141 people out of a population of more than five million are in hospital with the disease – one hospital case for every 38,000 people. 

MPs in London were told last week of plans to increase the number of “step down” beds in which coronavirus patients in the capital who no longer need hospital treatment can recover in isolation.

One MP briefed on the plans during a conference call with health bosses told The Telegraph: “The rate of infection is going up, and I was told hospitals have reserved beds for people coming out of hospital who need somewhere to recover.

“At the start of lockdown they were having to send people back to care homes or back to other facilities, with dire consequences, so they’ve booked places in respite care or empty care homes. People will go out of hospital, but they won’t return to their normal place of living. They just need care before they go back home so that they empty the hospital wards.”

A former minister added: “The effort is being made to step up capacity so that if there is a second spike the NHS doesn’t fall so far behind with other types of care.

“Different parts of London are looking at different ways to handle that, but everyone has learnt that terrible lesson that you cannot discharge people into care homes if there is any danger whatsoever that they might be Covid positive, so there is a big effort to find extra beds.

“Brent rented an entire care home and they discharged their people into another care home. I think other places will be doing that as part of their efforts to get ready for a second spike.”

Another source who was on the call said councils had been given the job of finding extra beds and that disused care homes were likely to be used.

The isolation wards would be in addition to the NHS Nightingale Hospitals, which provide extra capacity for treating people with coronavirus rather than space for them to recover.

Channel 4 News claimed on Thursday night that care home providers in Greater Manchester are being told they must accept Covid-positive patients from hospitals.

A leaked contract from Trafford Council outlines how eligible care homes will receive Covid-positive patients within just two hours of them being identified by the hospital as ready for discharge. It states that “some of these patients may have Covid-19, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic”.

Sage scientists have “considered the case” for a two-week lockdown during the October half term, meaning pupils would only lose one week of lessons, according to the Financial Times.

Lockdown measures were being imposed on Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, Sunderland and County Durham at midnight on Thursday night, forcing pubs and restaurants to close at 10pm and banning two households from mixing.

Almost two million people will be affected by the latest lockdown – bringing the nationwide total under local measures to around nine million – with a further million likely to join them if, as expected, Liverpool and parts of the West Midlands are added to the list.

It was reported on Thursday night that restrictions will be announced on Friday for Lancashire, with the exception of Blackpool.

Senior Cabinet ministers were called to a meeting of the “XO” coronavirus operational subcommittee on Thursday afternoon to discuss more local lockdowns.

In Liverpool, the rate has jumped sharply from 67.5 cases per 100,000 people to 107.8 in the past week, a higher rate than many parts of the North East which are already in lockdown.

Last week Mr Hancock (seen announcing the latest restrictions in the video below) and Baroness Harding attended a virtual “London Covid-19 summit” at which they discussed an “epidemic response escalation framework” that would give greater transparency to decisions on putting areas into lockdown.

Areas with infection rates at the lowest level would be subject to national restrictions such as the “rule of six”, while areas above a certain rate of infection would be subject to more stringent measures. Those with the highest rates of infection would face the tightest restrictions.

The infection rates for each category would be made public, enabling people to prepare for the possibility of local lockdowns by monitoring published data on their area.

According to a draft document seen by the Telegraph, areas in the middle band would have “mandatory masks” and “restrict religious gatherings”, although the document gives no further detail about what that would involve. Areas with the highest rates would go into local lockdown.

“Which brings us to the central paradox: the UK ranks among the great hubs of scientific research. It has 44 virology labs across the NHS, and more throughout academia. It also boasts great public health expertise. Yet England’s testing regime is in meltdown. Why?”

Aditya Chakrabortty www.theguardian.com

A friend texts: his five-year-old daughter is sick. On hearing the symptoms, the NHS helpline adviser says she must be tested for Covid. So he and his wife have been trying for two days straight to book her a test, with almost nothing to show for it. All they are offered is a 120-mile round trip to Gatwick ­– a long drive for a feverish child. Meanwhile the family stays in the flat, its walls throbbing with their worries about sickness and school and work.

