Boris Johnson celebrated his second anniversary as Tory leader on Friday, but probably not

in the way he might have hoped. Hold up at checkers in isolation, one of the hundreds of

thousands of Britons hit by the pandemic.

We'll be moving to a system of testing rather than isolation, but until then I just must remind

everybody that isolation is a Viking tool of our defence against the disease.

Welcome to Payne's Politics, your essential insider guide to what's happening in

British politics from the financial times with me, George Parker. Sebs on holiday allegedly,

and I think I spotted him at the spectator party on Thursday night, nursing a glass of

bubbly and looking very relaxed. Now, in what should have been a big final week of term at Westminster,

Boris Johnson had to abandon plans for a big announcement on social care reform. Instead,

Tory MPs were left with their heads spinning. It wasn't just the usual round of summer drinks

parties, as ministers tried to come up with a series of exemptions to the Covid isolation rules.

Meanwhile, Johnson opened a new front in his ongoing war of attrition with the EU over the

Northern Ireland protocol, a deal he signed in 2019, and which he and his Brexit Minister David

Frost claim is a threat to the peace process and is tearing up the fabric of the union.

Who could possibly have anticipated that? We will be talking about the government's plan to

rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol and the EU's response laser, with the FT's Peter Foster

and Lord Gavin Barwell, Theresa May's former chief of staff, who himself tried to resolve the

apparently insoluble Northern Ireland conundrum that beddevils UK EU relations after Brexit.

But first, let's turn to the pandemic and the pandemic, which looks set to dominate our lives

over the summer. Talk of freedom day has quickly evaporated, as 600,000 people in one week

were told to isolate. Ministers threatened to introduce Covid passports and speculations

...