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Hello and welcome to your coffeehouse shots Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Isabel Hardman. I'm joined by James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson.

Well, just as everyone was starting to think that COVID was in some way in retreat, we now have not just a new variant, but a super variant, which is being described

variously as the new variant or the South African variant. James, what do we know at the moment

and what implications is this going to have for the UK? So we know that this new variant has

been discovered in South Africa, one of the countries with

impressive genomic sequencing capabilities, and it appears to have a huge number of variations

to essentially, in very crude terms, combine extra transmissibility with vaccine evasion.

And that is what is worrying people. People are worried that this is

going to be much more transmissible and that the vaccines will be less effective against it than

the vaccines have been against most of the other variants we've seen so far. I mean, you can see

the concern here from not only the fact that the UK has put South Africa and several other

Southern African countries on the red list, but Sajid Javid has just told MPs that they're

considering putting countries with strong travel links to South Africa on the red list and an

attempt to try and buy some time. You've seen Israel, which has got an imported case of this,

talking about going back into a state of emergency,

despite how well advanced their own booster program is.

But I would just, the note of cautious and hope, actually, I would interject is,

we don't know yet whether this variant is more severe or not.

And there are some people who think that maybe the fact that it is so much more transmissible

...