he prime minister came before the country promising the “first sketch of a roadmap”; it was a wheedling, essay crisis phrase (let it not be said that I haven’t done it, since here is a sketch of it), and one of the frustrations of advising Boris Johnson must surely be that, however well thought out the plan, whatever he says he always sounds like he’s made it up on the spot. But there were tangible points in there, and new announcements. The Covid-19 alert system was novel: he announced it in backwards order, so it was like a 70s computer game, Hunt the Point. Level one was “disease no longer present”; level five was critical; level four was what we got ourselves into with our strenuous lockdown efforts; level three was what we were going into now; level two didn’t seem to really exist. Better representations appeared in newspapers, to which all wheezes are briefed ahead and then, following outcry from one stakeholder or another, denied. Still, for any practical purposes, they didn’t mean anything. If level two is “initial alert”, what action does that demand? On the government’s own record, none. If level three is “need to be on our guard, but safe to lift some lockdown restrictions”, we return to the puzzle of the “stay alert” slogan: what does it mean, in relation to an invisible foe? Alice Bennett, an academic, put together a terrifically helpful timeline on Twitter of “stay alert” messages across the history of state propaganda which culminated (for me, at least) in the marvellous Soviet-era injunction, “You have no right to relax your attention! Every minute be on the alert.” Broadly, Bennett concluded, these messages put a responsibility on the individual that is utterly unactionable. You cannot know that you’ve fallen short in your duties until the infection rate goes up, whereupon it is your fault. If it doesn’t go up, well done, meerkat nation. Level four is “NHS under pressure”, which could be any point, really, since Andrew Lansley became health secretary, and level five is “NHS is overwhelmed” which was also (keep up at the back) one of the speech’s five tests (is the NHS overwhelmed?). To be fair, terrorist alert levels – from which this system seems to derive – probably didn’t have much more flesh on their bones, but at least we weren’t looking to them for information on when we could next see and touch the people we love. It reminded me of the parent who enjoys authority for its own sake so much that they land at these circular, riddle-like positions: you can have a phone when you’ve proved you’re responsible enough for a phone. Yet it was delivered with that fecklessness for which Johnson is famed, so simultaneously it was like being told by a cowboy builder that phase two would commence right after the unknowable end of phase one. The rackety autocrat is such an enraging political entity – either be jokey and beg our patience, or be bossy and competent. You cannot be both. When it came to the practicalities of the announcement, Careless Boris won out: everyone whose work can’t be done at home should now go back to work. Employees in manufacturing and construction are, by these terms, due in on Wednesday. Duties will be placed on their employers to keep them safe, but what are those duties, how are they enforced, what about workers who themselves are in vulnerable groups, and what rights do workers have if they don’t think their workplace is safe? Employees shouldn’t take public transport, they should walk, cycle or drive, but if they must take public transport, does that mean they shouldn’t work? It’s part-way down the path of giving up on governing altogether: “Don’t use the infrastructure, use your feet. While staying alert.” Fines for people breaking the rules will be increased, but to what, and what were they before? Children in years one and six could be back at school straight after half term, so long as they stay alert in relation to R + number of infections in the meantime. I heard some half-hearted intention to get selected secondary-school children back before the end of the year, though no clarity on whether that meant the calendar or academic year. A caller to Radio 5 Live heard “September at the earliest”. Nowhere was there any detail on the safety of teachers. I’m no nudge unit, but I feel moved to point out: people who have been celibate since they started self-isolating from their non-cohabiting partner seven weeks ago are going to be asking why their predicament is less important than someone going back to the shop floor to make aerospace parts that we can’t imagine using. People missing their extended families are going to wonder why they’re being praised for their great sense of shared humanity on the one hand, while their own needs as human beings are ignored and the educational prospects of five-year-olds (no offence, five-year-olds) are prioritised. In what imaginable universe is golf more important than playgrounds? A staggered end to lockdown is an incredibly delicate act of persuasion, which rests on principles of honesty and logic that can be followed. We have, instead, persistent dishonesty (“literally hundreds of thousands of tests per day”, Johnson promised at one point, surely sticking to no script except maybe one he dreamed) and a culture of “don’t worry your pretty head, we’ll make the hard choices”. It is a thin line between predicting the breakdown of public buy-in and preaching civil disobedience. It is self-evident that we cannot disregard the advice altogether; that we cannot each lift the lockdown unilaterally in despair at the incompetence of the people enforcing it. Yet there is something so unsettling about waiting for scraps of sense from the table of people who themselves, one feels, are so starved of insight.