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Hello and welcome to coffee house shots, Suspectus Daily and sometimes more than daily politics podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Forsyth and Isle Isle Hardman.

And we've just had an announcement from the Prime Minister where he confirmed reports that have been pretty widely covered now,

that he plans to delay the lockdown by up to four weeks. A review at two weeks, however, he suggested it was unlikely that restrictions

would be lifted after two weeks and instead suggested that the four week delay was hopefully

a firm one. James, is this a cast iron commitment? The Prime Minister sounds very optimistic,

but he felt slightly short there. Yeah, I think you could tell a deliberate attempt to change his

language. In the roadmap, all the dates are not earlier than. He was suggesting that July

19th, the new date is a kind of terminus date, e.g. the date in which he would expect

all of this to go. And I think that perhaps more reassuring was Patrick Valence, the government

chief scientific advisor, saying, but it wasn't obvious that you got much gain from delay in

reopening beyond four weeks. And I think the context for this needs to be seen in the

PHE England data, which suggests that both the Pfizer and Astragenic a jab are 90% effective

against hospitalisation after two doses. That is slightly better numbers that I think people have

been expecting and does give you a bit more confidence that

this July the 19th date might be met. Now, obviously the government has an issue here because,

you know, everyone remembers from 12 weeks to send COVID packing, you know, on you go. But I think

if you add together the fact that you would clearly want to have any exit wave in the summer months,

this data on the vaccine protection, the confidence they have of who they can get second doses to

before July the 19th, I think that the government would appear a very heavy political price if it couldn't reopen after this four week today.

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