Boris’s real failure wasn’t breaking lockdown

Boris Johnson made a big error, alright. But it wasn’t walking into a room where his wife had prepared him a surprise birthday cake. It was in overriding his liberal instincts and imposing highly prescriptive lockdown rules in the first place. If, in March 2020, he had stood up to advisers and said that no, it was not the business of the state to micromanage people’s lives – had he banned large gatherings, closed crowded pubs but left private meetings to our sense of personal responsibility – then he would not be in the position he is today.

Moreover, many Britons would not have died alone or succumbed to crippling loneliness. As he has admitted, rather too late, many lockdown rules were simply inhumane. Nor were they backed up by much scientific evidence. As has become increasingly obvious, Covid does not spread well out of doors, and yet for months we were banned from meeting up with friends and relatives in the open air, and even pursued by police drones for taking their dogs on a walk in the wide-open spaces of the Peak District.