Does Boris Johnson really need to be out and about so much?

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The PM has been criticised for cycling miles from Downing Street (AFP via Getty Images)

The prime minister exhorts the nation to obey the rules and stay at home in this national crisis. Yet at the same time, he is seen on TV at a mass vaccination centre in Bristol. What is the “reasonable excuse” for him being so far from Whitehall? Does this constitute work? It appears to be more like Boris Johnson standing around providing as much assistance as a sack of potatoes to those who have important things to do. Presumably, he travelled with an entourage of staff and police officers.

I suggest that this is more of Johnson’s own distraction therapy. He seems incapable of sitting in a room and working on the greatest national crisis in living memory. He prefers to be seen to be out and about, oblivious to the fact that his visits must disrupt those who are struggling against the odds to do their invaluable work.

If the prime minister wants to have a break from his desk, I suggest he appears every day at the 5pm news conference, which he can do as part of working from home. Or perhaps he would, as usual, prefer to avoid awkward questions.

David Mason

Darlington

It beggars belief that, while we are being implored to “Stay home, save lives, protect the NHS”, Boris Johnson is travelling to Bristol to visit a vaccination clinic. 

The prime minister was presumably attended by a security detail and followed by a number of TV and newspaper journalists and camera crew. All of this is totally unnecessary. Far from being a morale booster, it only serves to add to the growing list of foolhardy decisions.

Jean Stone

West Midlands 

Remainers have nothing in common with Trump

Christine Latham might object to Brexiteers being compared with Trump supporters ('Trumping each other’, Letters, 11 January) but equally it is wrong for her to compare Remainers with Trump supporters simply because we are not wholeheartedly accepting the “will of the people”, as expressed in the referendum.  

Trump lost the election but has chosen to question the legality of it. No one on the Remain side is suggesting that the EU referendum was fixed; we are just unhappy with the outcome.  

What really rankles is that the referendum should never have been called in the first place. It was called by David Cameron in an attempt to stop the Tory party losing votes to UKIP.

It is not as though we joined the EU on the basis of having to vote to renew our membership every four years, as with US presidential elections.  

If the referendum had been more decisive (65/35 and not 52/48), it would have been easier to accept. If the Leave campaign had not been so underhand, it would have been easier to accept. If the various prime ministers involved, having agreed a withdrawal deal, had held a confirmatory referendum, and had a majority of people agreed that we should still leave, then that, too, would have made it easier to accept. 

Unfortunately, none of those things happened and I and many Remainers feel that the country has been conned and that the future is not going to be as good as it would otherwise have been.  

Richard Barlow  

Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire  

Vaccination delays

I write in response to your article regarding the need for two million people to be vaccinated on a weekly basis ('Two million people must be vaccinated each week to prevent third wave, experts warn government’, 29 December).  

I have volunteered to help out my local GP surgery to help with the Covid vaccinations. Last week we had a thousand or so vaccines. This week the surgery is only receiving 300 vaccines. They do not know how many are arriving on a weekly basis or, indeed, when they will arrive. There are over 36,000 people to be vaccinated in the area that we cover.  

At this rate it is going to take a long long time.  

Patrick Tuohy

Address supplied  

A compassionate Tory MP

Thank you for the piece on Caroline Nokes ('Government’s ‘inhuman’ approach to immigration will not work and will cost more, says former Home Office minister’, 10 January). How refreshing to learn we actually have a Tory MP with compassion and conscience, and even more to the point, guts to speak out and say the unpalatable.

Ian Wingfield

Bamford, Derbyshire