A more humble Boris

It is often said that Boris Johnson gets himself into trouble because he has the attention span of a flea and is too lazy to master his brief, leaving him relying on charm and seat-of-the-pants decision-making to get out of a hole.

Whether there is any truth in this, I don’t know, because I’ve heard precisely the opposite from those who worked with him as Mayor of London. But what this lockdown has revealed about the Prime Minister’s psyche is an addictive streak: an addiction to giving us deadlines – deadlines which he was not able to meet.

Thus, during the first lockdown, the PM said the virus should be over in three months, then his forecast was for the end of the summer. Last autumn, he said the worst should be over by Christmas and then last week, that the lockdown would hopefully be lifted by Good Friday.

To my mind, this spirit of optimism – Boosterism if you like – is one of the more positive sides of his character. It’s his optimism – and reluctance to go for Asian-style authoritarianism – that held him back from locking down the country last February or putting us under house arrest at Christmas.

But today Johnson, while on a visit to some of the worst-hit flooded areas in south Manchester, switched gear. He finally admitted that this latest variant of the virus is spreading so “very fast” that it is too early to say if the restrictions will be lifted by the end of the spring, or even summer.

And this time Johnson was more realistic about giving any future deadline, saying that “we’ll look at how we’re doing” once the four priority groups have been vaccinated by mid-February.

Such candour is a better and more honest approach and I suspect the public will appreciate that he is being open with them, rather than giving them false hope.

Enduring lockdown is bad enough without having your expectations – and the date of an exit – constantly dashed. And it’s one of the many reasons that everyone you talk to says this lockdown is so much harder to bear.

Far better to buckle down and get on with life as best we can while the vaccination roll-out rolls on: close to five million people have now received their first dose, with 363,508 first vaccinations given yesterday, the highest daily figure to date.

There is other sunny news: from this week there is an extra hour of daylight every day, and each month from now on, another extra hour a day.

What did Trump’s letter say?

Joe Biden signed 17 new executive orders on his first day in the White House, more than any other US president in history.

The new President got to work straight away with executive actions on a range of issues ranging from making masks mandatory on federal property to reversing some of the decisions on immigration made by his predecessor, ex-President Trump. He tore up many of Trump’s measures on the environment – rejoining the Paris Climate Accord – the US census and immigration.

Biden also made changes to the US response to Covid-19, hoping to ease the financial strain on those affected by the pandemic. He set in motion new rules on racial injustice which will need Congressional legislation, calling on federal agencies to ‘root out economic and racial injustice.

Biden is undoing several of Trump’s anti-immigration policies by refocusing deportation efforts on those undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes in the US.

What Biden didn’t reveal though – but what we really want to know – is what Trump said in the traditional letter that an outgoing president writes to his successor.

Biden of course wouldn’t give the game away although he did say he would check with Trump that he can publish the contents. But he did say the letter was generous. One of the wittier attempts at guessing the letter’s contents doing the rounds on Twitter was: “Joe, you know I won.”

What next? 

Do take a look at Reaction tomorrow to see what the world might look like when we emerge from the Covid nightmare and start living as normally as we can. Douglas McWilliams writes for us on the shape we can expect the world economy to take – and how the UK will be OK. Olivia Gavoyannis takes a look at the future of holidays and the travel industry, while Caitlin Allen considers how the cat-and-mouse game between new variants and vaccines will play out.

Maggie Pagano,
Executive Editor