Boris johnson

There are three areas where government policy now implicitly accepts that they made mistakes in their earlier handling of the pandemic. The first is the desire to increase testing to 200,000 tests a day. This suggests that the earlier decision to pull back from a test and trace strategy because the infection was being spread in the community was due to a lack of a testing capacity; something that could have been remedied if the government and Public Health England had adopted the collaborative approach to testing that they now have. The second is care homes.

Be careful what you wish for. Over the past few years, a fair number of thoughtful Tories have included a strange item in their letters to Santa Claus. They wanted an effective Leader of the Opposition, who could keep ministers under pressure and force them to raise their game, which would lead to better government. Well, after nearly a decade-long pursuit of unelectability, Labour has granted the Tories their wish. The Tories are not enjoying it. One suspects that Keir Starmer was always a pretty forensic character, even before he sharpened his cross-examining technique at the Bar. Moreover, a virtual House of Commons plays to his skills, but not the PM's. In a full House, Boris would stride to the wicket, swinging his bat to excite the crowd rather like Ian Botham in his pomp.

Keir Starmer is a very rum package. His body and his manner seem to belong to different organisms. His physique is martial, sturdy, invincible. The square jaw, the trunk-like neck, the unsettlingly symmetrical face, the blue but eerily lifeless eyes. But his personality has no trace of manliness at all. He seems grannyish, nervy, over-delicate, like an unobtrusive footman who finds himself lord of the manor following a paternity test. There’s something about him that doesn’t ring true. His voice is like the creak of a door in a chapel of rest. But he’s an effective debater. He enjoys using statistics to inflict horrors on his opponent. Today, he unleashed himself against the Prime Minister. Last week, Boris had suffered a corona shambles. He needed a convincing win.

There were three messages in Boris Johnson's address to the nation, and quite a lot of important gaps. The messages were: Because the Covid-19 epidemic has been tempered but not eliminated, lockdown continues – though will be modified very gradually;It would be a jolly good thing if a few more of us could return to work, especially on construction sites and in factories, so long as that can be done in a way that does not imperil health;The pace at which lockdown is modified, and whether it is modified at all, is in the collective hands of the British people, and will be wholly determined by whether we continue to obey social-distancing rules. So what were the gaps?

It turns out that the biggest problem associated with lockdown hasn’t been the ‘covidiots’ – that tiny minority of people who ignored social distancing measures – but the ‘hunker in the bunker’ brigade who, after six weeks of house arrest, can barely envisage ever returning to normal life. Opinion polling shows the UK has one of the most risk averse populations in the world when it comes to the notion of restrictions being lifted. Nearly three quarters of us say we will be ‘very nervous’ about leaving home when limitations on our movement are removed, according to Ipsos Mori.

There is so much to ponder in the prime minister's interview about how Covid-19 almost killed him. But, in respect of the effort to protect us all, what stood out for me was how and when he was persuaded to move from Downing Street to St Thomas's Hospital. ‘I wasn't struggling to breathe but I just wasn't in good shape and it wasn't getting better,’ he told the Sun on Sunday. ‘Then the doctors got anxious because they thought that my readings were not where they wanted them to be. ‘Then I was told I had to go into St Thomas's. I said I really didn't want to go into hospital...

How will the UK recover after lockdown? Although social distancing is expected to continue for months, talk has turned to how the government will deal with its coronavirus debts. The Treasury is seeking to raise £180 billion over the next three months to meet its pledges – putting the UK on course to see its budget deficit rise to a level never seen before in peacetime. Some estimates put borrowing this financial year at over £300 billion, far outpacing the years following the financial crash. This has led a number of public figures to predict a return to the Cameron and Osborne era with mass cuts in the years ahead.