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Confused, Contradictory, Chaotic: The ‘3 Cs’ Of Boris Johnson’s Covid Policy

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It’s been a few weeks since Boris Johnson jibed Keir Starmer with his alliterative soundbite of choice: “we vaccinate, they vacillate!” And given the past week of wibbly-wobbly, hokey-cokey pronouncements from him and his government, it’s perhaps fitting that the PM has laid off that particular attack line. 

In a dizzying few days of dithering, Johnson exempted himself from isolation rules then isolated himself, his ministers contradicted him on the need to obey Covid ‘pings’ and key policy on critical workers changed by the hour. 

The National Insurance rise to pay for social care was on and then off. The NHS pay rise was off and then on. Compulsory Covid passports were revived from the dead, just weeks after being quietly euthanised by Michael Gove. 

At times, the PM looked like Gromit desperately trying to lay new track in front of his train of state as it sped towards the parliamentary recess. But although getting over the line of the summer break may stop backbenchers from gathering in grumbly groups in the Commons tea room, ministers know there are gruelling weeks ahead. 

At the heart of the problem lies a fundamental confusion in Johnson’s pandemic strategy. He (backed by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, to be fair) has decided England will become the first country in the world to open up a country from lockdown precisely at the point when cases are soaring.

But instead of honestly admitting that his objective is a form of herd immunity  – ie “hybrid immunity” stemming from infections and vaccinations – the PM is telling the public to be cautious and “slowly” take full advantage of all the freedoms he has now granted.

There’s an easy answer to the “if not now, when?” question about full unlocking: mid-September, when all of the adult population has been offered a second jab. The PM counters that keeping restrictions in place until then would simply delay the covid wave, not suppress it. And a wave in summer is easier for the NHS to cope with than a wave in winter, he adds. 

Yet on that logic, being cautious and not “tearing the pants out of it” simply delays the wave too. Isolating after “ping” from the App delays the wave. Wearing masks delays the wave. Meeting outdoors delays the wave. But the PM says he doesn’t want to delay it. It’s hard to think of a more confused and chaotic public health policy, especially during a pandemic.

It would be more honest if Johnson admitted he wants the maximum number of infections this summer, just short of tipping the NHS into a serious crisis. And helpful if the department of health told us just what level of infections it thinks the NHS can cope with before lurching into that meltdown.

The other objective for opening up fully is to help ease the pain of businesses and all those who work in them. But if you’re then effectively telling the public not to use those businesses, because they should be “careful”, what is the point? That’s why, whenever Johnson was asked to define what tearing the pants out of it meant, he struggled with specifics.

It’s possible that the real, unstated reason for Freedom Day was not just “hybrid immunity”, but because ministers can see that young people simply aren’t going to be double jabbed in big numbers by mid-September anyway. Take-up rates are worryingly lower than older age groups, so if government waits for the magic 80% double-jabbed figure, it could be waiting indefinitely.

I suspect that’s what really lies behind Johnson’s drive for compulsory Covid passports. They will drive up jab rates, while giving attendees of nightclubs, football matches, music gigs (and cinema and theatre goers, and maybe indoor pub goers?) the security that they will be mixing with similarly protected people. Compulsion will also drive demand for booster jabs over the winter.

The big issue however over coming weeks will be just when restrictions are reintroduced. Johnson has already tried to soften up opinion this week by saying he merely “hoped” his roadmap would be “irreversible”. 

Would it make sense to have a roadmap back into lockdown, just as he had one out of lockdown? I used to think so, as it would allow individuals and businesses to plan their next steps.

But the problem may fundamentally be that the virus doesn’t respond to graduated steps. If you really want to flatten (not delay) a sombrero of cases, a hard and fast lockdown may be the only answer. Just reimposing masks and working from home may not cut it.

Yet given how confused and contradictory the current policy is, it wouldn’t be surprising if the policy that replaces it is similarly incoherent. Learning to “live with Covid” is obviously where we need to end up, but that requires maximum vaccinations for genuine herd immunity. It also requires more honesty from government about what its real strategy is.

The latest data on Friday suggests the third wave may, just, be peaking. But I’ve genuinely no idea if that’s what No.10 wants, or if it wants to ride the wave for a few more weeks.

Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam this week repeated his advice to avoid places with the ‘3 Cs’ overlapping: closed settings, with crowds and close contacts. Unfortunately, the real ‘3 Cs’ that have defined Johnson’s policy are chaos, confusion and contradiction.

