The Year The World Stood Still: 2020 In Review

From Barnard Castle to Brussels, from Wuhan to the White House, it has been a year of unprecedented challenges, impossible choices, huge governmental gambles and astonishing mis-steps. Will 2020 prove to be a wild aberration or a turning point for the business of British government? Our crack team of analysts returns from the (virtual) IfG Christmas Party to discuss the successes and failures of a year of crisis, from the pandemic emergency measures to the reform of the Civil service to, yes, Brexit. 

• “We’ve seen a Prime Minister who struggles to rise to the enormity of what he’s faced with.” – Jill Rutter
• “The Government’s communications have been so poor that they obscured many of their own successes.” – Alex Thomas
• “There is a growing narrative about Keir Starmer sitting on the fence. Labour need to address that next year” – Maddy Thimont-Jack
• “A hard rain fell on a lot of civil servants before it fell on Dominic Cummings himself.” – Bronwen Maddox
• “Boris Johnson’s optimism has led him into a cycle of overpromising and under-delivering.” – Jill Rutter
• “To say the peak has passed and you can go out, and then see ANOTHER peak… that could be a blow that a government might not recover from.” – Alex Thomas

Hosted by Bronwen Maddox with Jill Rutter, Alex Thomas and Maddy Thimont-Jack. Audio production by Alex Rees

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