This is LBC from global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

It's four minutes after ten. A very good morning indeed to you. I hope you had a lovely weekend.

Do you want to build a snowman? It was great, wasn't it? It didn't last very long where we are,

but obviously some parts of the country is still dancing in a winter wonderland. It's my sad

duty to steer you back to the rather grim reality that we share together at the moment.

And the crystallising thought I have, and I know this is a little bit self-defeating or sort of damaging

to give them what I do for a living, but the dangers of turning everything into a phone-in topic

are rarely more stark and more chilling than in the context of the continuing coronavirus

strategies. I hope I explain myself well a moment ago in the little talk up that I do before the news.

But it really is as if you're suffering from one kind of denial or the other.

You're either in denial about the infection and the death rates and therefore in denial about what would happen to them if we somehow had less stringent regulations in place.

That's incredible, no.

We've got the third highest number of new cases in the world.

Let me put in some caveats, all right.

Russia's probably lying.

There will be different measures of counting.

It's not like 100% definitive on any front. But these are the only measures that we have.

So we're still third. We've got the third highest infection rate in the world. We've got the

largest number of deaths per million

of the population, of any country, with a population greater than 20 million. And we're going to

break through the 100,000 deaths this week. And yet the conservative backbenchers, this ludicrously

misnomered COVID recovery group, are today, once again, putting pressure

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