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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Forsyfe. We began the week asking whether the Indian variant would derail the roadmap to ending lockdown. But now things look a bit brighter and phrasing your telegraph column, you say that the Prime Minister is quite keen to press ahead ahead but we shouldn't take it as a given yet why is that well there has been a quite

distinct change of moods boris johnson as we all know is an optimist that pretty much was this

political philosophy and this went all very well until covid came along and then he came to regret his

optimism he regretted not

locking down earlier. And then by the end of last year, it began to look like anything that could

go wrong with COVID did go wrong, especially in Britain that ended up with the longest lockdown,

one of the worst recessions, the highest economic damage and one of the highest COVID death tools. But right now,

all of that has flipped. Britain is now leading the world, certainly the G7 and the EU. There is no country

with higher vaccination levels, no country with lower levels of COVID, and there's now lots of

grounds for rational optimism. So Borders Johnson is

now feeling a little bit more confident in his optimism, which is why we saw what we did this

week. So where the usual routine here is the kind of, you can call it a new variant dance,

if you like, where a new variant comes along, then Sage will go and

analyze the potentials, and then the most scary statistic will get flung out, in this case,

50% more transmissible. Usually it's not too long before papers come out and we find out,

but actually the truth is somewhere behind it. Now, we had a situation where Michael Gove was actually arguing for more restrictions

on the back of this, and we had the usual suspects of anonymous briefings saying that yes,

Boris Goise is going to have to delay his 21st of January reopening. That was a Monday. But by Tuesday,

some hospital data came through from Bolton that made him more confident that it

wasn't the threat we originally envisaged and by Wednesday the prime minister was telling Tory

...