Boris Johnson must once again be grateful for the lack of serious opposition

Editorial: As with Brexit, the prime minister’s opponents cannot coalesce around a single unifying alternative to his social care plan

Will it be a hat-trick of broken promises from Boris Johnson? (Dave Brown)

Even by the standards of this government, scrapping two key manifesto commitments in the course of a single afternoon, on tax and the pensions “triple lock”, is a bit much. They were, of course, widely trailed and spun in the preceding days, if not weeks, to soften the blow to Conservative MPs’ pride (and their prospects in marginal constituencies).

Few seriously thought that the aberrant behaviour of wages after the pandemic could really justify an 8 per cent or so hike in the old age pension, welcome though it would have been. The news was delivered by the embodiment of emollience herself, Therese Coffey, who has made a fine job of keeping social security (mostly) out of the headlines.

By contrast, there was a certain elegant audacity in Boris Johnson’s admission that his solemn manifesto pledge on national insurance was to be tossed aside. The pandemic provided an ideal alibi, but still he presented his latest U-turn as an almost heroic act. He was, he claimed, the first prime minister to tackle the problem rather than duck it, and the first to actually put any kind of plan before the House of Commons.