‘The end is in sight’ says Boris, though he’s got absolutely no idea when

The end is in sight. This is the final stretch. When will it end? Probably never. And will children be back in school before the summer? Not sure on that one either, I’m afraid.

These were the key messages to take from yet another self-satirising Boris Johnson 5pm briefing, which are now firmly back in our daily routines with the same metronomic certainty as the old early evening Neighbours screening, except that every single episode is the one where Toadfish accidentally drives his wife off a cliff on their own wedding day.

As has been previously stated, many times, but evidently not enough, the point of the daily briefing at times of national crisis is to provide daily reassurance, a data dump with a human face, if you like. To say, “Look, here is everything we know, we’re doing our very best, stay calm, more as we get it.”

To go down the daily briefing route, and then to use them as a chance to obfuscate, and, to be blunt, downright lie, is not merely self-defeating but little short of torturous to all involved.

At one point, when the prime minister was asked why exactly he had allowed schools to return for a single day, for millions of children to come into close proximity to one another, and then to shut them again, he offered the following: "We wanted to keep schools open but, alas, it became clear yesterday that the data wasn't going to support that."

That is, even at the most generous possible level of interpretation, not true. There is not a single parent, anywhere in the land, that can possibly be expected to believe that. And yet, here they all are, millions of them, encouraged to tune in to their daily dose of reassurance from their government, but not to be reassured, at all, in any way. Just to be lied to instead.

Later we would learn that the virus is out of control, that one in 50 people in the country currently has it. In London the number is one in 30.

All through this pandemic, and especially in the last few months of it, Boris Johnson has been consistently and correctly accused of not listening to his scientific advisers. Such claims are routinely denied, but those denials are harder to sustain when he also doesn’t listen to them live on television. When, for example, he does his very best Fisher Price My First Statesman impression, to talk of how we are in “the final stretch”, mere seconds after it’s been explained, by his chief scientist, that this “isn’t just going to go away”.

That he can turn and walk back into his private quarters in Downing Street, announcing that the “end is in sight” directly after his scientists have explained that restrictions might very well have to be brought back in next winter, that there will still be risks to people in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, who can’t expect to be vaccinated for quite some time, and that the virus will go on mutating and making the job of defending against it more difficult, almost in perpetuity.

Asked whether children would be back in school before the summer, he declined to provide a straightforward answer to what was a very straightforward question.

So, as he disappeared again, the only questions worth asking are: “Are you reassured by any of this?” and “Do you feel like you’re being told the truth?” And if the answer is no, then maybe find something different to do at 5pm on a January weeknight when it’s already dark and you’re not allowed to leave the house. Because there’s precious little point in listening to Boris Johnson, now even less so than ever.