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Mark Harper, the Conservative MP who chairs the Covid Recovery Group, which represents anti-lockdown or lockdown-sceptic backbenchers, told LBC this morning that he thought the government could have gone ahead “perfectly safely” with removing all remaining restrictions for England on 21 June, as originally planned. Harper said:
I listened carefully to what the prime minister said yesterday and I was in the House of Commons for the health secretary’s statement, and it seemed to me we don’t know anything today that we didn’t know when the prime minister was telling us he was happy to move ahead on the 21st of June …
Ultimately we’ve reduced the risk of this disease hugely by our fantastic vaccination programme, and, as the Government says, we’ve got to learn to live with it, but the problem is every time we get to that point, ministers seem to not actually want to live with it and keep restrictions in place.
Tony Hall, the former BBC director general, is currently getting monstered by the Commons culture committee over what happened with Martin Bashir, and particularly over the BBC’s decision to rehire Bashir when some executives knew how he had obtained the Diana interview. My colleague Kevin Rawlinson is covering it on a separate live blog. It’s here.
Related: BBC bosses face MPs’ questions about Martin Bashir’s Diana interview – live
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