A new virus strain requires new tactics, but is Boris Johnson the man to convince weary citizens and stubborn backbenchers?
It’s the hope that gets you in the end. Had the nation been told at the beginning of December that Christmas wasn’t happening this year, then obviously it would have been a blow, but we’d have coped. Plenty of families had already made the mental leap towards staying at home, judging by the uneasy reaction to Boris Johnson’s initial promise of a super-spreader five days of mingling, and more could surely have been persuaded.
But no. Our leader’s Christmas gift to a nation already at the end of its tether was instead to get everyone’s hopes up and then stomp on them at the last minute, when families had spent money some couldn’t afford on food that won’t now get eaten and tickets that can’t be used. Unpack your bags, Prof Chris Whitty said, if you were planning to get away. Unravel your plans, uninvite the people you had let yourself look forward to seeing, unpick the stitches that were stopping some people coming apart at the seams. But miserable as all this is, recent events have blown a hole in rather more than a nation’s plans. This crisis isn’t just for Christmas, but for months to come.