Similar stories are unfolding across the country this month. Westminster columnists may huff and puff about the rule of international law, but at the school gates people are furious about self-isolating for days on end and losing pay while waiting for the all-clear.

The most dangerous example of politicians breaking promises while a system fails its people is the utter collapse of what the prime minister calls the “world-beating”, “superlative” test-and-trace regime. Trust in a government seeps away when hundreds queue up in Bury for up to five hours for a test. Faith in the fairness of a scheme dwindles when a nurse in the south-west of England drives his daughter 50 miles for a booking – only to find they haven’t been sent the right QR code; oh, and the next available slot is in Dundee.

That nurse, those people queueing up, have had a gruelling six months. Some have seen sickness and death, or a drying-up of income. From the NHS to furlough, they need the public sector’s support. What they often get instead is a testing system that doesn’t even work. Failing at fundamental tasks, ministers instead threaten families with criminalisation if they so much as stop to chat with others.

What’s causing this chaos is not a shortage of swabs. Testing centres are cutting appointments because the Covid labs are already buckling under the workload. This is the “critical pinch-point”, admit senior officials, who apologise even as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, blames the public.

“When a service is free, it is inevitable that demand will rise,” he said on Tuesday. As if he hadn’t spent last month urging people to get tested. As if anxious parents, teachers and others just trying to do the right thing are freeloaders. As if a 150-mile round trip to sit in a car park with a swab up your nose is a family outing to top Alton Towers.

Much more is at stake here than a malfunctioning minister. Without a fully functioning test-and-trace system, the UK is doomed to ever more lockdowns, whether local or national. It’s essential to kicking the economy out of first gear and saving as many jobs as possible.

The biggest false opposition of 2020 is the one claimed airily by pundits and politicians: that there is a choice to be made between jobs and lives. Like other societies, the UK regularly has health issues and epidemics, both local and national. But when Salisbury suffered an outbreak of Novichok poisoning, no one went on Newsnight to lament the trade-off between the economy and health; the same applies in the case of sexually transmitted infections, which are spreading. Instead we rely on public health experts to control the spread of infection. The acute conflict, therefore, is between a broken test-and-trace regime and the economy: the first stymies the second.

Yet amid the biggest global pandemic in 100 years, England’s test-and-trace regime has crumbled within a week of schools reopening. With seven months to prepare for the start of autumn term and the outbreak of sniffles season (which was always going to prompt worried parents to seek a test), ministers have failed again.

Which brings us to the central paradox: the UK ranks among the great hubs of scientific research. It has 44 virology labs across the NHS, and more throughout academia. It also boasts great public health expertise. Yet England’s testing regime is in meltdown. Why?

It is not through penny-pinching. Ten billion pounds of your money and mine has been poured into test and trace. Rather, it’s because the vast majority of that expertise has been utterly sidelined. The system that is labelled “NHS test and trace” has hardly anything to do with the NHS. Each fragment of this system is contracted out to big private companies that often turn to subcontractors. So Deloitte handles the huge Lighthouse Labs that can’t get through the tests, while Serco oversees the contact-tracing system that regularly misses government targets.

Still, failure pays: Serco’s initial fee for running tracing was £108m. Then there are the consultants buzzing around this cash cow. Accenture pocketed more than £850,000 for 10 weeks’ work on the contact-tracing app ­– the one that still hasn’t been launched. McKinsey scooped £560,000 for six weeks’ work creating the “vision, purpose and narrative” of a new public health authority.

Early this year, Boris Johnson and Hancock faced a stark choice. They could take the expertise and systems of the NHS and public health authorities, however badly starved of cash and bashed about by a decade of hapless Tory ministers, and build around that a response to the pandemic. Instead, they ignored the scientists, brought in the outsourcers and went for size – except the shiny mega-labs were too late to help for most of Covid’s lethal first wave, and the contact-tracing was laughably poor.

