The government wants us to take responsibility, but isn’t so keen on giving us the data we need to make informed decisions
Sixteen months ago we probably would have rolled our eyes at being told to take “personal responsibility” by Boris Johnson, a man who doesn’t even take personal responsibility for an unspecified number of his own kids. But that was then, and these days we just have to let it wash over us like a waterfall in a shampoo advert.
There was certainly a powerful cascade of it all on Monday, as the prime minister explained that it was now or never for opening up. Faced with that false opposition, who wouldn’t pick “now”? I am hugely into “now” as the moment where it all goes away, and we return to a prelapsarian world where the government that got pretty much all of it wrong, pretty much all the way through, simply gets out of our lives. The only nagging worry, I suppose, is the possibility that the government that got pretty much all of it wrong is getting this bit of it wrong too, and that that means they’re going to be right up in our business again come the autumn.
