Polling by Ipsos MORI actually took place before the Prime Minister’s public spat with Dominic Cummings

30 Apr 2021 | Full Fact's weekly news
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FACT CHECK
Conservative support may have fallen—but not when the Guardian says it did

An article in the Guardian this week claimed that public support for the Conservative party has fallen “following weeks of revelations about lobbying, the refurbishment of the prime minister’s flat, and the latest row with his former key adviser, Dominic Cummings.”

But these poll results are based on interviews that took place between 16 April and 22 April this year.

So while news about David Cameron’s lobbying and Downing Street refurbishments might have affected opinion, the polls ended before the Prime Minister’s spat with Dominic Cummings became public, on 23 April.

On 21 April this year, the BBC reported what it said were a series of leaked text messages between the Prime Minister and the entrepreneur Sir James Dyson.

On 23 April, newspapers reported that Boris Johnson believed Mr Cummings had leaked the messages—but Mr Cummings denied this, and made several counter-accusations about Mr Johnson in a blog later that day.

The Guardian amended its article after we contacted them about the error.
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FACT CHECK
Boris Johnson promised to publish his Dyson communications—we're still waiting on "all the details" ([link removed])

During an exchange at Prime Minister's Questions last week, Boris Johnson promised to publish "all the details" of his conversations about procuring ventilators with the entrepreneur Sir James Dyson. He also later confirmed to a journalist that the communications would be published.

At Prime Minister's Questions this week, however, he rephrased the promise in different terms and claims to have fulfilled it. At the time of writing, he has not published the full details or all his communications.
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FACT CHECK
Newspapers get muddled over Covid-19 ([link removed])

We’ve recently spotted two examples of newspapers misreporting studies and numbers around Covid-19.

An article in the print edition of Monday’s Daily Express says in its first line: “Pregnant women are 22 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than other women.”

But what the study actually found was that pregnant women with Covid-19 were 22 times more likely to die than pregnant women who didn’t have Covid. And due to the small numbers involved, this figure is highly uncertain.

Elsewhere, several newspaper articles greatly overstated the danger of the so-called “Nigerian variant” of Covid (officially known as B1.525).

Kent Live (the online site for the local newspaper) reported that this strain kills “twice as many people” as other variants, claiming that it has “so far” killed 4.3% of the people it has infected.

But this is misleading, because we don’t know the true number of people so far infected by it.

These death rates are also based on the number of deaths occurring among known cases. At the time the article was published, there had only been 328 cases of the “Nigerian variant” in the UK, so we can’t really be confident about how deadly it is.

Public Health England (PHE) said in February there was “no evidence that this variant causes more severe illness or increased transmissibility.”
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