PM reverts to his familiar tropes after Labour leader’s challenge to his Covid hokey-cokey
You couldn’t blame Keir Starmer for trying to solve the mystery of the government’s messaging on foreign travel. After all, in the last 24 hours it has changed from amber list countries being open to visits for family and friends, to then being closed to all travel, to being closed to only essential travel for business and family illness, to essential travel including foreign holidays. It’s just that prime minister’s questions was probably not the right forum for him to solicit the information. Partly because Boris Johnson still finds it impossible to answer a straight question, but mostly because even he doesn’t seem entirely sure.
Johnson began by saying that the UK had the strongest borders in the world. Which must make him wonder how it has managed to acquire the highest number of cases of the India variant outside India itself. And why India was put on the red list two weeks after Pakistan and Bangladesh, which had comparable levels of Covid 19 in early April. But that was by the by. What mattered was that he had now decided that people should only travel to amber list countries if it was absolutely essential.
