He started by suddenly saying he couldn’t understand why I thought people his age – namely mid-40s – wouldn’t want, or indeed demand, a Covid vaccine for themselves,” she wrote. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Unless she had insisted on directly reporting to the Prime Minister when she took the job, she “probably wouldn’t have succeeded, because there would have been too many people in the chain telling us we couldn’t do it”. It was a condition she had discussed with her husband, the Conservative MP Jesse Norman, who managed the furlough scheme as financial secretary to the Treasury. The pair soon became known as “Mr Tax and Mrs Vax”.

Two years on, Bingham is as aware of the fights she lost as those she won. When she took the role, Johnson gave her three objectives. To secure vaccines for the UK; to ensure shots were distributed equitably worldwide; and to make the country more resilient for next time. He also knew that he’d always win in a verbal punch-up with the mild-mannered Alok Sharma, who was nowhere near as aggressive – and certainly insufficiently devious to take on the health secretary,” she wrote. She said other cabinet members who attended the meeting approached her after the meeting. “Gove could not have looked more embarrassed. The business secretary, Alok Sharma, called me immediately afterwards to apologise. Others sent messages of support,” she said.But when it came to the committee discussion itself, the health secretary had traded in Dr Jekyll for Mr Hyde. Knowledge and power must meet. Bingham and Hames’s accessible, edge-of-the-seat account of how British innovators vaccinated the UK and much of the rest of the world is also a quiet, compelling, non-partisan argument for dialogue between business and politics. She stresses that the UK clearly has more manufacturing capacity than it did – the Government bought and repurposed a veterinary vaccine plant in Essex, for instance, while Moderna is setting up an mRNA vaccine manufacturing plant. Britain also invested in training, and expanded vaccine testing facilities at Porton Down.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? their intelligence – this makes a huge difference for a speaker. In the Oxford audience I encountered many experts in the field my book covered and even one of the ambassadors I’d quoted What is crazy is that all this manufacturing side is massively economically beneficial,” says Bingham. “We’re really good at advanced manufacturing, we’ve invested in the skills to do it… so why wouldn’t you lean into that? It’s a missed opportunity, and it could really provide economic growth.” She also thinks the UK’s status outside the European Commission (EC) – who “did a bad job” – allowed the Government to be faster and “more nimble”. While Bingham is disappointed that Britain has been “so weak” on sharing surplus vaccines with the rest of the world, her main regret is the continued holes in future disease preparedness.It was a privilege for me to visit the festival to receive the Bodley Medal. As an incidental blessing I saw Oxford at its most mysterious and atmospheric. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away. Christ Church was silent except for the footfall of unseen persons around corners and the sounds of evensong creeping from behind closed doors. For the first time I understood thoroughly the power of college ghost stories. I knew if he [Sykes] didn’t think much about any aspect of our operation, then he’d say so – loudly. Conversely, a seal of approval from him would be as close as I could get to acquiring body armour,” she wrote. Sykes’s review approved of the taskforce’s work in July 2020. The Oxford festival is the most elegant and atmospheric of literary festivals. It’s a pleasure to both attend and perform there.