With so much leaking and briefing, there’s very little suspense left in a Downing Street announcement, save whether or not their lecterns are still standing. I suppose there’s always a chance somebody will get divorced live on air.

So, we already knew what so-called “Freedom Day” would entail, and we already knew that, if it came, it would be 19 July, unless it was postponed to some other day. Johnson promised the removal of all legal limits: on the numbers of people at sporting events and theatres, at gatherings, and on which businesses would be allowed to open. No face masks, no social distancing, no Covid certificates, no more instructing people to work from home. How well it’s going to play instructing them to come back to the office is another matter, but the beauty of that is that it’s not his problem.

The prime minister’s overriding imperative – you could tell by the very many times he said it – is to “move from universal government diktat to relying on people’s personal responsibility”. He’s basically had enough of making all the decisions, and wants someone else to have a go. Absent an obvious single candidate, he’s throwing it on to all of us.

In one way, it’s a relief, since his diktats were always so hit and miss; and yet it was a little unsettling to hear his rationale. “We must be honest: if we can’t reopen society in the next few weeks, we must ask ourselves, when will we be able to return to normal?” At least technically, it’s the middle of summer. We’re outdoors, schools will have their holiday “firebreak”, winter is when the virus is at its most powerful, so if not now, when? He sounds much more like a guy in B&Q, who’s just lost patience with looking for the right shade of white – what do you want him to do, go to Homebase? – than he does like a man carefully weighing up the intricate and often incomparable risks and benefits as have been produced for him by the nation’s finest minds. Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, two of those very minds, flanked him with almost palpable reluctance.

More of us will unfortunately die: if Johnson takes any pleasure from these briefings at all (such a shame to see the love affair between him and limelight reduced to this shadow), it’s in delivering the news of our own mortality, more or less his constant message since the crisis began. It must be a boarding school thing. Whoever finishes their gruel fastest gets to be memento mori for the day.

The final decision won’t be made until a week today, so in effect Johnson announced what we already knew, per a timetable he has yet to decide. If there was anything novel in the speech, it was that he rowed back from the “irreversible” peg he’s so far hung his hat on. The fifth point in his plan – after carry on vaccinating, remove all legal limits, continue with test and trace and maintaining the red list system on the borders – was to “do everything possible to avoid reimposing restrictions”. An eagle-eyed Beth Rigby from Sky News pointed out that irreversible, unless it needs to be reversed, isn’t really a thing. And while she had him, removing restrictions in a country when there are a quarter of a million people infected, isn’t really “cautious” either. “You can’t say I’m being incautious and abandoning irreversibility,” he replied. He didn’t say why not. It was more of a shrug. This sounds like a “you problem”, not a “me problem”.

Two members of the public and five journalists ploughed on. If numbers are going up so steeply, if we’re so close to being fully vaccinated, if we don’t know how well the vaccine protects against long Covid, if we don’t yet have the data on vaccinating adolescents, why rush? But it’s ultimately quite hard to argue with a decision that’s been made by a man who’s just tired of the whole damn thing, and even tireder of being in charge of it. So they were reduced to asking Whitty and Vallance what they’d do.

It was like when you get pension advice, but they’re not allowed to tell you what to do, so you end up going “what pension have you got?” When will they personally stop wearing masks? What do they think of the football (as a potential super-spreader event, not as a national triumph)? Whitty will continue to wear a mask in many listed scenarios, but omitted “to stop jerks recognising me in the street”. I wonder whether we’ll ever see his face in real life again.

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Originally Appeared Here