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“England expects that every man will do his duty”. Admiral Nelson’s famous flagship signal, issued on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar, was for years scribbled down in history notebooks by wide-eyed school children taught the classic tale of heroism and sacrifice.

Boris Johnson was clearly one such pupil, because it seems that Nelson’s message is now his main public health policy for dealing with a very 21st century pandemic. The PM told his latest Downing Street briefing that “we expect and recommend” that the public should wear face masks in crowded and enclosed spaces used by strangers.

The phrase “expectation management” is beloved of politicians trying to massage reaction to an anticipated election, but this is whole new territory. Johnson clearly believes that he can somehow massage the public’s Covid conscience by just telling them that he expects them to do the right thing.

Proving this was not a mere verbal tic of the PM’s, health secretary Sajid Javid used the “expected and recommended” phrase in his update to the Commons too. Javid even had a variation on this theme of a sense of personal duty rather than public requirement, saying he would be “encouraging” businesses to use Covid ‘passports’ to limit the spread of the virus.

Expecting, encouraging and recommending aren’t, of course, the same as compelling or strongly advising. That’s why several medics and scientists are worried that as we head for the “Freedom Day” of July 19, there has been just too much mixed messaging from the government on issues like mask-wearing and working from home.

Still, Monday showed that Johnson and his ministers are beginning to realise the error of last week’s hard emphasis on “personal responsibility”. Just a few days ago, ministers were talking about wanting to bin masks because they were just a bit irritated by wearing them or because (novel one this) face coverings made it difficult to communicate with the hard of hearing.

The PM has not been deaf to such criticisms and there was definitely a shift in tone and language from just one week ago. Even though the government won’t call its latest messaging “advice”, it wants to make clear what it sees as the better way to behave, while insisting this is no longer a matter of legality or illegality.

The shift in tone was also notable in the implied threat Johnson carried about what would happen if the public proved they couldn’t be trusted to listen to his entreaties: the return of some kind of lockdown.

Having said in February that his roadmap was “cautious but irreversible”, the PM tried a bit of revisionist history of his own. “I hope that the roadmap is irreversible – we’ve always said that we hope that it will be irreversible – but in order to have an irreversible roadmap, we also said it’s got to be a cautious approach,” he told the briefing. It was the audacity of hope, Johnson style.

In fact, this not a willed triumph of hope over expectation, it’s both hope and expectation yoked together as pandemic policy. The only problem is that whereas lockdown can be used to predict the Covid curve, relying on consistent public conduct in unlockdown is very much an uncertain science. On some of Sage’s more scary modelling, we could end up with “at least” 1,000 hospitalisations a day and upto 200 deaths a day.

Chief medical officer Chris Whitty gave the PM valuable backing for the idea of some kind of easing of restrictions next week. There is no clear evidence that a further delay was going to make a difference, he said, before adding the crucial caveat “what is going to make a difference is going slowly”.

But when Whitty then said the public should “avoid unnecessary meetings”, it begged the question how they should sort what was necessary from unnecessary.

In some ways the most telling remark was from Sir Patrick Vallance, when he all but confirmed the Whitehall whispers that a form of “hybrid immunity” (from those vaccinated and those infected), was now unofficial policy. Just don’t call it “herd immunity”.

Vallance said: “We are on track to have significant levels of immunity that will really impede the ability of this virus to transmit and cause damage. And that will bring the possibility that future big waves would go at that point.” Which is perhaps the cheeriest uncheery thing anyone has said at these briefings for quite some time.

There is certainly some force in the government’s argument that July 19 is a valid pivot point given the school holidays and looming winter. It can be used to slowly restore businesses and jobs and hospital waiting lists that have all suffered in lockdown. But briefing some newspapers “Freedom Day” rhetoric while urging continued caution is a tricky game to play.

The PM’s new soundbites about caution may well be heard by much of the public. But with the Commons itself sending the most damaging message of all (one rule for them, one for the rest) by allowing MPs to ditch masks while forcing staff to wear them, the dangers are obvious. Shop and tube staff don’t enforce mask wearing as it is, imagine the arguments once refuseniks get a legal licence next week.

When he emerged from hospital last year after his own bout of Covid last April, the PM declared: “If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger, which I can tell you from personal experience it is, then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor.”

The difficulty is that his own mixed messaging has turned his public health policy into a half-Nelson, the wrestling move that can be overturned by a determined opponent. As Horatio looks down Whitehall towards Downing Street with one eye, there’s an uneasy feeling among MPs and ministers about the unlockdown gamble.