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Why The PM’s Covid Passports Are Now Not A Threat But A Promise

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UK ParliamentPA

Nadhim Zahawi

Connoisseurs of parliamentary proceedings will know that while ministers use an opening statement to set out broad policy, the devilish detail is often held back until their answer to their opposition shadow. And for anyone interested in the scale of the government’s planned ‘Covid passports’, today was a perfect example.

In answer to Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, vaccinations minister Nadhim Zahawi gave a very strong hint that it was not just nightclubs that would require the NHS Covid pass as a condition of entry. He said indoor music venues, as well as “large unstructured outdoor events such as business events”, “music and spectator sport events” were “the ones that we are most concerned about”.

That will ring alarm bells among Labour’s party conference organisers I suspect (it’s due to have a full in-person conference in Brighton, whereas the Tories have pointedly planned a hybrid event and the LibDems a fully online one), as well the UK’s huge but struggling events business. Football matches, gigs, all sound like they’ll need a passport for entry.

And despite suspicions that the nightclub plan for late September was just a bluff to get young people jabbed, it looks like it really is going ahead. One of the few areas where business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng stuck to the script on Thursday was when he said that instead of a specific vote for nightclub passes, there might be “a general vote on the concept”. “I’m very confident we can pass the legislation we require,” he added.

With many Tories worried that a blanket Covid ‘ID card’ could be used for entry to pubs (and with Labour going for the populist line that it would be “unfair” on pubs and pubgoers), Kwarteng’s confidence will be subjected to a serious stress test when the Commons returns after its summer break.

But given Zahawi’s detailed hints, the PM’s own line on Monday – “some of life’s most important pleasures and opportunities are likely to be increasingly dependent on vaccination” – now feels like it’s not a threat but a promise. Zahawi also put Covid passports at the heart of the government’s strategy to be the first country in the world to “transition” from pandemic to endemic, “from pandemic to manageable menace”.

Vaccination does remain the best hope of getting there (new stats showed it had prevented 52,600 hospitalisations), yet there are real worries in Whitehall at the slowing uptake among under-30s. Some 34% of 18-29s have not had their first jab. And as NHS England warns hospitals they may be entering the “most difficult period” of the pandemic for more than a year, it also said high rates of admissions are ”closely linked” to low vaccine uptake.

Just as worrying, the surge in Covid cases has a direct impact on the vaccination programme because anyone infected has to wait 28 days until they can be given the jab. PHE said a total of 1154.7 infections per 100,000 people were recorded among those aged 20 to 29 – the highest figure recorded for any age cohort since the beginning of the pandemic.

In a bitter twist on the PM’s line this week that he’s “turning jabs, jabs, jabs into jobs, jobs, jobs”, the pingtastic third wave is forcing young people to not only delay vaccination but also forcing them to stay off work, with all the consequences for the economy that entails.

One subject that Zahawi didn’t want to touch in any detail on Thursday was NHS pay. He ignored both Ashworth and Jeremy Hunt when they asked just where the £2.2bn needed to fund the 3% rise was coming from. Downing St confirmed for the first time the cash would come from the DHSC budget but not from money “earmarked for the NHS front line”.

The cash will probably come from a mixture of the extra emergency Covid funding for this financial year for the NHS (although trusts are still waiting for the post-September half of that), plus the long term plan. But given the massive £37bn earmarked for Test and Trace over two years, I wonder if Sajid Javid will see that as a target?

Few people realise that Test and Trace actually reported a huge, 39% underspend of its 2020-21 budget of £22bn, mainly because the lockdown earlier this year meant “cancelled activity”. That’s a cool £4.3bn, more than double the pay rise bill.

The Treasury will probably just bank the underspend, but politically just imagine what a win-win it would be to hand cash from a failing service to pay the wages of the tired, heroic staff of the NHS?

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Can Boris Johnson Win His Game Of Covid Chicken Over Vaccine Passports?

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UK ParliamentPA

Boris Johnson

“Do you want me to have another go?” Boris Johnson’s plaintive plea in PMQs was directed at the Speaker, as a Zoom glitch cramped his usually combative style. David Cameron famously once said his Christianity was like “Magic FM in the Chilterns, it comes and goes”, and the PM’s volubility suffered similarly from his remote access to the Commons.

The erratic nature of Johnson’s contributions turned out to be uncannily apt as it matched yet another chaotic day for the government. Keir Starmer was relentless about ministerial mixed messaging on use of the NHS app. He also ridiculed No.10’s failure to define which “critical workers” (clearly the PM wasn’t one of them) would be exempt from being pinged into isolation.

