Last night an article by Gordon Rayner in the online edition of the Daily Telegraph assured us that:
Boris Johnson is expected to announce plans for easing the lockdown as early as this week after he returned to Downing Street on Sunday night to take full-time control of the coronavirus crisis.
The Prime Minister will on Monday morning chair his first meeting of the Covid-19 “war cabinet” since he was taken to hospital more than three weeks ago, and is ready to resume his role hosting televised Number 10 press conferences.
I took a dim view of that suggestion on Twitter:
This morning the Prime Minister had returned to Downing Street from his country residence and gave this speech to the nation:
According to The Daily Telegraph’s Twitter feed this morning:
However according to The Independent’s Twitter feed:
Meanwhile according to The Times’ Twitter feed this morning:
Here are some of the Prime Minister’s actual words, transcribed from the recording above:
It follows that this is the moment of opportunity, this is the moment when we can press home our advantage. It is also the moment of maximum risk because I know that there will be many people looking now at our apparent success and beginning to wonder whether now is the time to go easy on those social distancing measures.
I know how hard and how stressful it has been to give up even temporarily those ancient and basic freedoms, not seeing friends, not seeing loved ones, working from home, managing the kids, worrying about your job and your firm.
So let me say directly also to British business, to the shopkeepers, to the entrepreneurs, to the hospitality sector, to everyone on whom our economy depends: I understand your impatience, I share your anxiety. And I know that without our private sector, without the drive and commitment of the wealth creators of this country, there will be no economy to speak of, there will be no cash to pay for our public services, no way of funding our NHS.
And yes I can see the long term consequences of lock down as clearly as anyone. And so yes I entirely share your urgency. It’s the government’s urgency. And yet we must also recognise the risk of a second spike, the risk of losing control of that virus and letting the reproduction rate go back over one, because that would mean not only a new wave of death and disease but also an economic disaster and we would be forced once again to slam on the brakes across the whole country and the whole economy and reimpose restrictions in such a way as to do more and lasting damage.
And so I know it is tough and I want to get this economy moving as fast as I can. But I refuse to throw away all the effort and the sacrifice of the British people and to risk a second major outbreak and huge loss of life and the overwhelming of the NHS. And I ask you to contain your impatience because I believe we are coming now to the end of the first phase of this conflict.
And in spite of all the suffering, we have so nearly succeeded. We defied so many predictions. We did not run out of ventilators or ICU beds. We did not allow our NHS to collapse. And on the contrary we have so far collectively shielded our NHS so that our incredible doctors and nurses and healthcare staff have been able to shield all of us from an outbreak that would have been far worse. And we collectively flattened the peak.
And so when we are sure that this first phase is over and that we are meeting our five tests – deaths falling, NHS protected, rate of infection down, really sorting out the challenges of testing and PPE, avoiding a second peak – then that will be the time to move on to the second phase in which we continue to suppress the disease and keep the reproduction rate, the R rate, down, but begin gradually to refine the economic and social restrictions and one by one to fire up the engines of this vast UK economy.
And in that process difficult judgements will be made and we simply cannot spell out now how fast or slow or even when those changes will be made though clearly the government will be saying much more about this in the coming days.
And I want to serve notice now that these decisions will be taken with the maximum possible transparency. And I want to share all our working and our thinking, my thinking, with you the British people. And of course, we will be relying as ever on the science to inform us, as we have from the beginning, but we will also be reaching out to build the biggest possible consensus, across business, across industry, across all parts of our United Kingdom, across party lines, bringing in opposition parties as far as we possibly can, because I think that is no less than what the British people would expect.
Which version of this Covid-19 “story” do you prefer to believe?