There is a murky grey area between government contracting and looting of the public purse. In the UK, the COVID-19 crisis has seen government and private contractors increasingly operating in this grey area, and with little sense of shame. The repeatedly demonstrated incompetence of the UK government (in particular the government of England) has drawn muc...  Read this >>

I can’t remember now who wrote it, but a few months ago I read an insightful piece that argued that Boris Johnson doesn’t actually want to be Prime Minister. It’s too much like hard work. But he does want to have been Prime Minister. This explains a lot about recent events in the UK: it’s a statue of himself that he wants...  Read this >>

In a previous diary entry, written while Boris Johnson was in Intensive Care, I (mildly) regretted an earlier post in which I had referred to his reputation for laziness and incompetence. Ever since his recovery, I have regretted my regret. Tonight’s speech, in which Johnson supposedly set out the new lockdown rules for the UK, has once again shown ...  Read this >>

Director-General Tedros and other senior officials at WHO have today been retweeting an interview from the Financial Times in which Bill Gates announces that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is refocusing all of its efforts on the COVID-19 response: “We’ve taken an organisation that was focused on HIV and malaria and polio eradication, an...  Read this >>

Hugh Grovesnor, the seventh Duke of Westminster, has donated £12.5 million to a National Health Service charity “to say a huge thank you” to NHS staff. This has been widely (and rightly) greeted with disdain by those on the left, who point to the failure of the Duke to pay inheritance tax on his estimated £10 billion fortune, and t...  Read this >>

Yesterday I posted a diary entry about Boris Johnson and his reputation for being workshy. Within hours of posting the entry it was announced that he had been taken into hospital, and later that he had been moved into intensive care. Today I've been wondering whether to go back and edit or remove that entry, which now feels much more mean-spirited than i...  Read this >>

I say on Twitter that it is much too early to judge which countries have responded well to coronavirus, and that the picture of ‘good and bad responders’ that we have today might look very different 12 months from now. I meant the comment partly as reference to the fact that we can’t see how the pandemic will develop in future (countries...  Read this >>

Throughout his career, Boris Johnson has maintained a reputation amongst almost everyone who has worked with him for being lazy, unprepared and unreliable. Although much of his public persona is quite transparently a performance (anyone who doubts this should read Jeremy Vine’s revealing piece from last summer: https://www.spectator.co.uk/artic...  Read this >>

I take the opportunity of a quiet Saturday to catch up with my friend Kanchhi in Kathmandu. I was supposed to be in Nepal now, but for obvious reasons couldn’t travel. They are on their 12th day of lockdown today. From the sound of it, this is largely being complied with– probably much better than here in the UK, where (as the government feare...  Read this >>

Something doesn’t feel right to me about the ‘immunity passports’ idea. (For those who haven’t seen it, it is the idea that those who have recovered from COVID-19 and are – at least in theory – immune could have some kind of document that they would be provided with after passing an antibody test. This would allow them ...  Read this >>

As someone who has written previously about the tendency of emergency pandemic responses to tip into authoritarianism, with all manner of negative consequences for human rights and civil liberties, one of the most fascinating aspects for me of the COVID-19 crisis has been the public clamour for ever greater restrictions. Certainly in the UK – but fr...  Read this >>

Judging by social media, most people seem to be baking their way through this pandemic. But the local supermarket hasn't had eggs for a couple of weeks now. Our younger daughter's birthday is in two days, so we discuss the ethics of travelling to a different supermarket in search of eggs for a birthday cake. Does this meet the threshold of an 'essential j...  Read this >>

A tweet by Maryam Deloffre draws my attention to a new blog post on the Duck of Minerva site entitled ‘Why Have IR Scholars Largely Ignored Pandemics?’. In it, the author (uncredited on the piece itself, but who later turns out to be Steve Saideman) says that “I can’t really name any scholars that come to mind that are pandemic exp...  Read this >>

According to @DrMarkDoyle on Twitter, your next monograph is ‘Empire of’ followed by the item you have currently stockpiled in the greatest quantity. Mine is ‘Empire of Nongshim’. I commit to writing it before this lockdown is over.  Read this >>