Johnson tried to hit back by stressing that his own forced quarantine in Buckinghamshire just proved how important it was to comply with requests to stay at home, even if not everyone has use of a country home.

But while the PM was playing Chequers, Starmer was playing chess. His attack on Johnson’s WhatsApp messages (joking about leaving the over-80s to die from Covid) prompted the PM to let slip that “we were thinking in those ways” last year – damning admission that is sure to haunt him in any public inquiry.

Starmer also put the opportunist into Opposition, seizing on Tory backbench unease about Johnson’s U-turn over Covid “passports” by ridiculing his previous vow to eat any ID card he was forced to carry. Later, Labour announced it would not support compulsory use of double-jabbed certificates for entry to nightclubs, creating the prospect of a government defeat on any such legislation.

It was perhaps that realisation that prompted the PM to later tell the backbench 1922 Committee that basically his threat on nightclubs was all about jolting the young into getting vaccinated. If enough came forward, he wasn’t ruling out ditching the plan. Playing a game of chicken with the under-30s seems to be where his pandemic policy is right now.

What Johnson didn’t do was read the riot act to those MPs, like Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg, who opted not to wear face masks in PMQs. At one point I counted only a quarter of Tory MPs following the Speaker’s clear guidance, and at most just under half. With his backbenches restive over other Covid curbs, that suggested who is really calling the shots right now.

With more non-mask wearers on trains and buses this week despite government “encouragement”, the sight of senior MPs doing the same is yet another corrosive bit of message indiscipline. The bare-faced cheek of both is the public health equivalent of tailgating on the Tube, when fare dodgers ride the slipstream of those who do the right thing. The division and resentment it can breed can only get worse.

The Speaker is likely to be even more unhappy about the farcical way in which the 3% NHS pay rise was non-announced to parliament, before being announced finally in the form of a press release. Labour’s Rosena Allin-Khan, who is a part time A&E doctor, could hardly contain her anger as health minister Helen Whately said the pay rise was merely “considering” the rise.

Perhaps taking to heart the PM’s request to have “another go” at things, the department of health took just three hours to reveal the 3% was indeed happening after all. I understand the reason for the delay was not an admin error or anything to do with the fact that Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak are themselves isolating. It feels like there was serious tension over where and when the funding might come from.

With non-NHS staff like police and teachers being told their pay was frozen (a tactic perhaps designed to make nurses think their deal was a king’s ransom in comparison), the overall impression was not one of end-of-term good news for key workers who were once clapped for their public service in the pandemic.

And it’s that U-turn, the U-turn in sentiment towards those who helped everyone else over the past year, and the suspicion that a pay rise has been dragged out of him for the NHS and is non-existent for others, that could cause the government serious trouble. The Tories are still ahead in the polls but there’s a sense that the ‘vaccine bounce’ may be coming to its natural end.

The upside of the vaccine programme is it touched nearly everyone. The downside of the ‘pingdemic’ is that it too appears to be touching nearly everyone. Calmer heads in government think the sense of disruption, confusion and chaos can’t last much longer. But as MPs head for the metaphorical beaches this summer, some Tories worry that the PM’s flip flops may linger in the public memory.

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Will Muddy Messaging Spoil Boris Johnson’s End-Of-Term Send Off?

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Just before a parliamentary recess, governments often embark on a Take Out The Trash Day. A raft of written ministerial statements will suddenly appear, stuffed full of announcements or data that ministers hope will get buried amid the pile of departmental black bin bags.

Thursday will still inevitably see that mass of information dropped on Westminster, but today the government seemed intent on a different kind of trash talk: soiling its own public health policy with yet more muddied messaging.

In the apparent absence of a coherent pandemic plan for the third wave, both ministers and No.10 fuelled the suspicion that they are simply making things up as they go along. The day after ‘Freedom Day’ felt like free jazz day, with different bits of government riffing and soloing discordantly.

Business minister Paul Scully kicked things off by suggesting the public could make their own “informed decisions” about isolation after being pinged by the Covid app, adding it was ultimately “up to individuals and employers”. Within minutes, No.10 had a not so gentle slapdown, stressing it was “crucial” people isolated when told to by the app. 

It’s worth saying that Scully was absolutely correct that there is no legal requirement to obey the ping, and it’s only if you’re directly contacted by Test and Trace that you need to stay at home. But his natural attempt to stress the needs of business contrasted with Downing Street’s emphasis on the needs of the healthcare system.

Unfortunately, No10 added to the air of confusion by failing to come up with clarity on exactly which ‘critical workers’ would be allowed an exemption from isolation. There will not be any list of individual sectors that qualify, because “we’re not seeking to draw lines specifically around who or who is not exempt”, the PM’s spokesman said. That sounded less gov.uk than confused.com.

