Boris Johnson is at odds with his parliamentary party on the biggest issue of the day. Not Brexit – where the vast majority of Tory MPs continue to back his hardball approach – but Covid.
No. 10’s approach, as I say in the magazine this week , now is one of pre-emption. They want to clamp down on the virus long before it has a chance to get out of control. Tory MPs, though, still favour a policy of containment: broadly, they believe that the government should stick to the approach that guided the easing of the lockdown, trying to keep the virus within the capacity of the health service to deal with it.
Right now, Tory MPs who don’t like the direction of the policy can’t do much more than grumble. But the emergency powers that the government have been using need to be renewed at the end of this month.
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