This lockdown comes at a high political cost

Keir Starmer has his first attack line of the next general election campaign. He will say that England’s second lockdown was longer than it needed to be because the Prime Minister didn’t act when he had the chance. If Boris Johnson had listened to the scientists, Labour will say, we’d have had a two week ‘circuit-breaker’ and controlled the virus. As things stand, a man who set his face against lockdown was then forced to adopt one — making it longer, more painful and costing far more jobs.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a clear dividing line: Labour wanted national measures; the Tories wanted regional ones. So Starmer can now claim to have won the argument. This has depressed Tory MPs. They resent the fact that they were busy piling into Starmer for wanting to, in Johnson’s own words, ‘turn the lights out’ — only to find themselves being asked to vote for policies which do just that.