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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and Katie Balls.

So this afternoon Matt Hancock gave a press conference in which gave some new updates on the tier

system in England as well as some updates on a new strain yes another one as well can you tell us

what he said so more areas of England are going to move up into tier four large parts of the

south and east of England and that will be from one minute past midnight on

Boxing Day, so enjoy your first minute of Boxing Day, people in those areas. And other areas,

such as Warrington, Northamptonshire, parts of the South West are moving up into Tier 3. That was all

reasonably expected by the time Hank Hook appeared in Downing Street. What was less

expected was that there is another highly transmissible mutation of the coronavirus which has

arrived in the UK from South Africa. And people who've been planning to go to South Africa

or travel back from South Africa are now going to be subject to quarantine measures.

And there's two cases, I believe, where the contacts had travelled back from South Africa.

And so those were the announcements that Matt Hancock made.

He also was at pains to seem quite apologetic to the people who were moving into the higher

tears. He said the government was truly sorry to them and just kept urging people to stick

with the restrictions until the vaccine could make us safe. And Katie, there was also an announcement

on the Oxford vaccine, but it wasn't the announcement, I think, that a lot of

people were hoping for. It was just a submission of the final data for the Oxford vaccine.

Yes, this is not the big announcement, I think, figures such as Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson

are probably dreaming of any day now. It's just that Matt Hancock announced that all data on the Oxford

...