Raab stands in for Boris – but he can’t take the biggest decision of all

Dominic Raab is a lawyer, not a doctor, by temperament as well as training. He is not a politician who talks about his feelings much. This made it all the more striking to hear him talking about Boris Johnson as a ‘friend’, and his hopes for his recovery. The reassuring news is that Boris Johnson’s condition is stable and he hasn’t required a ventilator.

Understandably, Raab faced a barrage of questions about how him deputising for Boris Johnson will actually work. Raab emphasised Cabinet collective responsibility and how they were implementing the plans that Boris Johnson had already set out. 

But on the biggest policy question — how and when to ease the lockdown — there isn’t yet a settled government policy. How to ease off the lockdown is going to be one of the biggest calls that any PM could make.