Surely now is the time for Boris Johnson to offer the courage of his hero Winston Churchill.
We need it more than ever. Yet last week he became the reincarnation of LedruRollin, the French revolutionary, who, as the mob rampaged through Paris in 1848, declared: ‘I must follow them, for I am their leader!’
What else can we make of his decision to hide beneath the mess of unreliable and inaccurate data from Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, and his Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty?
After some pretence of sticking up for his Chancellor Rishi Sunak, the one resolute figure this Government has yet produced, Johnson then followed his Brexit supremo Michael Gove, and his Health Secretary Matt Hancock, in swallowing everything Vallance and Whitty served up.
There seems no statistic so obviously exaggerated, no invitation to lock the country down too economically disastrous, no appeal to save the NHS too ridiculous for Gove and Hancock to swallow hook line and sinker.
