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

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Forsyth.

We've just heard the Prime Minister deliver a press conference where he updated the nation

on the evolving story of the new strain of coronavirus.

After the Prime Minister cancelled Christmas for over 16 million people on Saturday by placing

them into Tier 4, as well as changing the Christmas rules, European countries and countries

further afield have taken action

with many banning travellers from the UK while they investigate the new strain. But James,

the part that's been causing the government the most concerned today, and we heard Boris Johnson

addressed in his press conference, this is not so much the movement of people for leisure,

or even business trips, so much as freight and goods.

What's going on there?

So I think it's fair to say that the UK government was slightly surprised by, in to use Grant Shapp's words,

by the French decision to bar even freight from moving across the border.

You heard Boris Johnson speaking that press comments just now

about how he fought the risk of a kind of unaccompanied lorry driver was low and that he hoped

this border issue could be sorted out in the next few hours. I'll have to wait and see whether

that you actually get that. We know that he's spoken to Emmanuel Macron, but there was clearly no

definitive conclusion from that conversation that he could tell the country about tonight. I think the speed

of which this gets sorted is absolutely key, because 24, 48 hours is what the French initially said

yesterday. I think that level of disruption is manageable without anyone noticing things going missing from supermarket shelves

...