The UK government's only strategy for some time - and this goes for everything, not just the pandemic - is leaking vague policy plans to trusted journos and letting the speculation outrage simmer to guage public reactions before committing to anything.

It happens so consistently that it simply must be be their core PR policy, and you just know they're very smug about how effective it is (note: it isn't).

This generation of Tories, as we've talked about before, have the concept of social engineering built into their ideology. It's their one guiding principle: you don't ever admit what you want, you just convince people they want it too.

It's all about manipulation and optics. It sort-of-kind-of worked with Brexit, in that it got them a result that brought them to power, but they've run up against the basic inertia of reality since.

As the wrestler Scott Steiner once put it in an interview, "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit."