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Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, has claimed that what she calls “safetyism” is helping to hold back British growth.

She made the comments today in a Q&A at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, a three-day event with rightwing international speakers, particularly from the US.

In a news release summarising her remarks, the ARC says:

Speaking at the third day of the inaugural ARC conference, business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch MP called for the UK to scale back government intervention and roll back a culture of ‘safetyism’ in a bid to boost the UK’s entrepreneurship.

In an interview with the UnHerd editor, Freddie Sayers, Badenoch said that “the state itself is doing more than it ever used to do before. We ask the government to intervene in things that it never used to intervene before.”

“There has been a fundamental cultural shift around our attitude around risk and what I call safetyism,” Badenoch said, responding to a question on causes of the UK’s economic malaise. “We talk about risk as if it’s a bad thing rather than something that generates [reward].”

She was also asked if she wanted to emulate the sort of “war on woke” being waged in the US by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. In response, she did not fully endorse his approach, but she said she would like the UK government to be less “shy” about setting out its vision.

Boris Johnson is credited with introducing the world to the notion of the “dead cat” strategy. The phrase itself came from Johnson’s friend Lynton Crosby, the Australian political consultant, but it was Johnson who made the term famous when he wrote about it in the Telegraph 10 years ago. Now anything in politics that even looks vaguely like a distraction strategy is described as a “dead cat”.

According to Dominic Cummings’ witness statement, in the autumn of 2020 Johnson said he wanted to “dead cat” Covid because he was fed up with the issue. Cummings told him (rightly) this would never work.

Boris Johnson asked the top scientists Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance if Covid could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nose, according to Dominic Cummings in his witness statement to the Covid inquiry. Aletha Adu has the story.

Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, was “quite sceptical” about the case for paying compensation to people who missed work because they needed to isolate because they had Covid, the inquiry was told.

David Halpern, the former head of the behavioural insights team, made the comment in an email shown during the hearing.

Asked about the comment, Halpern said he did not talk to Sunak himself about this, but that he did talk to Treasury officials. He said it was the job of the Treasury to be reluctant to spend public money. He said he thought the Treasury would not agree to making sick pay more generous, because that would involve a “deadweight” cost, with more generous payments going to people who would comply with Covid isolation rules anyway. But he said he thought the Treasury would be more open to hardship payments to the low-paid, administered by local authorities.

The inquiry has now finished for the day.

Kate Forbes adds to pressure on Sturgeon by saying she kept all her Covid WhatsApp messages

Severin Carrell

Kate Forbes, the former Scottish finance secretary under Nicola Sturgeon, has said she had kept all her WhatsApp messages from the Covid pandemic because “it was clear [there] would be an inquiry” into the government’s handling of the crisis.

Forbes, a noted critic of Sturgeon’s who narrowly lost the Scottish National party leadership election to Humza Yousaf, further increased pressure on Sturgeon to explain whether or not she had kept her messages. It has been reported most or nearly were deleted.

Sturgeon, the former first minister was asked four times yesterday whether she had deleted the messages, and refused to say. She acknowledged she would disclose that to the UK Covid inquiry: “I will be very clear to the inquiry what I hold and what I don’t hold and why that is the case.”

Speaking to reporters at Holyrood on Wednesday, Forbes said: “I think it’s incumbent on each of us to give an account for our own actions and our own decisions.”

Forbes’s intervention also raises further questions about Yousaf’s assertion earlier this week that Scottish government policy required the deletion of old WhatsApp messages every 30 days. Despite claiming that policy was in place, Yousaf has said he also kept all his messages.

Forbes said:

Well, I suppose my approach has been that where something is relevant to my role as minister, I have retained it.

[It] is really critical that the Covid inquiries provide answers to all those that were affected during the Covid years. And I think that calls for the greatest possible source of information, correspondence and evidence, and so on.

At the Covid inquiry David Halpern, the former head of the Behavioural Insights Team, is giving evidence. Asked for his reaction to Dominic Cummings breaching lockdown rules when he took his family from London to County Durham, and then went on his eyesight-testing trip to Barnard Castle, Halpern said it was “atrocious”.

He said countries could either have a principles-based approach to dealing with Covid (Japan was an example – it told people to avoid the three C’s, crowds, closed spaces and close contact), or a rules-based approach. The UK had a rules-based approach. Halpern said, if rules were broken, there should be consequences. But the Cummings episode blew a hole in that because he was subjected to no sanctions.