Worse still, it appears there will be a fantastically bureaucratic system whereby individual firms have to apply to individual Whitehall departments to seek exemptions for individual staff (though even that is unclear, as the spokesman later talked of “groups of individuals in specific sectors”). 

Unlike the clear definitions used last year for exemptions for overseas travel in the first wave, there is no definition at all. And in what appears to be a form of state planning beloved of Soviet East Germany, civil servants will use a ‘case by case’ approach, with no clue so far as to how long each application will take. No wonder business has said the plan is “unworkable”. 

No.10 is hoping to launch some fresh public health messaging later this week, but I don’t envy them. Instead of ‘Hands, Face, Space’, it seems we now have ‘Plans: Case By Case’.

The sense of chaos was underlined with new figures showing a million schoolchildren were sent home to isolate in England in the past week. The numbers of under-5s in nurseries affected is high too, with all the knock-on effect on working parents. Some 10% of parliament’s armed police officers have been pinged, highlighting the scale of this third wave caseload.

Another alarm bell ringing is the Guardian’s revelation that Border Force staff are so overwhelmed that they have been told they need no longer check negative test or passenger locator forms for airport arrivals from amber list countries. I suspect Keir Starmer may want to add that to his PMQs list on Wednesday. While Channel crossings of migrants alarms ministers, the Covid crossings at airports could end up much more concerning. 

In one early ‘Take Out The Trash’ move, the DWP slipped out its response to a consultation on statutory sick pay tonight and was swiftly accused of reneging on its promise to reform it. Citing the pandemic, the department said now “was not the right time to introduce changes to the rate of SSP or its eligibility criteria”. With increasing numbers asked to isolate, fear of losing income makes this a very live issue again.

As if all that were not enough, there’s new Tory unease at the idea of U-turns on both Covid passports and jacking up national insurance to pay for social care (neither of which may get a Commons majority). They may well ask whether 2019 manifesto pledges being taken out with the trash too. 

Despite the backbench morale boost of an expected 3% pay rise for NHS staff, in some ways it’s probably a good thing Boris Johnson will not be physically present for his end-of-term session at the despatch box, or at the 1922 Committee. With Tory backbenchers, as with Covid, remote control is often no control at all. 

Still, Dominic Cummings could once again ride to the PM’s rescue, though this time not exactly as he intended. Tory MPs’ sheer loathing of the former adviser has gone off the scale after he told the BBC he discussed a ‘coup’ to oust Johnson within days of his 2019 election.

There could be no better way of getting backbenchers to back their leader.  But if the PM continues to upset his troops by breaking his word, they may even start to think Cummings has a point. The right messaging matters to your own party as well as the public.

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Why Is Boris Johnson Singling Out Nightclubs For A Covid Crackdown?

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Alberto PezzaliPA

Boris Johnson

Does Boris Johnson think the way through the third Covid wave is through more injections, more infections or both? Well, on the basis of his latest Downing Street press briefing, you could be forgiven for thinking all three options are very much alive and jostling for attention in the PM’s brain.

As he dialled in for the first time from Chequers for the event, he looked as remote from clear decision making as he was from the £2.6m briefing room itself.

After days of appearing to turn his public health policy into a giant shrug of the shoulders (“meh, a big wave was gonna happen sometime so why not now?”), the PM had one big, bold new announcement designed to show he wasn’t a let-it-rip, laissez faire leader after all.

Yes, from the end of September, nightclubs and other venues with large gatherings will be forced to turn away people who have not been double jabbed. But the very fact this mandatory measure was being delayed for more than eight weeks itself caused more confusion.

One one reading, this an extra incentive to young people to get double jabbed (turning Ibiza amber last week felt similar) so they can enjoy freedoms. Yet on another reading, it was actually an invitation to the under-30s to cram in as much clubbing as they can now, in turn spreading the virus and building “natural immunity” as well as vaccine immunity.

There’s certainly the whiff of incoherence about the PM’s policy making right now. Asked by The Sun to rule out needing to “produce papers” for a pint, he said “I certainly don’t want to see passports for pubs”. Yet within the same breath he added that in enclosed crowded places with close social contact (yes, that sounds like quite a few pubs) “we reserve the right to do what is necessary to protect the public”.

Similarly, vaccinations will be allowed for 12 to 16 year-olds if they or their parents are vulnerable, but not if (for example) their teachers are. And on the whole idea of compulsion, the government has already crossed the rubicon of forcing care staff to get the jab, while it only edges towards the idea for other settings.

