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

Hello, three minutes after ten is the time.

You're listening to James O'Brien on LBC,

where we find ourselves once again contemplating a landscape so chaotic that it's sometimes easy to forget that we're actually in the United Kingdom, as opposed to observing madness unfolding elsewhere or possibly even reading history books.

But here we are. It's the north, the northwest, large swathes of the north that woke up this morning,

if they weren't checking Twitter or the news last night.

916, as far as I can tell, was the time at which a thread of tweets was released,

revealing that Manchester and, or 10 boroughs of Manchester and a few other northern locales would be facing more restrictions.

I heard Andy Burnham this morning, the mayor of Manchester, saying that it's not a lockdown.

And then on the front of the Daily Mirror this morning, we've got north in lockdown two.

Front of the sun, lock of the north.

That's a good headline. They are good at headlines, aren't they?

It's a shame about everything else in the paper.

I don't really mind much about the semantics.

I suspect you don't either.

The point is that the restrictions that have been introduced in the north

overnight are designed to actually avoid the likelihood of what would have to be called a second lockdown,

either in scope or, of course, scale.

So it's not just what the restrictions involved, but also how widespread an area is affected.

I don't think, even if I were to accept the job as Boris Johnson's official spokesman.

I don't think I would be able to explain the contradiction between how we are treating Spain

and how we are treating Manchester.

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