But Halpern said the one positive was that, after the Cummings affair, most people continued to follow the rule. That was because people were more keen to follow the example set by their neighbours, co-workers and fellow commuters than someone in Downing Street, he said.

The Covid inquiry has published the text of Dominic Cummings’ witness statement. It runs to 114 pages, and is not easily searchable.

Cummings was in part forced out of No 10 because he lost a power struggle with Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie (still his fiancée when Covid struck in 2020), and, although this feud did not come up in the evidence session yesterday, in his witness statement Cummings restates his claim that she was a negative influence on the PM. He claims that she exacerbated Johnson’s indecision problem. But he also claims Johnson himself sometimes blamed her unfairly for U-turns for which she was not to blame.

In this passage Cummings is referring to WhatsApp messages about Carrie published last month.

Severin Carrell

Scottish Labour has significantly increased its lead over the Scottish National party, taking a six-point lead over its rivals, according to a respected academic survey from the Scottish Election Study.

Its quarterly Scoop poll put Labour on 38% and the SNP on 32%, after don’t knows were removed, giving Labour its largest lead since 2010 and appearing to confirm a consistent rise in support for Keir Starmer’s party in Scotland.

The Scoop data suggests undecided voters are switching to Labour, as have a fifth of SNP voters, 38% of Liberal Democrat voters and nearly a fifth of Conservative voters. Two-thirds of Scottish voters expect Labour to win the next general election.

The poll, conducted by YouGov, was carried out in late October after Humza Yousaf’s first national conference as SNP leader, where he unveiled a council tax freeze, and after his party’s devastating defeat in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection.

Unfortunately for Yousaf, Scoop found voter allegiance to the SNP has slipped significantly: only 55% of voters who backed the SNP in the 2019 general election plan to at the next election. The Tories fared far worse: only 48% of their voters will back them again.

The Scottish government’s reputation among voters has also fallen, YouGov found. It had a minus 20 satisfaction rating, although that remains far better than Rishi Sunak’s administration in London. The UK government’s satisfaction rating was an Arctic -68.

The Scottish Election Study is based at the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Heather Hallett, the chair, asks a final question. She wants to know what powers special advisers have.

MacNamara says in theory special advisers cannot direct civil servants. She says in practice they can, if a special adviser asks for something on behalf of the PM. But she says during this period sometimes advisers were, from their own initiative, asking civil servants to act.

And that’s the end of MacNamara’s evidence.

O’Connor quotes from another passage in MacNamara’s witness statement. In it MacNamara said:

The prime minister rarely accepted that to govern is to choose. He really did want it all and changed his mind often.

The decision-making swung between two extremes, the prime minister’s undoubted liberal instincts and then the extremes of shutting everything down, when in reality all of the discussion and debate and choices were in the middle.

O’Connor turns to schools. He says that, in her witness statement, MacNamara says that, after the permanent secretary at the Department for Education was forced to resign over the exam grading fiasco, she was told by Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, that Boris Johnson intended to ensure that Gavin Wiliamson, the education secretary, would also have to move at some point soon.

O’Connor says MacNamara also raised the issue of whether PPE was designed to fit women’s bodies. She addressed this in her witness statement.

MacNamara says this issue eventually got raised by the PM in a meeting. She says she thinks a colleague persuaded the PM to raise this issue because that was the only means of getting a response.

MacNamara says she thinks more people will have been harmed as a result of domestic abuse during lockdown. An email is shown in which she said: “It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this.”

O’Connor shows another extract from her witness statement addressing this. In it MacNamara says it was “far too difficult” to get colleagues in No 10 to focus on domestic violence.

UPDATE: MacNamara said:

People don’t want to think about these things, so you don’t want to think that awful things happen to children and partners and parents in their own home.

If you are a more experienced civil servant … you have a different sense of these things and I think it goes to who is involved and advising in decision-making, and are they able to bring the full gamut of what the state actually knows about what sometimes happens.

I feel that it was quite lopsided at this point. We were looking at harm through a very narrow lens without realising that of course there can be all sorts of consequences of other things you can’t see.

O’Connor presents an extract from MacNamara’s witness statement in which she said the lack of a “female perspective” in No 10 created a problem in Covid policymaking. She suggests there was more focus on issues like shooting and football than domestic abuse or pregnancy as a result.