The Nobel laureate and head of the Francis Crick Institute, Sir Paul Nurse, wrote three times to Downing Street and Hancock at the start of the pandemic, offering to coordinate university labs to help the NHS in testing for Covid. Had his proposal been taken up, he says, up to 100,000 tests a day might have been done from very early on. That alone could have avoided some of the deaths in our care homes. He didn’t get a reply, so his institute went ahead anyway. Similarly, nearly 70 leading virus experts wrote twice to Downing Street’s top scientists offering to help. As public health officials working at local and regional level, they were brushed off. Control was centralised. Even after all the lethal errors, Hancock and Johnson plough on, offering a vast £5bn contract for private companies to take over Covid testing. To my untrained eye, that appears another attempt at privatising much more NHS work.

Nurses, teachers, benefits offices: the sole pillar that keeps the UK from collapse in 2020 is its public sector. In this year of private businesses shutting down, it has been the government’s borrowing and spending that have kept people in jobs and saved even more firms from collapse. But just when the public sector has never been so important, government is stuffed with ministers and advisers known for their contempt towards it. While at the Department for Education, Dominic Cummings referred to teachers as “the blob”. Now he threatens a “hard rain” on Whitehall, while his boss, Johnson, wanders around like a wind-up double-glazing salesman issuing ever more extravagant promises – and when they fail you just know civil servants will again take the rap. Each flagrant failure of government is handily used to chip away trust in the very idea of governance.

These chancers bring to the state no imagination, nor any idea of how to mobilise its resources. Their main skill is looting it for money to give their mates in the private sector, while blaming it for their own fatal mess.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Sasha Swire review — this frisky account of the Cameron and May years is a hoot

“The voters rarely get a look-in. Tory activists are as dotty as the church stalwarts in The Vicar of Dibley. Parliament is seldom mentioned until the needle days of Brexit. This is government as a social reel among friends who are rivals, the tempo ever quickening, the dance becoming more and more frenzied until eventually the world goes bump, power is spilt and it is someone else’s turn.”

Quentin Letts www.thetimes.co.uk

Sasha Swire’s diaries are causing mayhem. David Cameron is aghast, Michael Gove’s wife is hopping, hopping mad, and Prince Andrew’s lantern jaw must be on Windsor Castle’s floor at the lèse-majesté of that damn Swire woman.

For those of us on the touchline? Bliss. Swire may have dropped social Hiroshima but with her description of how politics works she has done us a tremendous favour. Her frisky account of the Cameron and May years is both scandalous, a scalding hoot and a treasure chest for tomorrow’s historians.

The plotting, the texting, the endless Tory leadership jockeying and the near-constant conviction, even when in public they seemed so cocksure, that it would all end in electoral defeat to Labour: these, we now learn, were the realities of the inner-Cameroons as they governed our country.

Booze and sex banter abound and have inevitably been seized on by the outrage brigade but the diaries are a great deal more valuable than that. They catch the coyote-like ambition, the bitching, chaos, laughter, hypocrisy, fragility and occasional shaft of principled endeavour you find in high politics. The scandal, perhaps, is that we so rarely get to see it. George Osborne, in May 2010, grabbed the ministerial grace-and-favour house Dorneywood by driving down to Buckinghamshire and placing his toothbrush in the bathroom there before Nick Clegg could beat him to it.

There is method to this apparent childishness: Osborne uses Dorneywood as a base for political entertaining for the next six years. Whitehall and the Commons may be where they discuss policies but social get-togethers are where politicians gel, where they forge the alliances needed to win power.

William Hague makes a speech at Dorneywood for Osborne’s 40th birthday party. He informs the guests of “Osborne’s Law One” of politics: “Work out, ahead of anyone else, who will be the next leader, stick to them like glue and become indispensable.”

Cynical? Yes. But it is true, of all parties and in all countries. For all his cleverness and cartoon villainy, Osborne is not bullet-proof. Lady Swire’s husband, Sir Hugo, a Tory MP and minister, bumps into Osborne in October 2010. Boy George is on his phone. “Just reading my congratulatory texts,” says the new chancellor smugly. “Can’t be your phone, then,” says Swire. That little jest leaves Osborne strangely deflated.

