Inside Politics: Joe Biden brings up Northern Ireland with Boris Johnson

The president-elect raised his concerns about the Good Friday Agreement during a 25-minute call with the prime minister, writes Adam Forrest

Boris Johnson and Joe Biden (AFP)

Michael J Fox has reprised his role as Marty McFly in a new rap video. The Back to the Future star tells Lil Nas X to avoid the year from hell: “Whatever you do … don’t go to 2020!” With so much on the line right now, it would be pretty tempting to jump ahead to the end of January 2021 if you had access to a time-travelling DeLorean. Will Joe Biden have made it to the White House by then? Will Boris Johnson have agreed a Brexit deal and dodged border chaos? Will a Covid vaccine roll-out be successfully under way? The government thinks we may know much sooner if smooth, mass vaccination is possible – preparing the NHS to start the process from 1 December.

Inside the bubble

Our political commentator Andrew Grice on what to look out for today:

Boris Johnson, buoyed by some good news at last on a vaccine, will face Keir Starmer at PMQs. While Covid is sure to dominate the encounter, Joe Biden’s victory might also feature. Housing secretary Robert Jenrick will answer an urgent question about helping rough sleepers in the second lockdown. And two select committees will take evidence on the impact of Brexit in Northern Ireland and on the logistics industry.

Daily briefing

ABIDEN WITH ME: Boris Johnson must be feeling pretty good about things right now. The PM was able to “warmly congratulate” Joe Biden on his election win during a 25-minute phone conversation. He is believed to be the first European leader the president-elect spoke with after his victory. A Biden spokesperson later confirmed that the president-elect brought up stuff related to Johnson’s plan to override key parts of the withdrawal agreement. Irish premier Micheal Martin, who also chatted with Biden, said the president-elect “underlined his commitment to the Good Friday Agreement”. Still, Downing Street officials seem happy. “The vast majority of [us in government] would have preferred the result we got,” one unnamed No 10 official told Sky News. Slightly embarrassing then, that a “technical error” meant Johnson’s Twitter card message congratulating Biden showed the name “Trump” in the background. The alternative one was embedded in the other by mistake, said No 10.

ROLL WITH IT: The NHS will be ready from the start of December to begin rolling out the Pfizer vaccine – so long as it gets approved, Matt Hancock announced. The health secretary told MPs “there are no guarantees” about the complex process. But according to The Times, the ambitious aim is to vaccinate one million people a week and cover all over-50s by early next year. Mass testing for Covid will be rolled out to 67 more areas across England, Hancock also announced. Areas including Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and parts of London will receive new rapid “lateral flow” tests which can give results in an hour. Meanwhile, plans are under way for an “evacuation” operation to get students home for Christmas. Universities will be expected to allocate students staggered travel slots between 3 to 9 December. In other education news, Wales’ school exams for 2021 will be cancelled and grades based on classroom assessments – but there are no plans for England to follow suit.

TALKING YOURSELF OUT OF THE JOB: If you thought select committee hearings were straightforward affairs, think again. FA chairman Greg Clarke had to quit after using “unacceptable” language to describe black players during a truly disastrous appearance before MPs. Clarke said he was “deeply saddened” for offence caused after he used the term “coloured footballers” while speaking to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Elsewhere, the culture secretary Oliver Dowden was busy throwing the future of the BBC up into the air. He said there was a genuine debate over whether “we need” the Beeb – telling The Telegraph it was time to ask “really profound questions”. Several Tory-connected figures will be asking those profound questions on the new public service broadcasting panel – including Baroness Bertin (David Cameron’s former press secretary), Sir Robbie Gibb (Theresa May’s former comms chief), Andrew Griffith MP and Lord Grade.

CHICKEN RUN: Tory backbenchers just love an acronym, don’t they? We already have the ERG and the NRG. Now, Conservative MPs who voted against the lockdown have formed a new group call Covid Recovery Group (CRG) – promising to agitate against any further restrictions from 2 December. Maybe Lee Cain can knock them into shape? No 10’s director of communications – the man once employed by The Mirror to dress up as a chicken – is reportedly in the running to be Boris Johnson’s chief of staff. The new role would allow him to order civil servants around on behalf of the PM. One Whitehall source said Dominic Cummings “would be able to work with Lee, because he knows he is an ally, not a threat”. Cabinet ministers are clearly not happy, with their special advisers already pushing back against the idea of Cain assuming such power.

LOOKING INTO THE IN-LAWS: Questions about vaccine chief Kate Bingham and the £670,000 she reportedly asked to be spent on PR consultants at Admiral Associates aren’t going away. Lib Dem peer Lord Scriven has complained about the link between one of the firm’s directors and Dominic Cummings’ father-in-law. According to Companies House filings revealed by the FT, Admiral Associates’ officers include Angus Collingwood Cameron. And he is also listed as a director of Chillingham Castle Wild Cattle Association alongside Sir Humphry Wakefield – Cummings’ father-in-law. “These revelations raise yet more serious questions about how taxpayer money is being spent,” said Labour’s Rachel Reeves. Meanwhile, a group of MPs has said the process for choosing towns to benefit from a £3.6bn fund was “not impartial” and could “fuel accusations of political bias”. Labour said the process was “murky” – but communities secretary Robert Jenrick insisted it was all “perfectly normal”.

EMBARRASSING YOURSELF: Joe Biden has said Donald Trump’s refusal to join the reality-based community and concede the election was “an embarrassment … it will not help the president’s legacy”. But it’s not possible for Trump to feel shame. And it doesn’t look like his senior appointees have any either. His secretary of state Mike Pompeo made the ludicrous-but-frightening claim that “there will be a smooth transition to our second Trump administration”. What did Biden make of that? The president-elect chuckled uneasily when asked about it, then said: “There is no evidence to any of the assertions made by the president or secretary of state Pompeo.” Senior Republican refused to congratulate Biden as they returned to Washington, with Senate leader Mitch McConnell stating: “Until the Electoral College votes, anyone who’s running for office can exhaust concerns about counting ... It should not be alarming.” Reassured? No, me neither.

On the record

“We do not yet know whether or when a vaccine is approved, but I have tasked the NHS with being ready from any date from December 1.”

Matt Hancock readies the health service for the Pfizer vaccine.

From the Twitterati

“Diplomatic win for UK to be near the top of the new president’s list.”

The FT’s Sebastian Payne thinks the PM did well to be the first European leader to speak to Biden…

“People seem surprised that Biden took Boris’s call so soon. They don’t seem to have worked out that it was designed to cause maximum fury to Donald Trump.”

…but Piers Morgan thinks he knows Biden’s motivation.

Essential reading

John Rentoul, The Independent: Johnson’s clash with the Lords is a very strange way of negotiating with the EU

Tom Peck, The Independent: Matt Hancock is injecting hope into our veins – and sheer relief into his own

Nick Dearden, The Guardian: A toxic UK-US deal is just as likely under President Biden

Amy Sorkin, The New Yorker: Trump’s legal challenges are pure fantasy

Sign up here to receive this daily briefing in your email inbox every morning