On the very day that almost all restrictions were lifted in England, the requirements on travel were in some cases more draconian (as with arrivals from France). Double jabbed ‘critical workers’ will be allowed exemptions from having to isolate, with a negative PCR followed by daily testing. Yet a similar belt-and-braces regime was not employed for the “events research programme” for Wimbledon or Wembley finals.

As for mask-wearing, while the PM must be pleased Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham are making it a condition of travel, there’s no real consistency. The Department of Transport’s permanent secretary Bernadette Kelly suggested people travelling from England to Scotland would have to put their masks on, just as people arriving on a train in London would need one for the Tube. Well, spoiler alert: they’re not. 

I travelled by train to and from the capital on Monday, and there was a marked increase in non-mask wearing. Way back in spring 2020, before the first lockdown, Chris Whitty said the pandemic would bring out extraordinary “acts of altruism”, but it seems the 30% (in recent polls) who won’t wear face coverings now have altruism fatigue. 

And those numbers may grow as others will ask themselves why they should bother if others aren’t. As Prof Graham Medley pointed out last week, there’s literally no point in having a mask-wearing regime where a substantial chunk of the population rejects it. Even when mask wearing was a legal requirement, transport and supermarket staff almost never enforced it, so that’s hardly going to happen now.

In some ways, mask-wearing and even working from home are beside the point, though. What really suppresses a Covid case curve is a curb on people meeting indoors. When I asked Jonathan Van-Tam today what measures he’d reintroduce if the NHS was at risk again, he said “close contact indoors” would be his target. The public may be baffled by mixed messaging but it seems the only language the virus understands is a lockdown of one kind or another.

Johnson’s Covid confusion – over whether he wants to offer carrots or sticks, whether he want compulsion or vigorously opposes it, whether pubs are the Englishman’s last liberty or even they are subject to ‘pint passports’ – seems as endemic now as the virus itself. On the one hand the PM backs isolation by App ‘ping’ to restrict the spread of Covid, yet on the other hand he seems resigned to the spread itself.

The best reason for the July 19 unlockdown’s timing is clearly the looming school holiday firebreak. And we had better hope that Sir Patrick Vallance was right when he said August should see a plateauing or even cases “coming down by September”. But it would help if the PM made up his mind about whether he wants those infections, injections or both.

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The PM Predicted The Case Curve, But Will He Carry The Can For July’s Covid Chaos?

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Predictions in politics are a dangerous game, as everyone has hopefully learned in recent years. But predictions in pandemics can be uncannily accurate, and today’s latest figures on the number of Covid cases in the UK are bang in line with forecasts.

The 51,870 cases recorded on Friday bear out Boris Johnson’s own sombre warning just under two weeks ago. “We are seeing cases rise fairly rapidly,” he told us. “There could be 50,000 cases detected per day by the 19th.”

Of course our fantastic vaccine rollout means the key chart to watch is the number of hospitalisations. But the number of infections (cases) is now close to outstripping the number of injections (jabs). And while hospitalisations are nowhere near the levels of January, they are still very concerning. 

On Thursday, Chris Whitty said those hospital admissions were doubling every three weeks and could hit “scary numbers” soon. Well, as self-styled ‘Covid centrist’ maths prof Oliver Johnson points out, we are now looking at a doubling of hospitalisations every two weeks. Which is scary indeed.

For some, July 19 is a distraction from the fact that most of the damage was done several weeks ago. It’s arguable that if the borders had been closed earlier to India, the UK would have bought time to get to mid-September with every adult double jabbed and case still low. Labour has yet to convince the public of that so far.

The key thing is that Whitty and chief scientist Patrick Vallance have given their blessing to the Monday’s unlocking, albeit with the need for strong warnings for the public not to ditch masks or working from home. Moreover, NHS England’s medical director Stephen Powis recently gave the PM a dose of political inoculation by saying the NHS could cope even with this third wave.

It’s the sheer number of forced isolations from the NHS App that is really causing a headache for No.10. With soaring numbers of schoolchildren, factory and health workers ordered to quarantine, the trigger appy virus is disrupting the economy and education. 

The school holidays offer some respite but with cases and isolation on track to keep soaring, even summer breaks within the UK will be cancelled. Overseas trips look iffy too. It all went Pete Tong for young people banking on a Balearic beat this week, as Majorca and other islands were put back on the government’s amber list.

Tonight’s news that double-vaccinated British travellers returning from France will still face a 10-day quarantine from Monday will add to the gloom.

