THE UK’s plunge into a third lockdown and Boris Johnson’s leadership dominated the newspapers comment sections.

The Daily Express

Paul Baldwin said, watching the Prime Minister’s address on Monday night, it was hard not to get angry.

“Angry at the way we have been lied to, angry at the way we have been treated like credulous infants, angry at error after error after error made by the people supposed to be in charge, the people who are supposed to be smart,” he said. “The Covid cock-ups, over issues which frankly would have been obvious to a child, have been legion.”

He said the nation, and the Prime Minister, were pinning their hopes on the vaccine, but even that was muddled.

“How is America, which was so far behind on sorting a vaccine, now ahead of us while our numbers remain alarmingly low despite the fanfare?,” he asked. “To a nation already cynical about the state’s ability to manage this crisis even the solution starts to feel like a problem.”

The Guardian

Marina Hyde said that, once again, we were doing something inevitable entirely too late ‘meaning it will have to be done much longer and much harder than it would have had Johnson showed some leadership and grasped the nettle.’

“No one should be in any doubt that we are paying for his weakness and vacillation in lives, in the bitterest economic terms, and in vital freedoms,” she said. “It’s not that Boris Johnson can’t see round corners – it’s that he can’t see two steps straight ahead of him.”

She said the Prime Minister’s spirit animal was a headless chicken. “Then again, the Guinness World Records show that in 1940s Colorado, one farmer decapitated a chicken, and the headless creature nonetheless survived and walked around for a further 18 months. So a year into his handling of the pandemic, there’s everything for Boris Johnson to play for.”

The Independent

Tom Peck said Boris Johnson sought to blame the new variant of the virus for the new lockdown and did not acknowledge his mistakes in handling the pandemic.

“This supposed moment of national unity was, in fact, Johnson getting his excuses in for his own past failures, and transparently failing to get away with it,” he said. “There is no one who believes our collective efforts were working. His own scientists have been telling him for weeks that they haven’t been working.”

He said the government has got no clue what it’s doing from one hour to the next. “If the prime minister wants to make the toughest weeks any easier for himself and the rest of us, he should start by injecting himself, and us all, with a generous dose of the actual truth. It won’t kill us. It might just make us stronger. Because goodness knows we’re immune to the bull**** by now.”