Isabel Hardman

Tuesday's cabinet meeting discussed the usual topics of Covid and the Brexit transition period, but at the end, Boris Johnson told ministers he had asked Sir Michael Barber to conduct a rapid review of government delivery 'to ensure it remains focused, effective and efficient'. Downing Street's readout of the meeting said the Prime Minister told his colleagues that 'it remains important to ensure that work continues to ensure that we build back better from the pandemic'. Barber, currently chair of the Office for Students, set up the first 'delivery unit' in Downing Street in 2001, and has even written a book on How to Run a Government. He will be examining how No. 10 can deliver its domestic policies over the next few years.

Matt Hancock spent Monday evening trying to explain a very delicate tension to the public. There’s the good news of the vaccine and his determination that all four of the most vulnerable priority groups will be vaccinated by mid-February. And then there’s the bad news that in the meantime, coronavirus is spreading and we haven’t yet seen the worst of its impact on the NHS. So alongside announcing that more than 2.3 million people across the UK have had their first dose of the vaccine, Hancock warned at Monday night's Downing Street press briefing that unless the public sticks to the rules, he will have to tighten restrictions on meeting others for exercise.

Boris Johnson’s coronavirus press briefing this evening was largely an upbeat discussion of how the vaccination programme is being rolled out, including a look at the logistical side of things with Brigadier Phil Prosser. So far, nearly 1.5 million people have been given the vaccine across the UK, and the Prime Minister said there was sufficient supply for all the top four priority groups to have been immunised by 15 February. This is all very well, but the reason we are in the current lockdown is that ministers want to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed before the vaccines have been rolled out.

It is much harder being an embattled minister in the socially distanced Commons than in normal times. There is no group of supportive MPs to arrange behind you, no ability to organise sympathetic noises from the backbenches as you give your statement explaining why you've taken a last-minute decision to close all schools when you said you wouldn't and had been threatening councils who were trying to do so just before Christmas with legal action, and why you've spent the past few weeks insisting that exams would go ahead in the summer, only to cancel them this week too. On this charge sheet, Gavin Williamson would have struggled in any Commons setting when he explained why the government had changed its mind at the last minute.

Boris Johnson this evening tried to give a little more background to why he had called England’s latest lockdown – and why he had confidence that this really was the darkness before the dawn. The Prime Minister told the Downing Street coronavirus briefing (yes, we are back in that sort of lockdown) that more than 1 million people in England are now infected with Covid – around 2 per cent of the population, according to the ONS – but that as of today, the same number of people in England, and a total of 1.3 million people across the UK, have received the vaccine. He had to explain why he had changed his tune on schools so rapidly, going from insisting that most schools should return to cancelling face-to-face teaching within 36 hours.

It used to be the case that the only things that were certain in life were death and taxes. To that list we can now add unending turmoil and confusion at the Department for Education. Today Gavin Williamson U-turned on the government’s previous pledge to keep schools open, announcing that a number of schools in Covid ‘hotspots’ would not be going back as planned next week. Primaries in some areas – including a slightly random patchwork of London boroughs – will not reopen next week. Those in lower tiers and some Tier 4 areas will start term as planned. The following week, years 11 and 13 will return to secondary schools, and from the week beginning 18 January, all year groups will return.