The armed forces are among the latest casualties, with 5,200 personnel “pinged”. But most importantly of all, some hospitals are now on their knees because of Covid admissions but because of NHS staff (most of whom were double jabbed ages ago) told to isolate after contacts with others. 

Although there has been talk about exempting staff if patient care is at risk, no hospitals have been sent explicit guidance on those lines. The Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine today urged an exemption, but their sense of urgency is so far not matched by any government announcement.

Lots of people would like to bring forward the August 16 date when double-jabbed people can avoid self-isolation if they test negative. Yet it’s worth remembering that the very reason that date was pencilled in was because of fears of a lack of PCR tests to cope. That fear was made real this week as many areas simply ran out.

Test and Trace’s lack of capacity, given the many billions spent on it, could end up being the real cause of a ruined summer, not just for the double jabbed but also those who end up with long covid or worse. Commons science and tech committee chairman Greg Clark tells me on this week’s Week In Westminster (aired on Saturday) that the latest blunder is unacceptable. 

With Dido Harding no longer around to blame, will ministers start pointing the finger at her replacement Jenny Harries? Or will they perhaps take on some of the responsibility themselves?

With some MPs and staff pinged in recent days (the Press Gallery too, my own office was officially ‘closed’ with Covid today), SW1 is not immune from the “pingdemic” either. Given all the disruption, it will look rather odd next week if MPs cram into the Commons chamber hugger mugger, simply to give Boris Johnson a rousing send-off at the last PMQs before recess. 

The current disruption was not just predictable, but predicted. That doesn’t make it any less painful politically, even with the backing of the scientists. Claiming the mantle of Captain Foresight may therefore backfire on the PM, if the public abandons the forgiving mood it has held to date.

All it takes is for one minister to blurt out that a certain number of long Covid cases or even deaths were ‘a price worth paying’ for wider immunity, and it could be a cruel, cruel summer indeed.

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Will Boris Johnson Ever Admit That ‘Levelling Up’ Is A Soundbite In Search A Policy?

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Last year, a former minister confided to me that when he road-tested Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” catchphrase among his constituents, one voter replied with the immortal words: “You mean the potholes?”

So perhaps it was fitting that when the PM tried to explain the concept, his speech was as rutted and cratered as a Mexican ringroad. Full of policy holes and bumpy, meandering stretches, Johnson’s address to the bewildered audience in Coventry was a journey without a destination.

Of course, one very simple interpretation of levelling up is the idea of spending more cash in areas outside London. One of Dominic Cummings’ main achievements in his time in office was persuading the Treasury to rewrite the so-called ‘green book rules’ to allow investment in less affluent places.

The old idea that “investment should always follow success” was indeed ridiculed by the PM as he vowed to tackle towns and cities in decline. But the most notable Cummings influence on display on Thursday was the sheer stream-of-consciousness verbiage deployed. At 4,272 words, the speech made a Cummings blog look the acme of brevity.

In a genuine service to the nation, the Downing Street website published what it described as the “transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered”. Listening to it was one thing, seeing it written down in black and white confirmed its long and winding mode. One sentence lasted a full 210 words, and felt longer than the sentence hardened criminals get for armed robbery.

The word blizzard, which whooshed or lulled according to the PM’s mood, seemed designed to bury the fact that there was not a single new definition of what is meant to be the defining policy of his premiership. As for hard cash, the only fresh money was £50m so that “ultimately” (key word that) no one will be more than 15 minutes from a football pitch.

Former No.10 adviser Tim Montgomerie put his finger on the problem earlier this year when he revealed that post-election conversations about levelling up were “vacuous” because no one could “convert a soundbite that tested well in focus groups into something real”. When pressed on Thursday, Johnson admitted he so far only had “the skeleton of what to do”. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, indeed.

And whenever Johnson has little to say, the gags are always a giveaway. One section of the speech about Heinz investing in Wigan seemed exclusively inserted to tee up a joke about “the magic sauce – the ketchup of catch-up”. Yet it was a punchline in place of a policy, because that key ingredient of levelling up turned out to be “leadership”.

And in true Johnsonian fashion, the key test wasn’t of his own leadership but that of local politicians. They would determine the success of his flagship idea and it was their job to really define levelling up through their actions, he suggested. Reheating old plans to give county councils “metro mayors” like those in big cities, it was devolution but not as you know it.

Featuring another shot in the culture war (“loony left” councils would not get more powers), it felt like an olive branch to southern Tories worried about planning reforms, with the promise of becoming shire versions of Andy Burnham or Sadiq Khan.

