Boris Johnson’s Covidiot army won't take yes for an answer

Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UK Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Five weeks ago, Boris Johnson rejected his scientists’s advice to impose a two week national lockdown, to bring the virus under control. And here Johnson was, having failed to stand up to the now greatly enlarged psychotic wing of his own party, having to impose a four-week lockdown instead of a two-week lockdown, the preventable death count soaring, the economic damage quite possibly an entire order of magnitude more damaging than it might otherwise have been. There was Philip Davies, to take but one example, demanding the prime minister tell him: “How many collapsed businesses, and how many job losses, he and his government believe are a price worth paying to continue pursuing this failed strategy of lockdowns?” At one point, Labour’s Pat McFadden wanted to know why a four-week lockdown now was better than a two-week lockdown five weeks ago. Here was the prime minister, who deliberately ignored the advice Chris Whitty gave him five weeks ago, deploying Whitty’s words to mean the direct opposite of their intention, not so much being led by the science as deliberately misrepresenting it then hiding behind it.