For satirists, Swire’s diaries are chastening. No Spitting Image skit could ever match what was going on behind the Westminster arras between 2010 and 2019. Take the Chinese state visit in 2015. The Chinese ambassador to London is a diplomat of such elasticity that the Swires give him the nickname “Swivel Hips”. To prevent unseemly protests by Tibetans, the Chinese bus in obedient expats to wave flags on the Mall during President Xi’s carriage ride with the Queen. The Chinese want their security people to be allowed to run alongside the royal carriage but the Metropolitan Police say if they try to do anything of the sort they will be treated as terrorists and shot on sight. At the Buckingham Palace dinner for Xi, numerous Chinese communist officials with counterfeit invitations are caught trying to gatecrash the royal event. Given what Swire says about the filthiness of the palace cooking, they possibly had a fortunate escape.

The dinner ends with a screeching performance by the Army School of Bagpipe Music, to which the Australian high commissioner responds with the single word “ouch”. Sir Les Patterson lives.

Here is politics at its most personal, a steeplechase of splashy shindigs alleviated by the occasional, farcical public event. At the Foreign Office Hugo Swire summons the Ecuadorean ambassador to give him a dressing-down for letting Julian Assange take sanctuary in the embassy.

The ambassador tries to change the subject by inviting Swire to Ecuador. “I can arrange it for you, minister.” No thanks, says Swire. But “I will come one day, because I need a new panama hat.”

Cameron begs Hugo to stop making a fuss about Tony Blair staying at British embassies around the world, pointing out that he himself will be an ex-PM one day and will want similar freebies. In 2010, when Cameron speculates about his successor, he idly supposes it will be “someone like Jeremy Hunt”. Sasha groans and tells her friend Dave: “No! Please, far too wet. It’s only because he sucks up to you and tells you what you want to hear.” None of Cameron’s advisers would tell him that but the wife of a fellow Etonian minster has the social confidence to do so. And in 2019 when Michael Gove is caught in the briars of a press hoohah about youthful drug-taking, Hugo is asked how he would respond if asked if he had ever taken drugs. “Five-one-zero-three-nine-four,” barks Hugo. Why? “That’s my army number, the only thing I’m trained to give under hostile interrogation.”

The voters rarely get a look-in. Tory activists are as dotty as the church stalwarts in The Vicar of Dibley. Parliament is seldom mentioned until the needle days of Brexit. This is government as a social reel among friends who are rivals, the tempo ever quickening, the dance becoming more and more frenzied until eventually the world goes bump, power is spilt and it is someone else’s turn.

Repeat cameo appearances are made by camp, extravagant Greg Barker, an environmentally friendly Tory MP who organised the young Cameron’s polar huskies stunt and who became a peer. Barker has dubious business links in Russia. With US sanctions against Russia threatening to wreck his business career, we find Barker in a golf buggy at a five-star Sri Lankan hotel. “Better get used to this when we have to return the Porsche Cayenne,” says the eco-campaigner.

Could floppy-fringed Sir Hugo not have written a diary himself? Possibly not. Too decent an egg. Sasha, a journalist, has the necessary wildness. Her mother is Slovenian and her father is that Thatcherite thistle Sir John Nott. Sasha herself, though besties (although no longer, one imagines) with Samantha Cameron, the former home secretary Amber Rudd and Downing Street’s former gatekeeper Kate Fall, is a closet Brexiteer who sees the cliqueishness of the Cameroon “mateocracy”. She claims to have kept her journal without the intention, at any time, of publishing it. We believe you, dear heart! But out it has popped, as accidental as an Erica Roe, to enthral us with 500 pages of high-grade disclosures.