He didn’t sound like he was backing down on housing zones, but instead telling the Blue Wall “if you can’t beat em, join em”. The catch was that No.10 would still hold all the cards and decide what made a deserving case.

The fundamental problem with all of the mayoral innovations to date has been their dependence on London for funds, and a very limited ability to raise funds themselves. That was underlined when Johnson joked that even Tory mayor for the West Midlands, Andy Street, couldn’t “extort massive cheques” from the Treasury at will.

We were promised a White Paper on levelling up later this year, but it appeared that the PM wants local politicians to really do the heavy lifting. Just as he has outsourced public health policy on Covid through the mantra of “personal responsibility”, he felt like he was devolving outside government the future blame for any fudge or failure of levelling up.

He may prove the doubters wrong with some detailed, coherent and costed plans later this year. But if progress is slow and unmeasurable, it is likely to be someone else’s fault.

And the way the PM disowned any role in Conservative austerity that some feel has really crippled the regions over the past decade, the way he talked of his “outrage” that life expectancy was inexplicably higher in Hampshire than in Blackpool, suggests someone determined to say “it wasn’t me”.

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Can Boris Johnson Bridge The Gap Between The Tories And The England Team?

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It was Wednesday, just after noon and, in an imposing building overlooking the Thames in Westminster, the questions on football and racism were coming thick and fast.

But the venue was not the House of Commons and the speaker was not the prime minister. In the fortified bowels of MI5’s Thames House HQ, director general (aka the ‘DG’) Ken McCallum was answering queries from the media, including yours truly.

Whereas PMQs thrives off the bearpit jeers and cheers, DGQs is an altogether more sober affair, befitting its annual rather than weekly schedule. Yet when McCallum was asked about the problems of online extremism and the impact on young black men in the national team, he sounded more eloquent than many politicians.

At almost exactly the same moment that Boris Johnson was squirming under Keir Starmer’s prosecutorial glare, the domestic spymaster was unambiguously praising the England football team for their conduct over the past few weeks.

And he explicitly compared his own behind-the-scenes team with the one that performed on Europe’s biggest stage last weekend. “As I watched the penalty shootout on Sunday night,” he said, “I was very aware that I’ve got experience, MI5 has got experience, of watching capable, brave young people of all races, giving their all for their country.”

He went on to say that racism was strongly associated with extreme right wing terror groups whose activity has in recent years become a daily, significant part of his agency’s work. And he clearly meant it when he declared: “I’m proud of many of the people in MI5 today, working to deal with the terrorist threat that is fuelled in important ways by toxic racism”.

Even the most determined culture warrior would find it difficult to argue that McCallum, the youngest DG in the agency’s history, is some kind of “woke” Marxist. The Security Service, just like the England football team, benefits from diversity in a very practical sense as well as a symbolic sense. Looking like the nation it serves is a necessity, not ‘PC gone mad’.

But the contrast between the ease with which McCallum spoke about race, and the discomfort of the PM on the same topic just a few hundred yards away, could not have been more stark.

As Starmer marshalled the evidence of senior ministers’ mixed messaging on booing players who ‘take the knee’, Johnson could tell his usual “vaccines-vaccillation-remoaner” distraction technique wouldn’t work.

With Priti Patel having said booing the team was “a choice”, with No10 having said the PM “fully respects” the right of those booing to “make their feelings known”, even the later U-turn was too late to use as a defence. The real problem was that Johnson resembled the wonky trolley of Dominic Cummings’ image.

Drawing a culture war dividing line only works if you don’t keep hopscotching over it yourself. Put another way, “wedge” issues (as the Americans call them) are a bit pointless if they end up giving the instigator a political wedgie (as we British would call it). If they noticed at all, the minority of voters who think booing is ok may have been simply been confused by the PM’s shifting stance.

He did have one concrete policy announcement in his back pocket, namely extending football ground banning orders to be triggered by online as well as offline offences. Yet even that welcome development was obscured by the bigger row over the gulf between the Tory party and the England team.

And when a Tory MP heckled that footballer Tyrone Mings was a “Labour party member” they managed to undermine rather than help the PM’s case (“I do not want to engage in a political culture war of any kind”). Aside from anything else, failing to praise working class black and white kids who go on to become self-made millionaires sounds a strangely un-Tory thing to do.

With key ministers attacking footballers for “gesture politics”, why would any player want to take part in the real gesture politics of visiting No.10 in future? If the whole booing issue and taking the knee issue had not been weaponised by some ministers, Johnson could even have said his own cabinet team mirrored the diversity of the England team and was stronger as a result.

