The government is right to be cautious about the end of lockdown

Editorial: Resisting calls to do too much, too soon is important – we can only hope that Boris Johnson and his ministers stick to their plan

Dominic Raab has said that the government ‘can’t get ahead of the evidence’ (Reuters)

If Boris Johnson hadn’t been prime minister, he probably would have spent the past year writing lockdown-sceptic columns.

These are where his basic instincts lie, and though he regularly claims, entirely wrongly, to be some kind of metropolitan liberal, the hard-right wing of the Conservative Party is also where he draws his authority.

His landslide election victory in 2019 also served to remove a number of MPs at the core of the Tories’ moderate centre – Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke and so on – which for at least a decade had been the party’s soul.