At today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, standing in for Boris Johnson, deployed a revealing turn of phrase.
“It was too early, he said, to talk of a ‘transitional period’ out of social distancing,” writes New Statesman political correspondent Patrick Maguire. “That is language we have not heard from a minister before. Politicians on both sides have hitherto preferred to speak of ‘exit strategies’.”
The change of language tells us that the government is not planning for an immediate return to the old normal, Patrick writes. And that wasn’t the only thing we learned at PMQs: we learned Keir Starmer’s new approach is reaping small dividends, and that ministers are drawing a new dividing line with the Labour leader over how he speaks about science.
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