Fresh from his Cornish beach minibreak, PM returns to face Covid reality – and his furious backbenchers
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.