And the real half-Nelson may be a feeling that while the public are being left to do their duty, the PM is somehow shirking his. Let’s hope (there’s that word again) his message of encouraged caution works.

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Ever since Gordon Brown blundered into giving pensioners a measly 75p rise in their pension, politicians have been terrified of upsetting the grey vote. Back in 1999, the Treasury was so pleased with low inflation that it had failed to spot the PR disaster of the tiny increase it entailed in all index-linked benefits.

Brown never repeated the error, and indeed paid his penance by swiftly making his temporary winter fuel allowance a permanent fixture, as well as introducing free TV licences for the elderly and pension credit.

During the 2010 election, David Cameron was bounced by Brown into keeping the measures. The Tory leader went further by bringing in the now infamous ‘triple lock’ that guarantees to uprate the basic and state pension in line with earnings, prices or 2.5%, whichever is the higher.

In 2015, the Conservatives did dip a toe in the dangerous waters of cutting “pensioner perks”, as some called them, announcing they would withdraw state funding of the free TV licence for over-75s and ask the BBC to foot the bill instead. The blame game still plays out, but a survey by AgeUK found that Tory voters will be hit hardest.

Fast-forward to today and it appears that Rishi Sunak is preparing to think the unthinkable and not honour the triple lock pledge that was reaffirmed in the last Tory manifesto. The chancellor has in some ways the perfect cover in the form of the pandemic and the huge costs it has inflicted on the whole nation.

The young in particular have been hit hard by joblessness, on top of student debt and the UK’s chronic inability to offer them affordable housing. With the third wave of Covid powering a fresh tsunami of cases among the under-30s, it seems they are in for their share of ill-health too. While ministers seem bent on a form of herd immunity, long Covid is the fear that stalks many a young person’s Whatsapp chat.

The demands for “intergenerational fairness” have been getting louder and Sunak seems to have listened. Of course, he was subtle about it on the breakfast sofa shows, but the message seemed pretty clear: the triple lock will be tweaked, amended, possibly suspended to save valuable cash.

In a masterclass of political hint-dropping, the chancellor said that yes, the triple lock was still government policy “but I very much recognise people’s concerns”. “We want to make sure the decisions we make and the systems we have are fair, both for pensioners and for taxpayers.” It was straight out of the overseas aid playbook: the overall aim is to stick to the manifesto but the pandemic has forced a rethink.

That’s why the chatter in Whitehall and among MPs is that the Treasury is considering a possible suspension of the triple lock for one year only, just as happened on the pledge to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid. The hint was all but official when even Boris Johnson refused to kill off the speculation on Thursday. “We’ve got to have fairness for pensioners and the taxpayers,” he said.

Whereas Brown was trapped into a PR nightmare by linking pensions to (low) inflation, Sunak is obviously keen not to suffer from a similarly self-inflicted, locked-in syndrome. With pensions now linked earnings (which are soaring at 8%), even a temporary way of avoiding the £3bn cost would save the Treasury serious money. Pensioners could still get a rise, just not a mega rise.

Insiders stress that nothing is decided and it will all depend on how the numbers look later in the year ahead of the spending review, but no one is killing the idea of a brief suspension of the full triple lock. The fact that both the PM and chancellor sounded like they were coordinating their message (on various outlets) shows there is a softening up exercise going on at the very least.

With Keir Starmer’s shift from constructive to destructive opposition, Labour will inevitably try to seize on any change as an outrageous theft from pensioners’ purses. But what everyone will be trying to gauge is just how many Tory backbenchers try to prevent any unpicking of the lock. Will those who were gung ho about a temporary cut to aid now bite their tongues?

It will certainly be a test of Sunak’s political skills, though he does perhaps have time on his side. Just as with the international development ‘cut’, opting to do this in the middle of a parliament (and the middle of a pandemic) gives him room to make up for it in the run up to the next election.

It could also be that on the triple lock the chancellor realises that over the long term he could burnish rather than tarnish his reputation, not least among younger voters who see this as a fairness issue.

The furlough scheme has already helped make him the most popular politician in the UK and he may think he can afford to burn a bit of that capital now. Ending the £20 uplift in Universal Credit and jacking up corporation tax prove he is unafraid of making unpopular decisions.

If he does go ahead and take the bold option on pensions, it would certainly signal that Sunak really does have his eyes on the main prize. Unlike his ‘buy now, pay later’ boss, the chancellor cannot be seen to rely on borrowing as his way of balancing the books. If he can project himself to Tory MPs as firm but fair on tax and spend, he may have a decent crack at No.10 himself.