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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we ask a few of our writers to read their

piece from the magazine aloud. On this episode, Fraser Nelson

starts by reading our leading article. The Prime Minister promised date to not dates,

but with deaths from coronavirus down 99%, 85% of over 60s now having antibodies, a new

variants showing little sign of changing things, should we reopen before June 21st?

Fiona Mountford is on next, arguing that corporate friendliness is cheap and meaningless.

Where are the good old days of dispassionate professionalism?

Then, Laurie Graham reads her piece.

She wonders what her church group should put in their COVID time capsule to be opened in

2017.

And finally, Isabel Harman reads her notes on Dandelions, the cheeriest of wildflowers, she says.

First up, Fraser Nelson, reading our leading article.

A slogan can come back to haunt you.

For Borders Johnson, the words date and date, sounded pretty powerful at the time when

COVID cases were high and hospitals were full. His idea was that the government would be guided

by scientific reason. It would respond to the figures. It would not let rigid targets dictate policy.

But since he announced his roadmap at the end of February, dates do seem to have become a lot more

important than data. How, after all, can he claim to be following the data when he will not budge

from a timeline which now looks like it was designed for a very different phase of the pandemic?

Why were people braving the cold and the rain outside restaurants in a bank holiday Monday when there's every chance that it was safe to go inside?

There's nothing in the data we're told to suggest that we should further delay the dates laid out in the roadmap.

...