There are so many morsels: Osborne muttering that he will cut the Queen’s budget after the 2011 royal wedding because he was not offered a drink after the service; he and Cameron laughing about which women in politics were beddable and about which male ministers have the largest marital equipment; a “pompous” General Nick Carter, chief of the general staff, attending a dinner of sullen Remainers in June 2016; Archbishop Sentamu hosing back brandy after a day with Belfast Presbyterians; Dominic Raab going clothes shopping at the start of his 2019 campaign to become Tory leader; Lord Maginnis of Drumglass being so fat there is no flak jacket to fit him for a trip to Afghanistan; Cameron running up a £4,500 restaurant bill in Delhi, much of it on wine (he drinks like a camel, particularly bull shot and negronis); and Michael Heseltine’s habitual supper-party game of telling guests which jobs he intends to give them in his cabinet, the ancient lion never quite having got over his failure to become PM.

Soon after the 2010 election Prince Edward and his wife, the Countess of Wessex, arrive for a Hillsborough Castle garden party and Swire, being a minister’s wife, is pressed into chit-chat. The royal couple are “highly opinionated about political matters”, Edward being “overwhelmed with relief that the Conservatives have got in”. The countess, a sometime PR woman, is not the sparkiest of souls. Sasha goes over to her in the drawing room after dinner and tries to open the small-talk by saying: “So, bet he didn’t tell you he was a royal when he married you”. The countess is puzzled and says: “I knew he was a royal of course I did. What do you mean by that?” Sasha: “It was a joke!” Countess: “Oh.”

Still, the Wessexes come off lighter than the Duke of York, whose attempts to become a trade envoy are a verminous nuisance to the government. At an event with Northern Irish businessmen Andrew is “excruciatingly painful to watch, a mixture of blokeishness and royal arrogance”. At another palace banquet, Andrew wags a finger at the MPs on the table and loudly informs the foreign guests that whereas these politicians come and go, the royal family endures. No thanks to him.

Cameron may be upset that Lady Swire has spilled so many indiscretions but he comes across as a generally benign, hearty presence, one who patted both Swires on the bum and who, on a country walk, claims to have become so aroused by Sasha’s Eau d’Italie scent that he declares he might “push her into the bushes and give her one”. We need not take this literally. It is classic Cameron levity. Lady Swire praises Dave for his strong marriage and describes how he spends his downtime at Chequers watching Poirot murder mysteries. He emerges as a less tortured soul than the Machiavellian Osborne; mind you, I had no idea Cameron became so ardent about a second EU referendum. And there is something rotten about his remark in August 2011 while holidaying in Cornwall with the Swires. “What more do I want?” he says. “A great day on the beach, I’m with my old friends and I’ve just won a war.” He was talking of Libya.

Michael Gove develops into a plotter of Blackadderesque finesse.

Swire’s long friendship with Rudd is broken by the latter’s tricksiness as she tries to block Brexit. The rancour of those Brexit battles, particularly in the autumn of 2019, is evoked so well they set off my stomach acids. You gain a sense of an entire establishment aflame — and maybe it still is. The Swires, while protesting their exhaustion, toddle along to parties thrown by social alpinists such as Christopher Moran, owner of Crosby Hall. Why any sane person would willingly accept such invitations is baffling but Moran gives money to the Tory party. Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, the financier, will not like Lady Swire’s description of having to endure his haughty boasts at Lady Jane Rayne’s summer party in 2014.

I’m afraid there is little left of Sir Evelyn after two artfully destructive pages. She doesn’t even bother to get the old blower’s name right. Princess Michael of Kent mwaw-mwaws Sir Evelyn, fawning over him, flattering him. “Her head butts round him like a cat, her tail held high with a little hook on the end, and she is purring. You must really like men to do that and she clearly does — especially rich ones.”

With her domestic life in the West Country, Sasha Swire is not as self-absorbed as MPs. If the book has a polished hero it is her husband: dutiful, witty, accident prone. That is not an unfair summary of him, though there is a tantalising hint of a less amiable side when we learn that he stitched up Priti Patel’s departure from the cabinet in 2017. Again and again, the personal fuels the political. In 2016 Hugo is strongly inclined to back Brexit but he ends up supporting Remain owing to the tugs of his friendship with Cameron. Is that corrupt or is it honourable?

