Boris’s battle
IT is grimly ironic. Just when Britain should be celebrating leading the world out of the Covid nightmare, the man who deserves most credit is fighting for his political life.
Yesterday, all but drowned out by the firestorm over Boris Johnson’s partying, marked a historic moment in our two-year battle against this catastrophe.
Plan B — mandatory masks, vaccine passports and work-from-home edicts — is over. Even self-isolation will end on March 24 or earlier, barring some deadlier new variant, as we finally “live with Covid” like we do flu.
We will be among the first to the exit door, stealing a march on all those economies currently closed and in crisis.
That is no accident. It is largely down to Boris’s decisions, brave ones taken at speed and in defiance of the hysterical outrage of Labour’s lockdown lovers.
For all the bile spewed at him, for all his mistakes, many thousands owe their lives to the urgency with which the PM approved and funded the development and rapid rollout of jabs and boosters.
Many more owe their businesses and jobs to the vast furlough scheme Boris approved — and his courage in reopening our economy last July when clueless opportunists like Keir Starmer branded him “reckless” and “dangerous”.
He kept England open this winter too, rightly judging Omicron milder despite the objections of Sage and the Boris-hating BBC.
Prime Minister Starmer would never have raced ahead with jabs. It would have upset his Brussels friends.
He would have kept us locked down last summer too, hoping to flatten cases, but leading to an NHS-destroying eruption when Omicron later emerged.
It is staggering, then, that judging by his self-satisfied smirks and his lame, scripted jokes in the Commons, Starmer plainly believes ousting Boris and winning power are merely now formalities.
How gleefully Labour celebrated veteran Tory malcontent David Davis calling for Boris’s head. How giddily they welcomed Tory turncoat Christian Wakeford, a brazen chancer who after abusing Labour for years now dons the red rose in panic over his tiny majority.
The party of woke, Brexit-blocking, open-borders Europhiles is the perfect home for a man whose beliefs, like theirs, apparently shift with the breeze.
Boris is in possibly terminal and entirely self-inflicted trouble over Partygate. He has pinned his hopes on the official probe clearing him next week. Rebel MPs may hold off until then.
Pending that, No10 seems paralysed over the gravest cost-of-living crisis in decades when it needs an urgent fix for it.
That report cannot come soon enough.
D’oh! Raymond
POSH French chef Raymond Blanc detests our “tasteless” British white loaf.
Pardon, monsieur? We can’t all be off down the boulangerie every morning for a baguette that’s rock hard in hours.
We’d get as little work done as the French.
