On Johnson`s modus operandi

Marina Hyde is wrong (The curious tale of a wild dog in No 10 - and Boris Johnson -24/02/21). Playing the "calm, authoritative setter of boundaries" he may well be, but it`s the same old Johnson running the country. Too afraid of his right-wing backbenchers, he makes the mistake of producing too early a roadmap which causes the majority to relax their Covid defences. So intent on exhibiting "exceptionalism", schools in England have to reopen all at once rather than following the more sensible Welsh and Scottish example of a phased return. Fearful of pursuing any policies put forward by Starmer, the prime minister cannot support the idea of vaccinating teachers. It was the same last year when the WHO`s advice on early testing, and Australia`s example of a successful quarantine system could not be followed for similar reasons. Unless all staff involved in children`s schooling are vaccinated in the coming weeks, the reopening looks like a disaster-in-waiting. Indeed, Covid will continue to flourish until all of the people unable to work from home but crucial to the economy`s survival, are given priority vaccination status! Of course it "would be better not to allow an uncontrolled spread" of Covid in younger people, but that would mean breaking from Johnson`s modus operandi (Betting it all on vaccines. But are they the Covid pandemic`s magic bullet? 23/02/21). Sending children back to school gradually would have meant following the lead of the Welsh and Scottish administrations, just as having all teaching staff vaccinated at half-term would have been an acknowledgement that Starmer had actually made a sensible proposal. In the pandemic`s early stages the WHO strongly suggested that testing was the way forward, only for Johnson`s insistence on the UK`s "exceptionalism" resulting in the advice being ignored. This explains all of the policies adopted so far; the ideas have to be of English origin and not copies of methods used in other countries, or ones proposed by Starmer. The quarantine scheme has to be different from the one used successfully in Australia, and naturally ends up "half-baked" and unlikely to prove effective. The decisions are all political, designed to show Tory ideas better than Labour`s and England`s solutions more effective than those of all other countries. A death rate per capita worse than that of the US does not appear to be as significant as the next election!