Looking back on two decades in the London political swirl, Swire writes “we had a great fairground ride”. Of the Cameroons she adds: “We all holiday together, our children play together, we text each other bypassing the civil servants. People just don’t trust outsiders any more and even more so in politics, where the media lurks in the bushes waiting to pounce. The governing class is simply holding up a mirror to a nation where friendships have replaced other mediums.”

According to William Hague, Osborne’s Rule Two of politics is “get inside your opponent’s minds”. Maybe that explains the sharp reaction against Sasha Swire. It may look as if she has dished dirt but in fact she has betrayed the way the Cameroons thought.

Westminster diaries are judged on three levels: the details they leak, the political era they re-create and the central character of the author. Swire scores highly on all three. She is funnier and ballsier than Chris Mullin and if she falls short of Alan Clark it is only because he was so devilish. Swire, holidaying with the Camerons, had better access than Mullin or Clark. But maybe that should be “holidayed”. After these indiscretions, her future vacations may be in Outer Siberia.

Swire on . . . Amber Rudd

“What’s it like, handling Old Ma May? It’s all very difficult, she says, like having a dragon breathing down her neck. Unlike with other cabinet ministers, she knows and understands Amber’s brief intimately, so she watches her with a much more critical eye. She says their meetings, which are few and far between, are agonising because of her long pauses as she digests material. She has learnt to grip the table so not to jump in and interrupt, which she apparently hates.”

On John Bercow

“Trumpets, red carpets, a carriage trip down The Mall with Chinese officials in blue tracksuits conducting obedient Chinese expats waving flags excitedly. The official address before parliament is a circus. The little weasel Bercow walked in with the Chinese premier and then, losing no opportunity to grandstand, pompously declaimed how many Asian leaders he had welcomed to Parliament and what excellent champions of democracy they were, the latest of whom being Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. Dave looked furious as Bercow lectured him that the world was watching him and China. In fairness to the little creep, he has been a supporter of the Dalai Lama.”

On the Prince of Wales

“The butler arrives with tea and Duchy Originals biscuits, and they all sit down.

HRH: ‘Do you like the biscuits?’

[Hugo Swire:] ‘Oh yes, very nice, Your Royal Highness.’

‘I make them, you know.’

‘You make them?’

‘Yes, we have rows of them in the supermarkets in this country. They are very popular over here, you know, very popular.’

‘Yes, they are very tasty.’

The PoW turns to his private secretary: ‘We must give him a packet to take home with him.’”

On Boris Johnson

“Boris is, in many ways, an island, a spinning, mad island. He gets by having very good people to do the work, and the detail. “Cummings, he’s an excellent chap, we have a really good team in here now.” The atmosphere is certainly different as you walk into No 10. Everyone is smiling, despite the fact they are on death row. And even though he is an island he seems, like Trump, to be much more in touch with the people and the provinces. I don’t know what will happen to him, because events make politicians, but I have changed my view of him. Yes, he is an alley cat, but he has a greatness of soul, a generosity of spirit, a desire to believe the best in people, a lack of pettiness and envy which is pretty uncommon in politics, and best of all a wonderful comic vision of the human condition. He is not like any politician I have ever encountered before, and I have met many.”

On David Cameron’s cabinets

“I am increasingly irritated by how David, George [Osborne] and Kate [Fall, deputy chief of staff] have this monopoly on people’s careers in politics, using a completely erroneous set of criteria (good back story, woman, ethnic, good on TV, too posh, too mad, ghastly). It’s the politics of PR, not the politics of serious government.

From one conversation to the next I hear them move their players around the chess board, thinking they are oh so clever . . .”

In Las Vegas, they would call it a residency. So shabby has the government’s performance and messaging been over the coronavirus that Matt Hancock has found himself in the House of Commons almost on a daily basis, either to answer an urgent question or to make a ministerial statement on the latest Covid shambles.

