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It was just four seconds, but it felt like an age. That was the heavily pregnant pause, the strange silence amid the bearpit hubbub, that marked Boris Johnson’s delayed response to a direct hit from Keir Starmer in PMQs.

The Labour leader had picked up on widespread disruption being caused in schools and workplaces by the soaring numbers of people forced to isolate because of Covid’s Delta variant. Businesses were losing staff, holidays were being put at risk, parents and kids were missing school sports days, and some were even denied the chance to watch England in the pub, Starmer said.

Instead of a careful controlled unlocking of restrictions, didn’t the PM’s ‘big bang’ approach mean “we are heading for a summer of chaos and confusion?” Then came that pause. Johnson was still seated, reading his notes, and apparently unaware of Speaker Hoyles’ call to answer the question. “….er, no, Mr Speaker…” he finally blurted out.

PMQs is a chance for an Opposition leader to vent real-time frustrations on behalf of the public, simultaneously making a PM squirm while trying to act as a voice of the voters. And Starmer had been wise to use the weekly exchange to highlight the real concerns many are now feeling as they are ‘pinged’ by the NHS app, even if they are double jabbed.

With Tory newspapers as well as Tory MPs expressing fury at the four-week delay in changes to isolation policy until August 16, this was undoubtedly ripe territory. Starmer knew the real reason for the delay was a sensible fear that ditching isolation now could lead to even higher cases (possibly 25% higher, the Guardian has been told), but he exploited the issue for all it was worth.

Without crediting Dominic Cummings (not least as he’s irretrievably tarnished in the eyes of many of the public), Starmer picked up on the former No.10 adviser’s withering description of Johnson as a wonky supermarket trolley that crashes around uncontrollably. “He is doing what he always does, crashing over to the other side of the aisle,” he said.

It’s unclear if Cummings wants to assert his copyright, but The Trolley is a good attack line on the PM as it focuses not on his ability to mislead or his lack of moral fibre (which the public appear to have spotted and dismissed) but on his competence and that of his government. A fair chunk of floating voters don’t mind a quasi-comedian in charge, they do dislike chaos that affects them directly.

It was Cummings who revealed recently that the PM had told him: “The chaos means everyone will look to me as the man in charge.” The difficulty is that while you can get away with editing the Spectator in such a fashion, it’s hard to run the country on similar lines.

That Johnson replied to Starmer with a tired set of greatest hits (European Medicines Agency, vaccines-vaccines-vaccines) underscored the complacency that some of his own MPs have been worried about since his failure to sack Matt Hancock. And the string of similar non-sequitur answers to the Liaison Committee later may have confirmed that impression.

Asked if he had sacked Hancock, he replied that his Vote Leave bus’s £350m-a-week NHS claim was an underestimate and not worthy of all the ‘hoo-ha’. Asked about today’s confirmed cut in the £20 uplift to Universal Credit, he said jobs were better than welfare. Asked what he meant at the G7 by ‘building back better in a more feminine way’, he talked about the number of women diplomats.

This wasn’t a supermarket trolley with a mind of its own, it was a dodgem car veering forwards, backwards, sideways, moving in any direction other than one that answered a question. The problem may come when the public sees itself in the passenger seat. One man’s cheerful funfair ride is another’s painful whiplash, a condition felt not immediately but sometime afterwards.

Normally, the PM can get away with his chaos theory of leadership because he does it with a smile. The risk comes when, as with his replies to Tory equalities committee chair Caroline Nokes, he does it with a smirk that borders on a snarl. Claiming she “would find fault with almost anything that we did Caroline, with the greatest of respect”, he then added she should “send me a postcard” to suggest a better way to explain his own surreal phrase about building back in a feminine way.

On everything from his lack of a plan for climate change to the absence of a 10-year funding plan for schools, Johnson either changed the subject or promised action would come some day soon. The pauses in policy don’t feel pregnant so much as prevaricating.

As the committee was wrapping up, the PM suggested the public just weren’t that interested anyway right now. “I’m sure our viewers may be switching over to the football,” he joked. He was probably correct about the England football team’s rival appeal compared to the dull business of government. But one suspects the long pause can’t last beyond this summer.

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Follow the money. That line from All The President’s Men has ever since been a pretty good guide to a lot of politics ever since, on both sides of the Atlantic. And as the row continues over Boris Johnson’s ‘big bang’ removal of Covid restrictions on July 19, all the prime minister’s men (and women) are switching focus to the financial and economic consequences of the pandemic.

