Why Covid daily briefings should resume over Omicron as Rishi Sunak unveils £1bn hospitality package – The Yorkshire Post says

They’re ambitious words after the Chancellor unveiled one-off grants of up to £6,000 to help hospitality businesses hit by cancelled bookings, taxpayers’ money to help small firms pay the sick pay of staff absent with Covid and a £30m boost to the Culture Recovery Fund.

Downing Street’s lies over lockdown cheese and wine parties insult us all as new Boris Johnson photos emerge – The Yorkshire Post says

They’re also slightly disingenuous after Mr Sunak cited exiting measures like business rates relief and reduced VAT for hospitality and tourism that remain – the latter, as the Richmond MP should know by now, is of little help when families are simply not venturing out due to the risk to public health.

But what is frustrating is the Chancellor – just like the Prime Minister last Friday and again on Monday – chose to undertake one ‘pooled’ interview to avoid substantive scrutiny.

Even more significantly, there was no scope for questions when Mr Johnson announced last night, via a Downing Street video, that there will be no restrictions before Christmas.

And this, in itself, only heightens public suspicions about Downing Street’s wider competence and trustworthiness, in the face of multiple scandals, after it spent £2.6m of public money on a new room for press conferences which became the focus of national attention when the pandemic first struck – and again when indiscreet remarks by Allegra Stratton, the PM’s then spokesman, about Christmas parties in lockdown became public.

What Ministers should be doing is reinstating these daily briefings, certainly while Parliament is in recess, so senior politicians – and also their scientific advisors – can be questioned on the latest data in order for families to react accordingly. For, at present, common sense and guess work on the public’s part, in tandem with Covid booster jabs, is Britain’s best defence against Omicron this Christmas.

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