Manchester United striker, Marcus Rashford, has successfully forced the government to redeem free school meals for some children over the summer holidays.
His successful social media campaign, culminating in an article in the Times, utilised his childhood experience of surviving on food rationed by his mother and is the latest to pressure Johnson’s administration into a change of policy.
Others include the change of date, also using the impact of personal experience, being the apparent revocation of the NHS £4000 surcharge for migrant NHS workers.
This was after a video of a Syrian hospital cleaner, Hassan Akkad, emotionally asking the PM for change went viral.
Incidentally, some are seemingly having to still pay it.
This was followed by excessive wobbling with regards to the government’s plan to return children to schools on 1 June after headteachers, unions, and councils expressed safety concerns.
“Indeed many saw it as a matter of when, not if, the government gave into the immense amount of weight behind Rashford’s request.”
As Rashford’s campaign has rapidly gained momentum the public have been “waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase ‘the U-turn’”, this famous phrase from a former PM who was herself embroiled in a row over school nutrition, and have not been left disappointed.
Indeed many saw it as a matter of when, not if, the government gave into the immense amount of weight behind Rashford’s request.
Johnson is a Prime Minister who, at times, visibly lacks confidence at the dispatch box and is incredibly eager to limit public opposition in the grips of recent less favourable polling, including an Ipsos Mori study on 12 June suggesting that Starmer is the most popular Labour leader since Tony Blair.
This has led YouGov to dub him a ‘Prime Minister in waiting’.
Johnson’s government is having to walk a tightrope of considering the electorate’s concerns whilst also appearing stable and solidly on its own course.
This was the idea behind the unveiling of a phased “plan to rebuild”, a plan which Johnson warned may “adapt as we learn more about the virus”.
This potential diversion from strategy has been proven to be correct, as the government has reduced the lockdown despite previously outlined required criteria arguably not being reached fully.
“Johnson’s government is having to walk a tightrope of considering the electorate’s concerns whilst also appearing stable and solidly on its own course.”
Notwithstanding its 80 seat majority, confirmation that the UK is not to extend the Brexit transition period beyond December 2020, anti-austerity “levelling up” rhetoric, monolithic governmental spending, and repeated claims that governmental actions are being led by ‘the’ science – in reality a relatively small sample of national scientific opinions – this government finds itself in an uncertain position.
The lack of an unassailable, watertight plan to deal with an unprecedented – an overused yet necessary adjective – crisis has resulted in unease from both the public and the commons.
As the UK is predicted to suffer an 11.4% economic hit due to the lockdown, the largest of the developed world, a cabal of Conservative backbenchers have displayed “real unease” regarding the PM’s ability to get businesses moving again, even branding him “incompetent”.
Johnson and his Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, have since led the calls for the 2m social distancing rule to be reduced to 1m in order for businesses, such as shops and restaurants, to reopen and function more smoothly.
This government, which had previously so emphatically dismissed Corbyn’s Labour with an incredibly clear plan of getting ‘Brexit Done’ and levelling up the nations more deprived efforts, has been thrown off course by a century defining global health crisis.
In the face of the highest death rate in world (891 people per million) and a completely new, more popular adversary across the dispatch box, Johnson needs to reaffirm his personal, governmental, and public pre-COVID confidence if he is to survive the next election – whenever that may be.
Politicly 