When Johnson says we'll turn the tide in 12 weeks, it's just another line for the side of a bus | Marina Hyde
There's something unsettling in seeing the prime minister repurpose his Brexit media strategy for a deadly contagion
Britain. A nation of shopfighters, presided over at a time of mortal peril by a newspaper columnist, who has for three decades moonlighted as his generation's leading liar. Still, as the words clawed into the side of the plague pit probably once read, "We are where we are."
But where, currently, is that? It is a place where, at 5pm every day, the disease-threatened populace is expected to take prophylactic advice from Boris Johnson. From Monday, most British parents will be home-schooling their children. Not Johnson, of course - I imagine he doesn't want to break his own pledge on class sizes. The prime minister keeps saying that the forthcoming test to determine whether you have coronavirus will be "as simple as a pregnancy test", spaffing his sole area of expertise rather early in what is likely to be a long campaign.
Continue reading...