A few sparky initiatives ...then a giant wet blanket
NO whizz. No bang, No fizz or pop. The Prime Minister’s Sunday night sermon was a pyrotechnic-free affair. What many had hoped would be a road map out of the lockdown offered a few tasty morsels of hope, but for the main part served up much of the same old dispiriting gloop.
Put away the party Pimm’s, people. We’ve got a while of this to go yet.
The country had been through the mangle during these past two months of lockdown, the PM acknowledged. Social distancing, our loss of basic freedoms.
He could have added all those dreary Downing Street briefings we’ve had to put up with to that list of daily horrors.
Our setting was an unnamed room in No10. The PM sat behind a desk, twiddling his thumbs. Every now and then, he threw little rabbit punches toward the camera for emphasis.
Boris insisted the lockdown had come at a ‘colossal cost to our way of life’ which could be seen among ‘the shuttered shops and abandoned businesses and darkened pubs and restaurants’.
There was a hollow, melancholic tone to his voice as he conjured up this ghostly image. However, having sacrificed so much already, he insisted ‘it would be madness now to throw away that achievement by allowing a second spike’. That said, he had a strategy to address some of our fears. ‘A shape of a plan’ was how he described it. He announced a new ‘DefCon’-style [Defence Readiness Condition] system to measure the threat of coronavirus where ‘one’ would mark its eradication. Currently, we remain at ‘four’ but are in the process of moving to ‘three’.
On top of that, he promised increased testing and more vigilant plans to track the disease.
After this brief flurry of sparky initiatives, he produced the giant wet blanket. ‘No, this is not the time simply to end the lockdown this week,’ he announced. ‘Instead we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures’. These modifications turned out to be measly-sized portions. Gristly scraps at best. From Wednesday, we were told, people will be able to spend unlimited amounts of time out
doors for exercise. They could sunbathe in the park. They could play sport, albeit only with members of their own household.
BETTEr than nothing. Though anyone who’s ventured out in London’s royal Parks over the past fortnight will know most people are now doing this anyway. This was the first step of the PM’s plan. If the rate of infections could be kept down then he hoped to progress to step two in June by allowing schools to return.
Step three would possibly come in July when ‘some of the hospitality industry’ would be allowed to resume trading. Notice that crucial ‘some’. I suspect that means only those which have outdoor spaces for people to gather. Caution peppered every utterance. ‘I must stress again that all of this is conditional – it all depends on a series of big ifs,’ Boris said, repeating his belief that, although we had passed the peak of infection, coming down the mountain was far more perilous. ‘If there are outbreaks, if there are problems, we will not hesitate to put on the brakes,’ he stressed.
He braced himself to end on a flourish. ‘We will come back from this devilish illness,’ he said, jabbing his jaw outwards confrontationally. He hoped that, despite everything, the country would become ‘more resilient, more innovative, more economically dynamic, but also more generous and more sharing’. He signed off by reiterating the Government’s woolly new slogan – ‘Stay alert. Control the virus.
Save lives’ – which had caused confusion throughout most of the day. No one was quite sure what ‘stay alert’ meant.
Earlier, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon gleefully announced that she would be ignoring the Government and continuing to advise Scots to remain indoors.
So, not the cheeriest end to the bank holiday weekend. It is increasingly clear, should we ever return to our normal state of affairs, it will come more drip by drip than a steady gush. And at this rate it’s going to be a long old summer.