It hardly came as a massive shock. Indeed, given the surge in coronavirus cases over the past few weeks, the surprise would have been if Boris Johnson had chosen to relax all remaining lockdown restrictions in England on 21 June. But it was unquestionably a disappointment – to the prime minister as well as several million others. Boris likes to be the feel-good man: taking on the role of the sensible purveyor of bad news rather cramps his style.
So it was a somewhat subdued Johnson – it didn’t help that he was still coming down from his G7 Cornwall high – who entered the Downing Street briefing room, flanked by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance. There was a time in the early days of the pandemic when the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser were ingenues who, unknowingly, frequently allowed themselves to be used as human shields for government incompetence. Now they have both wised up and their presence was as much to make sure Boris didn’t have a last-minute change of heart as to do the heavy lifting of explaining the science and epidemiology.
Not that they need have worried. For we were in a parallel universe where Johnson was actually keeping a promise. Normally, Boris doesn’t think twice about not telling the truth – lying is second nature to him – but now he was delivering on a commitment. He had said he would follow the data, not the dates, and although he had never expected to make good on that promise – in his own mind the dates had always come first – he now found himself backed into a corner where he was obliged to keep his word. He made a mental note to not let telling this truth thingy become a habit. It was too inconvenient and much too much like hard work.
Boris began the press conference with the good news. The UK was already substantially more open than many other countries. It wasn’t entirely true but hell, he’d just come back from a fabulous weekend in Carbis Bay where he’d got to hang out and relax with a dozen or so of the most powerful men and women in the democratic world. Restrictions? What restrictions?
Johnson then got his excuses in early. When he’d set out the roadmap back in February, he’d always known that easing the rules would be accompanied by more infections and more hospitalisations. He didn’t seem to have noticed the slide that showed the current dominant strain of the virus to be the Delta variant. Something he might have been able to suppress or eliminate had he followed the data in April and banned all flights from India several weeks sooner than he had. And it still rankled that despite the delay, he still hadn’t got to go on his holiday/trade visit to India.
So here was the deal, Boris said, finally getting down to the nitty-gritty: 19 July would become the new 21 June. Only this time he really, really meant it. The 21 June date had only ever been an aspiration, but he was now going to spend the next four weeks in a vaccine frenzy to make sure that only something he couldn’t now foresee – there’s been a lot of unknown unknowns over the past 18 months – would prevent him from opening up the country completely.
In the meantime, though, he would throw in the consolation prize of allowing people to invite more guests to weddings, providing they adhered to social distancing rules. Quite how that was meant to work was anyone’s guess, and Johnson had the grace to appear confused as he explained. There again, he could just have been wondering why everyone was so keen on large weddings. One of the joys of his most recent bash had been that he had only had to fork out for 30 people. And even that had been more expensive than he would have liked. He couldn’t for the life of him understand why so many families tolerated so many liggers on the guest list.
Almost all the questions – the new GB news channel got one on its first day out, even if it wasn’t clear there was anyone watching to hear the answer – focused on just how certain the government was of meeting its 19 July target. And the longer the presser went on, the more certain Johnson became.
Yes, there would undoubtedly be more deaths along the way, but somewhere along the line you had to decide what degree of risk you were prepared to tolerate. And Boris could sense that he had maxed out his credit with his increasingly vocal backbenchers who were spitting blood that their leader had actually kept a promise to the country, and wouldn’t accept any further delays. As Johnson walked away from the podium, he could hear Steve Baker humming the tune of The Great Escape.