John Crace www.theguardian.com 

And sure enough, the health secretary was back in the chamber on Thursday to outline the latest regional lockdowns that account for about one-seventh of the country – it can’t be long before there’s just a couple of villages in Cornwall open for business that are preventing another national lockdown being declared – and to announce a triage service for A&E departments. Press 1 if you think you are going to die in the next hour. 2 if you think you have a 50/50 chance of making it to the end of the day. 3 if you have broken a leg, and stop moaning. 4 to sod off and take some ibuprofen.

Hancock didn’t think to mention the collapse of coronavirus testing in many parts of the country. Nor did he say that the R number is now thought to be an alarming 1.7 in London and other areas. There again, if he had, he would have used up some of his best material for next week’s shows.

Not that Matt seems to be getting much enjoyment from all the attention, as he has become increasingly ratty. Like most Door Matts, Hancock’s natural instinct is to punch down. So rather than accepting his share of the blame for the things the government has got wrong, he has now taken to attacking opposition MPs – and even some on his own benches – for not being supportive enough. Like Boris, he can no longer accept a word of criticism. His reply to Labour’s Jon Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, who had merely pointed out some blindingly obvious truths, was a model of sneering gracelessness. At times like this, I think Hancock may be closer to losing his grip than even he realises.

Still, at least we will always have Typhoid Dido Harding, the interim chief executive of the National Institute for Health Protection, who was making a rare appearance before the science and technology committee. Right from the start she looked to be on edge. And once she opened her mouth, it immediately became clear why. Typhoid Dido really didn’t have much of a clue about anything.

She began by informing the committee that England only had the capacity for 242,000 tests a day, but she was totally unable to give an exact figure on the levels of demand. You could never be too sure, because about 27% were demanding tests when they had no symptoms. Typhoid Dido appeared to have no symptoms of meaningful neural activity. Trying to be helpful, her best guess was that demand outstripped capacity by three or four times. She thought that was a result.

Typhoid then went on to say that all would be well because testing capacity would double to 500,000 in a matter of six weeks. The committee chair, Greg Clark, raised an eyebrow. Given that the government had missed all its other testing targets, why should we believe this one? And as 500,000 was the average daily figure of people experiencing Covid-like symptoms in a normal year, wasn’t the level of tests hopelessly short of coping with a pandemic? Typhoid seemed astonished to learn that there was a pandemic going on and even more surprised to learn that children went back to school in September.

Things went from bad to worse as it emerged that tests were being rationed because laboratories couldn’t keep up with demand and that far from meeting the prime minister’s target of a 100% results turnaround within 24 hours, the government was only achieving a figure of about 33%. “The system is failing,” said Clark. Typhoid begged to differ. She reckoned 33% was a trailblazing success.

Eventually, Labour’s Graham Stringer intervened and asked the question on everyone’s mind: what on earth made her think she was the right person to head the new National Institute for Health Protection? Typhoid thought for a bit. It could have been that she had been chief executive of TalkTalk when it suffered a massive data breach resulting in her ignorance being described as a lesson to us all. It could have been that she had been on the board of the Jockey Club that gave the go-ahead to the Cheltenham festival. It could have been that she had been in charge of NHS test and trace, a service in which many employees made just two calls a month.

Or it could just have been that she was a Tory peer, married to a Tory MP, who was prepared to step up to the plate when her country called. An expert in logistics and key performance indicators who “could act faster over a broader landscape”. It now became clear she saw that her main asset was to be able to talk bullshit – though not particularly convincingly.

She wasn’t sure whether she would still be in the job if interviews ever started for it to be made permanent, but she wasn’t that bothered. Like Chris Grayling, who has just landed a £100k-a-year sideline in advising ports, despite having awarded a ferry contract to a company with no ferries, Typhoid Dido has the priceless asset of being able to fail upwards.

Note the lack of PPE – Owl