Last week, a damning report by a joint committee of MPs found that serious errors and delays by ministers and scientific advisers cost lives during the pandemic. The fear is we are repeating those errors, and throwing in some new ones for good measure.
For if we have learned anything from these last 20 months, it is that to delay taking action early only means we end up having to make even more drastic and economically disruptive interventions later, with the added consequence that more people lose their lives.
Today, London business leaders joined large swathes of the medical community in calling on the Prime Minister to effectively trigger Plan B, by introducing vaccine passports and mandatory face coverings, in order to avoid another lockdown
An ever cautious Labour Party has not quite come out in favour of switching to Plan B, but, still at his best when at his boldest, Tony Blair very much has, calling for mandatory masks, vaccine certificates and half a million booster jabs a day.
With new confirmed cases yesterday surging to more than 49,000, and the Health Secretary last night warning they could hit 100,000 a day, the consequences of further prevarication are likely to be both grim and grimly predictable.
Elsewhere in the paper, David Ellis writes that, following comments by the DJ Steve Allen about her weight, Tilly Ramsay – the one making Strictly worth watching this year – is a paso doble-ing hero for our times.
Meanwhile, Pravina Rudra says it’s official: chatting people up in person is dead. Long live the tyranny of the dating app.
And finally, today I learned via the brilliant Londoner’s Diary it is entirely plausible that Cara Delevigne may have been named after the now sadly discontinued Aer Lingus magazine, ‘Cara’. Still, if you check out this list, it could have been worse.
