What happened at Boris's Covid Cabinet meeting?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
These meetings are usually called for the Cabinet to rubber-stamp a decision made by Boris and his advisers, so what's changed?
Reports today suggest that the Prime Minister was actively encouraging opposing voices, and that a majority of the Cabinet was against bringing in new rules. After the resignation of David Frost, has Boris been forced to accept a new way of decision-making? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews.
On the podcast, Fraser says: 'This was the first taste of the new Cabinet. The Prime Minister is being boxed in now by what his Cabinet will go with. He's now got to win them around. That's a very different process.'
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Get 12 issues of The Spectator for just £12 when you subscribe this Christmas. |
| 0:05.0 | And you can get a free bottle of Tattinger champagne. |
| 0:08.3 | Just go to spectator.k.k.uk forward slash celebrate. |
| 0:16.5 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots and Spectator's Politics Podcast. |
| 0:22.3 | I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Kate Andrews and Fraser Nelson. Christmas is getting closer but yet we are not seeing any new |
| 0:29.6 | restrictions. On Monday, the cabinet met to discuss new restrictions and there was an expectation |
| 0:36.7 | that the Prime Minister wanted to press ahead. |
| 0:39.0 | However, it didn't quite turn out like that. Fraser, can you update us on what went on? |
| 0:43.8 | Well, if this was a cabinet Zoom meeting for a start, and it was a normal choreography, |
| 0:48.9 | when we hear these meetings called at short notice, we think they're going through the motions |
| 0:53.8 | of announcing |
| 0:54.5 | a new crackdowns. So the cabinet meeting started of Chris Whitty saying how terrible the data |
| 0:59.2 | looked and how he didn't explicitly argue for more restrictions, but that was obviously |
| 1:03.7 | the line of his argument. But then something rather unusual happens. There was lots of pushback |
| 1:09.0 | from other members of the cabinet. And the prime minister |
| 1:12.0 | himself was actively encouraging voices of dissent. One of the people who was at the meeting |
| 1:17.4 | told me that he was going out of his ways saying, look, Jacob, what do you think? Rishi, what do you |
| 1:22.3 | think? Rishi Sunek, we all know that Rishi Sunek is no fan of lockdown. He was trying not to say |
| 1:26.9 | very much because obviously these guys knew that history was going to record what each and every one of them said. |
| 1:32.3 | And Rishi doesn't want to be seen right now as too much of a kind of a borrously stabilizer. |
| 1:37.3 | But after that long discussion, they found a lot of the questions were unanswered. |
| 1:42.3 | They weren't able to be told what these |
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