Can Boris's relaunch escape the Leicester lockdown?

Boris Johnson had hoped to use today’s speech in Dudley to draw a line under the past 14 weeks of lockdown and return to his election agenda. However, with the government announcing overnight that Leicester is to go into a local lockdown, the ongoing challenge of coronavirus isn’t far away. The Prime Minister acknowledged that some might think his speech on Britain after Covid ‘premature’ but he said it was not sustainable to ‘simply to be prisoners of this crisis’. Instead, the country must ‘slowly and cautiously’ come out of hibernation.

Reflecting on the crisis, Johnson did not go so far as to say mistakes had been made. Instead, he said he knew ‘there are plenty of things that people say and will say that we got wrong’. He attempted to focus on the positive – pointing to the things he thought the government had got right: the speed that new hospitals had been built, the success of the ventilator challenge (even though they weren’t needed) and UK drug trials.