I see Matt Hancock was on the morning broadcast rounds today suggesting a note of caution and saying the period between each step was "more likely to be extended than shortened".
Just give it a rest will you Mr Hancock - the country has had just about enough of doom and gloom over the past few months.
But it is intruiging that he said "..more likely to be extended than shortened..." which does leave open the small possibility of the gap between each step being less than five weeks.
Or you could see the announcement confirming that the next stage is gonig to go ahead two weeks in advance of the actual date rather than one week in advance. If this happened it would mean that the announcement confirming stage 2 would happen just before the vote in parliament on renewing the COVID legislation, and the announcement confirming stage 3 would happen just before the local elections. Both these scenarios would have political advantages for Boris Johnson.
After watching the news conference yesterday and reading some clarification in the media, I am feeling cautiously optimistic that 21st June we should surely be back to normal and all restrictions(including the dreaded social distancing and mask wearing nonsense) will finally be scrapped. Even at the news conference, Whitty and Vallance were both surprisingly optimistic about this. Fingers crossed the end is within sight now - just under 4 months to go, and that nothing is going to mess it up.
However two things I noted since that news conference yesterday. When checking the Metro website last night, whilst there was a big headline about the route back to normality, there was also an article on the right hand side that said "
Chris Whitty's dire warning that could halt route back to normality". I thought "What the ????", but I didn't bother to click in to read what it said as I don't want to read negative news.
Then this morning I do a quick check on the Sky News website and the main headline article is "
Hancock warns easing lockdown could be slower than PM's timeline". Oh for goodness sake! Yet only last month he was saying "
Everyone's going to have a fantastic summer, doing what they all enjoy again." and "
We're going to have a great British care-free summer."!!! This is what I get really fed up with, with this cabinet. They can be saying conflicting things to what others are saying, and also one week they could be saying something very positive about the easing of lockdown/restrictions and then the next week saying something more cautious or negative! So what are we to believe?!
Anyway, overall I'm feeling cautiously optimistic that on 21st June we should be back to normal and free of all these ridiculous damaging restrictions. If it turns out though that that doesn't happen and this drags on into July, August or later then this will just not be acceptable.