The morning after

When is a lockdown not a lockdown?

When the PM doesn't like to admit that the Leader of the Opposition was right.

Of course.

Those clever folks who brought you the European Research Group who did liitle or no apparent research now bring you the COVID Research Group (CRG), and are against not just the lockdown or restrictions in general.

I mention this as Johnson has to win an actual vote to impose this lockdown in England, as the lockdown is just England as Wales and Scotland have had their own different and more successful mitigations, have locked down earlier and generally more cautious.

It is likely that Johnson cannot win enough votes on his own party benches, so might have to rely on the opposition to support the lockdown before it is passed into law. That is slightly embarassing for a PM with an 80 seat majority.

And all the time more evidence emerges of cronyism in the awarding of supply contracts or invistigating the lrevious wave's failures.

The Good Law Project has compiled a list of over a dozen suspect contracts for PPE, and offered them to the BBC and several newspapers to run. All bar the Daily Mail passed(!) on the scoop.

Such cronyism or corruption at the time of a national crisis is mindblowing, the Government assuming the media will be looking elsewhere to notice.

They were right.

And then leaks of intendied policy are leaked through friednly jouralists, like Robert Peston who two hours before the official announcement was given the key points which he dutifully Tweeted out.

Government by decree, policy by Tweet and under no scrutiny.

SIs are still being created and updated, sometimes twice in the same day as more areas of the north and midlands moves into the highest (so far) tier.

The point on all this region by region, town by town, lockdowns is that the policy has failed on a grand scale. There is only hope that a total lockdown will break the cycle, but unless there is a working track and trace 27 days later, the wave will just pick up again. So, the Government and Johnson's appointee, Dido Harding, has until November 30th to fix the system they have been running for seven months, and is still failing.

We should push the PM to reveal what the plan is to get testing capacity up to required levels, all test results in 24 hours which he himself promised to have happened by the end of June. So far only 15% of results are returned in that time as the system cannot cope.

And then the fixing of track and trace, bearing in mind that the daily new infection rate is officially running at 25k a day, but is at least double that in reality. Can the system track and trace 50,000 contacts a day, every day? Or be able to do it before December 1st.

It would be a big ask for a competent Government, but for Johnson's......