The freedom divide: Why are politicians able to side-step their own rules?

Poor Robert Jenrick. This morning we learnt that, like the rest of the public, the housing secretary (and his department) is not signed up to the exclusive pilot scheme that was set to allow Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to skip quarantine. If Jenrick gets pinged, the rules will apply to him, just as they did to more than 500,000 people who were told by NHS Test and Trace to self-isolate in the first week of July.

Yet Jenrick still had to defend Johnson and Sunak on BBC One’s Andrew Marr show this morning, about an hour before Downing Street U-turned and announced they would self-isolate after all. It was a tough gig. Marr had no end of examples of businesses that are struggling to operate — Ruth Adams’s bathroom company in Bristol, major train operators up and down the country — due to the ‘pingdemic’. ​​Why are they subject to the rules when ministers are not?

Jenrick didn’t have many answers — and the answers he did have only made the situation worse.