Will Boris Johnson Come To Regret Making July 19 The Terminus Of His Roadmap?
Youre reading The Waugh Zone, our daily politics briefing. Sign up now to get it by email in the evening. Just when you think youve got it beat, Covid-19 somehow comes back stronger. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger but without the charm, this Terminator of a virus has an Ill be back menace that risks undoing all the hard work of the UKs stunning vaccine rollout. The epic battle between the vaccines and the virus certainly has high stakes. Perhaps thats why Boris Johnson sounded unusually nervous as he announced he would indeed be postponing Freedom Day by another four weeks. Instead of the sunshine of Midsummer Merrie England, there was a blizzard of scary charts of projected hospitalisations. Fluffing his lines, the PM referred to the adults of this company (he meant country) and then wrongly declared the new unlocking date was July 29th (correcting it later to July 19th). Polling shows most of the public are relaxed about a delay, but Johnson is acutely aware that the 24% who are unhappy include several of his own backbenchers, and it showed. Nowhere was this more telling than in his repeated reassurance that the Freedom Day Mk II was the real deal. He was pretty confident that July 19 will be the terminus date (he said terminal date too). June 21 was always a not before date, whereas this was much firmer, he suggested. This was not a defeat for lockdown sceptics, it was a victory, he seemed to imply. That spin may or may not work on Tory MPs, but it could paint the PM into a corner for the first time in months. Ever since he bowed to Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallances plan for a cautious roadmap, he has been able to fall back on their insistence that all four tests have to be met (the new variant test was particularly shrewd) and that data not dates will drive his decisions. But now with talk of terminal and fixed timelines, it feels like dates not data is the new approach. Steve Baker, Mark Harper and Sir Charles Walker, who will probably vote against the delay, have much more concrete evidence of a breach of faith should that July 19 date somehow slip again. Whitty and Vallance gave the PM invaluable backing at the press conference. The chief medical officer in particular pointed out that even without the Indian variant, the very restoration of unrestricted indoor mixing of households that are unrelated was always going to lead to an uptick in cases. He added there had to come a point where fatalities switched from deaths averted to deaths delayed, as with flu. Patrick Vallance even suggested that locking down beyond July 19 would be counter-productive. And he made the case for that date containing the Goldilocks calculation of just how hot or cold to make the roadmap porridge. Giving over-18s their first jab and pushing unlockdown closer to the school holidays certainly added some sugar, as did a lifting of the cap on wedding numbers. Still, for Keir Starmer, the talk of 19 July as a terminal date is an opportunity for a Judgement Day on Johnsons competence. If the vaccination programme cant sufficiently flatten the Delta variant spike, he is sure to step up his own attack line that Johnsons failure to stop flights from India is the real culprit. Already today, the Labour leader hardened his rhetoric to say it was a pathetic border policy that had postponed freedoms. Starmers clear aim is to drive a big wedge between the excellence of the NHS vaccine rollout and the governments wider failures. Its unclear whether it was the PMs desire to keep alive post-Brexit trade talks with Narendra Modi that prompted his inaction, but the suggestion that he recklessly undermined both the NHSs programme and public sacrifices is a toxic one. Todays failure to offer extra financial support to businesses added extra political risk too. Those firms which were hanging on by their fingertips will now face having to pay their share of furlough bills, with no extra income to fund them. Add in the self-employed already upset and an Opposition that was pro-enterprise could make inroads. To oversee one Covid wave is a misfortune, to allow two begins to look like carelessness. But to trigger a third wave, squandering all the good work of your own vaccine success story, could be seen as unforgivable by a public which has to date been incredibly forgiving of its prime minister.