After spending unprecedented peacetime sums on direct wage support, the Treasury is obviously keen to start balancing the books as soon as possible. Last month, the most significant clue that the PM would not allow further delay beyond July 19 came not in any Department of Health announcement but in Rishi Sunak ruling out any change to his timetable for furlough.

Indeed, despite the four-week extension of lockdown, the state’s element of furlough support was cut as planned on July 1. With struggling hospitality firms forced to find extra cash to support workers, it would have been politically unsustainable to further extend lockdown at the same time as Treasury help was withdrawn. The full removal of furlough by the end of September is another reminder of Sunak’s determination to start going ‘back to normal’.

Economic issues certainly dominated the cabinet meeting today, with Sunak leading the discussion to mark nearly a year since his ‘Plan for Jobs’ was unveiled. He also pointed to the fourth month in a row of falling unemployment, and new OBR figures showing two million fewer people were out of work compared to their original forecast.

Liz Truss gave an update on a new Global Investment Summit in October, building on the new giga-battery factory investment in Sunderland. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told colleagues of his forthcoming “innovation strategy”. So, it’s easy to see why the PM summed up at the end by telling his cabinet that “jobs, investment and innovation” would be at the core of his government’s mission “as we emerge from this pandemic”.

But even as the chancellor cited the OBR, there was less welcome news from the watchdog in its latest “fiscal risks” report, which warned he would have to find £10bn a year to fund a black hole on health, education and transport spending caused by the pandemic. Health alone needs £7bn more than current plans allow.

As well as the pandemic, record public debt and climate change (or rather a failure to act early enough on climate change) were the other big risks, the OBR said. No.10 insisted the figures were merely “illustrative”, but those ministers and Tory MPs who back carbon taxes will have been emboldened by predictions that delaying climate action will cost more in the long term.

The black hole in the public finances looks all the more stark when set against the £37bn earmarked for Test and Trace for two years. Which is why I suspect the Treasury will end up raiding that budget as the number of tests actually decreases in coming months (the Test and Trace budget is already underspent for last year, though few have noticed).

Meanwhile, Gavin Williamson confirmed under-18s who had contact with positive Covid cases would no longer need to isolate from August 16. Sajid Javid said adults with two jabs would also be free of the need to isolate, and would not need regular testing to remain free either (such people would be ‘advised’ to take one PCR test, not a daily lateral flow test).

Of course, simply allowing many more people to avoid isolation will be welcome news not just for the individual but also for the Treasury. More people can keep earning and, surely not a coincidence, there will be less demand for people to be paid by the state to stay at home. Sunak strongly resisted calls from people like Jeremy Hunt to offer a simple salary-replacement payment to encourage more people not to infect others.

If you’re worried about losing income from being forced into self-quarantine, you do indeed ‘follow the money’ – via your wages, because the Treasury isn’t going to offer the generous sick pay many have called for. Yet with spending cuts ruled out by the PM, he and Sunak are going to have to work out whether they tax more or borrow more.

The third option of funding public services from ‘the proceeds of growth’ looks unlikely, with anaemic growth rates forecast once the ‘bounceback’ runs its course this year and next. With inflation causing jitters about servicing the current debt mountain, it may be that Tory tax rises (perhaps with the cover of climate change) become a reality.

The PM is taking a risk on unlocking a country with soaring case rates, but the OBR warning shows he faces equally difficult calls on the public finances – even if his public health gamble pays off. Get it wrong and both our health and wealth will suffer from yet another winter lockdown.

That’s why perhaps the most damaging OBR data was this: the UK fall in GDP in 2020 was the second worst behind Spain and the worst in the G7. Johnson messaged Dominic Cummings last year that the UK could end up with “the double distinction of being the European country with the most fatalities and the biggest economic hit”.

Though the UK is not quite the worst, we are certainly near the top of the wrong kind of league tables. The PM will be hoping the feelgood factor of England winning the Euro football championship helps him politically, and everyone is desperate to have some kind of summer joy after our long, long hibernation. But the facts of life of the UK’s finances are as tricky for him as the facts of death of our Covid record.

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You know it’s time to get worried when Boris Johnson starts talking about honesty. Last year, when he was still refusing to trigger lockdown ahead of the first Covid wave, he actually said “I must level with you, level with the British public, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time”.

He wasn’t so much levelling with us as admitting belatedly that his own inaction was going to lead to large numbers of fatalities. We now know that “herd immunity”, or at least a mistaken belief that the public wouldn’t accept lockdown, lay behind that apparently fatalism on the part of the PM. Patrick Vallance’s warning that a “good outcome” would be 20,000 deaths was more right than anyone guessed.

