Why the Cabinet Office will be in the dock for Covid failures when the inquiry comes. As will Sedwill.

The Treasury has been welded at the top to Number Ten. Now there’s a push to do more of the same to the Office.

School re-openings. Williamson is making his case without a taranatula perched on his shoulder.

Enraged voters are not his target: he is zeroing in on the mass of questioning teachers and parents.

Ross resigns over Cummings

“I cannot in good faith tell my constituents that they were wrong and one senior adviser to the Government was right.”

Cummings made a reasonable case yesterday, and his critics should accept it – and move on

Any fair-minded observer would think better of him at the end of yesterday’s press conference than he or she may have done at the beginning.

Cummings 2) He will hold a press conference at four o’clock. This is a calculated throw of the dice.

There can only be one explanation: that the internal polling is dire. If this event doesn’t move it, resignation inches a step closer.

Cummings. The Prime Minister is now gambling on what the ’22 does next.

Assuming no new revelations or his adviser’s resignation, he can either tough it out or order an inquiry.

Cummings 1) At a stroke, the row has weakened the authority of the lockdown

If so much, as Ministers suggest, depends on common sense, nuance, context and common sense, people will draw the inevitable conclusion.

The triumph of Whatsapp and trouble for the whips

Groups of MPs are able to beat their jungle drums into a frenzy. And the powers-that-be have limited capacity to quieten them.

The Government’s democracy commission, “legal tools” – and boats of illegal migrants

The nub of the matter is that without changes to the law the entrants will keep coming to Britain.

The middle way on free and fair trade (and the only practicable one)

People cannot simply be viewed as consumers or producers – there are other dimensions to policy, including the stewardship of the countryside.

R = Retreat?

The Government has ways of evading commitment to the national reproduction rate of the virus as the determinant of policy.

Why the track and trace plan is set to be a long hard slog – with its shifting targets, self-isolation questions and “plough waves”

Rolling out enough tests with enough trackers, and then putting effective self-isolation in place, is very much a process rather than an event.

School closures, Labour, teaching unions – and why Starmer himself should be in the dock

Does he back the National Education Union’s advice to its members not even to engage on a possible June 1 re-opening?

This really is the time to let the deficit grow big enough to look after itself

If, that is, interest rates carry on at rock bottom rates. But we have to take a chance on growing our way out of this crisis.

If you thought staying in lockdown was hard, wait until you see what trying to get out of it is like. But here’s how Johnson could do it.

A successful test, track and quarantine policy would open the door to local paths out of this national shutdown.