Boris Johnson is becoming a risk to his own Covid rules

‘It feels like a tipping point. Trust in Boris is collapsing. It could be fatal’. So spoke a senior Tory, who hitherto has been a great cheerleader for the Prime Minister. Sunday night’s address to the nation by Boris Johnson won’t, he says, change the perception of Tory MPs that his recent performance has been wholly inadequate. That feeling may in fact be reinforced by Johnson’s choice of simply speaking sombrely down the barrel of a camera lens rather than holding a press conference and taking questions.

The point is that — by design — there was no media challenge after Boris Johnson broadcast, in which he said he wants all adults to have a booster, and that’s he is accelerating the rate of vaccination to a record-breaking one million jabs per day. With the official threat level from Covid-19 nudged up from three to four, because of the rapid rate at which Omicron is surging, there would have been a case for interrogating the usual troika of Johnson, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, to increase public understanding.