No matter how hard he might try, how disciplined and grim-visaged he is determined to be, the prime minister simply cannot help himself: he always overpromises and, putting it charitably, sometimes underdelivers. It has been true of Brexit, to widespread frustration, and it has been even more acutely true of the response to Covid. The boy can’t help it.
Thus, even as he attempts to prepare the country for a longer-than-expected lockdown and closure of schools, he slips in the tantalising but vague prospect of some easing of restrictions in February – strictly speaking, not much more than a week away. The target for vaccinating the most vulnerable in society is 15 February, which for a change does seem achievable, but even so, the inoculation will take a few weeks to start working.
Not for the first time, the prime minister is perhaps being a little too optimistic. It is coming up to a year since he declared that the virus would be “sent packing” in 12 weeks, once the famous sombrero had been flattened. In the summer, the “world beating” Serco test and trace system was supposed to “help us very greatly” to defeat the disease. In July, a “significant return to normality by November at the earliest” was envisaged. This was indeed followed by a succession of relaxations, only for them to be reversed – as it happened, in November. “Cancelling Christmas” was then ruled out as “inhuman”, only to be ruled back in a few days before the “holidays” started. Where once he ridiculed bringing in a second and then a third national lockdown, he was eventually forced to do so.
