Boris’s Covid strategy could lead to stricter lockdowns

Boris Johnson will hold a press conference later this afternoon to discuss the new local restrictions — and how they’ll work. Even if he wanted to do a national circuit-breaker lockdown it is now almost politically impossible for him to do so given that Keir Starmer has now called for it, I say in the Times today. One cabinet minister who knows the Tory parliamentary party better than most warns: ‘If they do it after all this, they’ll be in absolutely the worst possible place.’

Rejecting the idea of what would, in effect, be a second national lockdown has both buoyed Johnson and begun to reduce the distance between him and his parliamentary party. Arguing against shutting pubs and restaurants in areas with low Covid rates fits with his natural Merrie England conservatism, which has been forced into abeyance by the crisis.