Perhaps the most revealing remark of the week however came not in PMQs but in Tory backbencher Natalie Elphicke’s private message to colleagues: “They lost – would it be ungenerous to suggest Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics.”

Note that Elphicke didn’t say “we lost”, she said “they lost”. Despite her subsequent apology, that word “they” was possibly as damaging to the Tory brand as any explicit racist epithet could have been. It exposed a gap between some in her party and the national team in a brutal fashion, just when any normal politician would want to celebrate their achievement.

It’s that gap, which is implicitly also a gap between a party and the public, that worries some Conservatives dismayed by the culture war rhetoric. It’s also why any future visit to No.10 of the England team (to promote our World Cup bid, for example) is now freighted with tension. Maybe MI5 down the road could act as a neutral venue.

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Is Boris Johnson’s Half-Nelson Approach To Covid A Triumph Of Hope Over Expectation?

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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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After Keir Starmer’s Batley Bounceback, Labour Is Talking About Brexit Again

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Emily Thornberry

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It’s taken quite a while, but Labour is talking about Brexit again. In her first big intervention as shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves started the week by unveiling a new ‘Made in Britain’ policy under which the party would change procurement rules to boost home-grown firms.

As she set out details of how the plan would secure supply chains by “reshoring jobs” as the US and French have done, Reeves uttered the B-word. “It’s about sorting out some of the problems with our Brexit deal that the government signed last year,” she told me on TimesRadio.

That deal had “short-changed our creative industries, our professional services and our farming and food businesses. where we have seen a 47% drop in exports to the EU”, she added. New blue passports being made in France, just one UK firm winning HS2 contracts, overseas firms supplying PPE in the pandemic, all are examples of the government’s failures, she said.

For Labour the political benefits of this new policy are obvious. This week’s latest GDP figures showed that while professional services and construction were picking up again, manufacturing and farming were not. The former are concentrated in London and the south east, the latter are crucial in the ‘Red Wall’ seats (many of which have a mix of urban and rural) in the north and midlands.

And while Reeves is careful not to suggest Labour would reverse Brexit, she is determined to highlight the flaws in the Johnson deal. By focusing on how to make, sell and buy more British products, she has followed through on her very first Commons appearance in her new role. Add in examples of Labour metro mayors plugging the idea this week and you can see it’s no one-off strategy.

Labour’s win in Batley and Spen seems to have helped fuel this attempt to get on the front foot. And further proof of a new-found confidence on the issue comes in our latest Commons People podcast with Emily Thornberry. The shadow international trade secretary told us: “Six months out from the deal we can now start saying: ‘when you say this is a teething problem it obviously isn’t’,” 

Liz Truss was like the “secretary of state for a doughnut”, because she focused on all trade apart from the great glaring hold of trade with the EU, Thornberry said. “She will take no responsibility for patching the deal that we really need, which is the biggest trade deal, which is the trade deal with the EU, which has great glaring holes…We need to repair this really thin deal. It’s like gossamer.” 

Strong stuff, but Thornberry is clearly unafraid of taking the fight to her opposite number. In the podcast, she says Truss has become “a Margaret Thatcher tribute act”. And she reveals the gossip in the Department of International Trade is that Truss has a habit of writing on documents in her ministerial red box: “Too long, didn’t read”.

Thornberry also underscored Labour’s tougher lines on China, revealing she had been in talks with Taiwan’s UK representative today and calling for British firms to reveal if they use products made by Uighurs. This follows Lisa Nandy’s call earlier this week for the UK to stage a political, but not sporting, boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

The ‘Made in Britain’ policy itself has echoes of Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers”, without using that exact phrase. I remember David Cameron was so outraged by the slogan he once said in PMQs it was “borrowed off the National Front”. And in a reminder of how politics has come since, Cameron even complained the policy would contravene EU free movement rules.

Yet focusing on British manufacturing and procurement perhaps also shows that Labour is also getting more comfortable with the idea of “progressive patriotism”, a phrase that Rebecca Long-Bailey road-tested in the leadership campaign but quickly backed away from.

Gareth Southgate’s calm, inclusive leadership of the England football team has embodied that concept better than most politicians (particularly Tory backbencher Lee Anderson, who will amazingly boycott England’s big game this weekend because the team continues to take the knee).

As Boris Johnson wraps himself in bunting, while curiously wearing his England top under a suit jacket, Labour is edging its way into criticising his skinny trade deal with the EU. I wonder if Keir Starmer will go the whole way and promise at the next election “a better Brexit”?

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