The hope of the vaccine must not disappear due to dithering

BACK to work and back to school. In any normal year that would be the dreary Monday morning reality for most of us. The holiday season over, and a new year already underway. Many lawyers know today as “Divorce day” when thousands of couples – having been forced to spend most of the last two weeks with each other – finally give up the ghost and decide it is time to formally separate. By all accounts our lawyers are expecting this year’s Divorce Day to be less busy than before. But that is not because couples are getting along better than before, but because more of them have decided to split up while living in lockdown during the pandemic. One firm said it has already recorded a rise in enquiries through 2020 of 250% compared with 2019, with a pronounced spike since the pandemic hit the UK in March. That is further proof, if needed, that the coronavirus crisis is changing society forever. Unfortunately the grim reality is that the dawn of a new year is unlikely to release the pressure on family life. Our normal battles with taking more exercise, giving up alcohol, and learning a new skill will be dwarfed by the challenges of the next few weeks. The latest coronavirus infection figures, published yesterday, are more than uncomfortable. For the sixth day in a row more than 50,000 new virus cases were recorded, and another 454 deaths. Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in a television interview yesterday morning and indicated that more stringent restrictions may well be introduced, saying that the tiering system is ‘alas, probably about to get tougher.’

He said: “It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that will be tougher in many parts of the country. I’m fully, fully reconciled to that. There are obviously a range of tougher measures that that we would have to consider.

“I’m not going to speculate now about what they would be, but I’m sure that all our viewers and our listeners will understand what the sort of things... clearly school closures, which we had to do in March is one of those things.”

Any reasonable person will have some sort of sympathy for the unprecedented crisis that Mr Johnson and his Government have been forced to deal with. But now, perhaps more than ever, Johnson and his ministers will need to display decisive and determined leadership. The beginning of the mass vaccination programme gives all of us a glimmer of real hope, but the last thing the country can afford is for the programme to stumble, or even appear to, as a result of more ministerial dithering. The back-to-school issue, which anyone could see coming from the moment children broke up for the Christmas holidays, doesn’t fill one with hope.

Getting a Brexit deal over the line was a considerable achievement for Mr Johnson, but that will quickly be forgotten amid a storm of indecision, conflicting messages, and dithering over schools. Despite the dawn of a new year the UK remains in the grip of a crisis the like of which it has never seen before. The Government must grip it, and ensure that the light of the vaccine continues to be a beacon of hope.