Fears over deadly virus and ‘sour’ UK-US relations

The outbreak of a new strain of coronavirus features on many of Thursday’s newspaper front pages.

The Sun warns that the virus, which has claimed 17 lives in China, could already have spread to Britain.

Under the headline “World War Flu”, it says ministers have ordered a “clampdown” on flights from Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak.

But the Daily Mail says passengers who flew into Heathrow from China yesterday were not screened, and were simply given a leaflet on health advice.

The paper says British officials are facing questions over their response to the crisis, when countries such as the US, Malaysia, and Singapore have introduced more rigorous checks.

“Globalisation has made the nightmare of pandemics more likely, and harder to control”, says the Mail in its leader column, calling the government “complacent” and urging it to step up checks.

Meanwhile, several papers lead with the United Nations’ calls for an inquiry into allegations that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince hacked Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s phone.

The Guardian, which first broke the story, calls the disclosures “extraordinary”.

In its editorial, the paper suggests many business people may be looking again at their links to Saudi Arabia.

The Guardian notes that the crown prince also met Bill Gates, Richard Branson and George Bush as he tried to project a new image for his country.

“Many of those who posed smiling alongside the future king are doubtless in urgent talks with their digital security consultants,” says the paper.

And the Daily Telegraph warns that Boris Johnson may have been vulnerable to the same type of hack, quoting a Foreign Office source saying that he communicated with Mohammed bin Salman by WhatsApp.

The kingdom’s US embassy has issued an outright denial of the allegations.

“After three years of high drama… which changed the political landscape of Britain,” it says, the bill was passed in a moment of silence as peers “nodded it through” without objection.

The Mail says Boris Johnson plans to mark 31 January with a statement heralding “a new chapter in the history of our country”.

As the Daily Express puts it, a smooth Brexit has been approved at last and “the dream of British independence is close to being a reality”.

The Times says the new formal complaint against the former Commons Speaker, John Bercow, damages his hopes of a peerage.

It is understood the allegations from Lord Lisvane include bullying and humiliating staff.

Mr Bercow said the former chief clerk had “ample opportunity to raise any accusations… at no stage did he do so”. He calls the timing of the complaint “curious”.

A genius, a god, and a very naughty boy – all words used by the Daily Mirror to describe Terry Jones, one of the stars of Monty Python, who died yesterday at the age of 77.

The Guardian says he was key in developing Python’s “trippy, stream of consciousness format, where each surreal set up flowed into the next”, without a conventional punchline.

To the Daily Express he was not only a comic genius but a man of varied talents – one who wrote children’s literature, who brought medieval history to a mass audience, and who was not afraid to venture into political commentary.

The Daily Telegraph says Jones – with characters such as Mr Creosote – “took absurdity to violently hilarious extremes”.

The work he created with Python “wasn’t satire in the political sense,” it says, “but it made grotesque humanity simply laughable …. his comedy was a work of genius”.

And finally, Wordsworth reckoned that “shocks of passion” turned a man’s hair white, but the Guardian is one of several papers to report that a new scientific study has confirmed stress really can cause your hair to turn grey.

It says researchers found anxiety causes the body to exhaust its supplies of the stem cell which gives hair its colour.

The paper offers assurances that going grey won’t happen overnight, but the Times thinks the study by Harvard University could mean there is truth to the legend that Marie Antoinette’s hair went white the evening before she was beheaded during the French Revolution.

The Times offers advice to its readers who are fretting about going grey to “try to relax”.