It is outrageous, but it is true. The health of the nation is now a pawn in Boris Johnson ’s sordid struggle to stay in power.
He has signalled a premature end to all social restrictions that have kept coronavirus at bay for two years.
It will be a free-for-all by the end of the month, because he needs the support of hard-line Tory MPs to avert a vote of no confidence in his prime ministership.
He sent them away for a 10-day holiday with a promise to abandon Covid curbs when they return to Westminster.
This is a naked bid to head off the growing threat to his job from the Partygate scandal. He seeks to quell discontent among his own MPs with the “red meat” of Covid climbdown.
There is scant scientific evidence for his squalid manoeuvre. On the contrary, Omicron may be milder than Delta, but it isn’t mild and it’s still rampant.
The vaccination campaign is faltering.
Take my postcode of Sutton and Cross Hills: the rate of infection is still high, at 779 per 100,000. There have been three deaths in our local hospital, where admissions are running at eight daily.
Nationally, 1,544 people died in the last week for which figures are available.
Seventy-one per cent of people in the Craven district have been triple-jabbed, but the latest daily figures for new first and second jabs were zero, and only five for the booster.
The Prime Minister is typically over-confident, but there was no Number 10 press conference to test his bravado.
No Professor Sir Chris Whitty to give his backing to a premature, risky change of strategy. No reassuring statistics to support his blithe claim that the country is returning to normality.
Johnson’s so-called Freedom Day has less to do with learning to live with coronavirus, and more to do with learning to live with Bojo.
Russia toys with Truss
Modelling herself on Iron Lady Thatcher, fur-hatted Liz Truss visited Moscow yesterday to give Vladimir Putin a thick ear. Our Foreign Secretary didn’t meet the dictator of all the Russias, of course, not even at the end of a table longer than a Concorde runway.
Her date was with granite-hewn Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov, whose smile is as chilly as Siberia’s Lake Baikal.
There wasn’t much to say.
Undiplomatically, MsTruss had already trumpeted her bellicose views about the Russian threat to Ukraine.
Sexist Lavrov looked icily polite, but I bet he was thinking: “Why don’t you go home and play with your dolls?”
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Rail bosses tried to close Ribblehead Viaduct, whose 24 stone arches march majestically 104ft above the Pennines.
But the iconic structure still stands after almost a century and a half. I’m disappointed that it ranks only 27th out of the top 30 must-see sights of Britain.
I travel over it quite often, but it’s best viewed from below. From the train you see nothing, except the remains of shanty towns where 2,300 navvies lived – and more than a hundred died during five years of construction.
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Disillusioned dog owners (sorry Siobhan) are forsaking the name Boris for their pets. In the months after his landslide election victory, 313 puppies were christened with Johnson’s first name. That number fell to 123 last year. Very wise. Surely, it’s animal cruelty to give a dog a bad name?
