Boris Johnson may be overcompensating for early failings on Covid but he has no choice

The clampdown on households meeting inside covers a much wider area than Johnson envisaged when he christened plans for local lockdowns as his ‘whack-a-mole’ strategy, writes Andrew Grice

The PM meets officers during a visit to the North Yorkshire Police headquarters in Northallerton (AP)

Only two weeks after suggesting there could be a “significant return to normality by Christmas”, why has Boris Johnson imposed new restrictions on 4 million people in the north and adopted a hardline stance on foreign travel?

I suspect the prime minister is overcompensating for his mistakes at the start of the coronavirus crisis. He knows he was too slow to order the national lockdown in March, which some of his scientific advisers now admit cost thousands of lives. He came too close to conceding the point a week ago, telling the BBC there were “very open questions” and saying that “maybe there were things we could have done differently”. The government also avoided quarantine for UK arrivals until June, with scientists arguing it was too late to do so in April once the virus had already been imported and spread.

Johnson is now making up for lost time, and has gone to the other end of the spectrum. He doubtless hopes it will give him some protection at the public inquiry he admits is coming but, crucially, has delayed until an unspecified future date to give himself a chance to show he has put right his early mistakes. That would be his new “mitigation strategy”.