Monday’s Cabinet meeting held over Zoom was a fraught affair by the sounds of it.
Michael Gove and Sajid Javid were reportedly the leading voices calling for more restrictions on household mixing and on the hospitality sector, while the likes of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss argued that the data did not warrant such a draconian and retrograde step.
The Prime Minister seems to have been swaying somewhere in the middle. In the end it was agreed that no new restrictions would be imposed that day but the data would be constantly analysed with a view to imposing restrictions swiftly and before Christmas if alarming trends were picked up on the burden Omicron was placing on the NHS.
No doubt all who took part were keenly aware of the huge responsibilities that come with making such decisions, imagining that they held the fate of the nation in their hands. Well, as Evelyn Waugh might have put it: up to a point Lord Copper.
From now on guidance and persuasion must be the tools deployed to inhibit the disease rather than the prospect of a policeman’s knock on the door
That’s because much of the British public has simply moved on in this debate.
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