How will Tory backbenchers react to another lockdown?

Boris Johnson is coming under increased pressure from Tory MPs on both sides of the Covid debate today. On the one hand, there is former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt calling for schools and borders to close and a ban on all household mixing straight away in order to prevent the NHS from collapsing. On the other, there is Mark Harper, chair of the influential Covid Recovery Group, who has just issued a call for the government to start relaxing restrictions from February.

The two demands aren’t necessarily mutually-exclusive: the two men just have rather different timescales. Hunt insisted this morning that the restrictions he is calling for ‘will be time-limited to the 12 weeks or so it will take to get the vaccine out to those most vulnerable to Covid – so there is light at the end of the tunnel’.