On Monday, as he set out his ‘Big Bang’ plan to remove all restrictions on July 19, he was at it again. “We must be honest with ourselves,” he said, “that if we can’t reopen our society in the next few weeks, when we will be helped by the arrival of summer and by the school holidays, then we must ask ourselves: when will we be able to return to normal?”

Of course, there was nothing honest about the false choice he then presented (Dominic Cummings reminded us that Johnson “lies – so blatantly, so naturally, so regularly – that there is no real distinction possible with him, as there is with normal people, between truth and lies.). The PM claimed those who wanted a further delay to the lifting of restrictions wanted to reopen “in the winter”, when the virus will have an advantage, “or not at all this year.”

In fact, his own new timetable, of mid-September for every adult being double-jabbed, presented a real alternative for some critics. Greater Manchester Metro Mayor Andy Burnham, hardly a man who wants restrictions to stay a minute longer than necessary, said that deadline would be the perfect time to think about ending mask wearing.

In other areas of unlocking, such as the end of the work-from-home guidance, a slight further delay to September is attractive to others. And even this prime minister’s gift for shape-shifting can’t turn September into “winter”. Several scientists had been urging less of a “Big Bang” and more of a further phased removal of curbs to smooth out their impact.

To be fair, Johnson did have Chris Whitty on hand to say that “at a certain point” further delay doesn’t reduce hospitalisations and deaths, it just postpones them. But Whitty’s and Sir Patrick Vallance’s caution was palpable on the key issue of mask-wearing, their unease reflected in the way the PM talked swiftly about making decisions on economic and not just health grounds.

The chief medical officer set out his three scenarios for personally using a face covering, but more important perhaps was the immediate context in which he placed those conditions. He pointedly said he would keep wearing a mask right now, “particularly at this point when the epidemic is clearly significant and rising”.

But all the caveats Whitty used for when he would deploy a mask – any situation with an indoor crowded space, when told to by a ‘competent authority’, and when others feel ‘uncomfortable’ – just made the case for continued regulation to avoid individuals having to negotiate and police each scenario themselves.

The real significance of the masks debate is that it gets to the heart of the PM’s shift from governmental action to individual action. With previous Conservative administrations having sold off several nationalised industries, there’s little left to flog off other than Channel 4. But on Covid protections, it now feels as if Boris Johnson wants to privatise government responsibility too. Forget levelling up, this seems to be a levelling down of the morality tale of the pandemic.

One problem with this outsourcing of responsibility is that wearing face coverings is actually (as Vallance pointed out) about protecting others rather than yourself, it’s about public health, not private morality. That sense of duty is precisely why many people get jabbed: it protects them but ultimately protects the whole of society from transmission of a highly infectious virus.

At one point on Monday, some in government even hinted that the clinically vulnerable who want to travel on Tubes should only do so off-peak. There is certainly going to be a battle royal with groups such as Blood Cancer UK, which point out that ditching masks is going to effectively force people off public transport. Let’s see if London Mayor Sadiq Khan makes it a condition of carriage.

The PM’s “if not now, when?” approach was also a real contrast with his earlier pledge to be driven by data not dates. And in his punchiest response to any of the coronavirus updates since the start of the pandemic, Keir Starmer was quick to say Johnson was being “reckless”. Starmer also said ministers should hold off on ditching masks, introduce proper ventilation support and promise to pay more to people to self isolate.

The confused public health message on masks left Johnson saying he would wear one on a packed Tube but not in an empty, late night, inter-city train carriage. Most worrying of all however is not the lack of clarity but the potential tensions it sets up. Appeals to ‘courtesy’ may not work when both mask-backers and mask-haters have strongly held views.

I was struck recently by polling showing that lockdown sceptics tend to be Brexiteers, while lockdown supporters tend to be Remainers. Risk maximisers versus risk minimisers. Gamblers versus safety-firsts. As if the nation isn’t riven enough.

With his latest laissez faire policy on masks, the PM appears yet again prepared to let those divisions play out. Which in turn gives Starmer, if he somehow captures a weariness of all the them-and-us politics, the chance to present himself as potentially a healer of the nation, post-Brexit, post-pandemic.

All of us will be crossing our fingers that the government has got its unlockdown calculations right. But if hospitalisation numbers do start going up, Johnson’s political nerve really will be tested. It’s also worth remembering, as Patrick Vallance reminded us, that we will have to wait until next week for the very latest modelling on the actual number of deaths this ‘Freedom Day’ policy entails.