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“England expects that every man will do his duty”. Admiral Nelson’s famous flagship signal, issued on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar, was for years scribbled down in history notebooks by wide-eyed school children taught the classic tale of heroism and sacrifice.

Boris Johnson was clearly one such pupil, because it seems that Nelson’s message is now his main public health policy for dealing with a very 21st century pandemic. The PM told his latest Downing Street briefing that “we expect and recommend” that the public should wear face masks in crowded and enclosed spaces used by strangers.

The phrase “expectation management” is beloved of politicians trying to massage reaction to an anticipated election, but this is whole new territory. Johnson clearly believes that he can somehow massage the public’s Covid conscience by just telling them that he expects them to do the right thing.

Proving this was not a mere verbal tic of the PM’s, health secretary Sajid Javid used the “expected and recommended” phrase in his update to the Commons too. Javid even had a variation on this theme of a sense of personal duty rather than public requirement, saying he would be “encouraging” businesses to use Covid ‘passports’ to limit the spread of the virus.

Expecting, encouraging and recommending aren’t, of course, the same as compelling or strongly advising. That’s why several medics and scientists are worried that as we head for the “Freedom Day” of July 19, there has been just too much mixed messaging from the government on issues like mask-wearing and working from home.

Still, Monday showed that Johnson and his ministers are beginning to realise the error of last week’s hard emphasis on “personal responsibility”. Just a few days ago, ministers were talking about wanting to bin masks because they were just a bit irritated by wearing them or because (novel one this) face coverings made it difficult to communicate with the hard of hearing.

The PM has not been deaf to such criticisms and there was definitely a shift in tone and language from just one week ago. Even though the government won’t call its latest messaging “advice”, it wants to make clear what it sees as the better way to behave, while insisting this is no longer a matter of legality or illegality.

The shift in tone was also notable in the implied threat Johnson carried about what would happen if the public proved they couldn’t be trusted to listen to his entreaties: the return of some kind of lockdown.

Having said in February that his roadmap was “cautious but irreversible”, the PM tried a bit of revisionist history of his own. “I hope that the roadmap is irreversible – we’ve always said that we hope that it will be irreversible – but in order to have an irreversible roadmap, we also said it’s got to be a cautious approach,” he told the briefing. It was the audacity of hope, Johnson style.

In fact, this not a willed triumph of hope over expectation, it’s both hope and expectation yoked together as pandemic policy. The only problem is that whereas lockdown can be used to predict the Covid curve, relying on consistent public conduct in unlockdown is very much an uncertain science. On some of Sage’s more scary modelling, we could end up with “at least” 1,000 hospitalisations a day and upto 200 deaths a day.

Chief medical officer Chris Whitty gave the PM valuable backing for the idea of some kind of easing of restrictions next week. There is no clear evidence that a further delay was going to make a difference, he said, before adding the crucial caveat “what is going to make a difference is going slowly”.

But when Whitty then said the public should “avoid unnecessary meetings”, it begged the question how they should sort what was necessary from unnecessary.

In some ways the most telling remark was from Sir Patrick Vallance, when he all but confirmed the Whitehall whispers that a form of “hybrid immunity” (from those vaccinated and those infected), was now unofficial policy. Just don’t call it “herd immunity”.

Vallance said: “We are on track to have significant levels of immunity that will really impede the ability of this virus to transmit and cause damage. And that will bring the possibility that future big waves would go at that point.” Which is perhaps the cheeriest uncheery thing anyone has said at these briefings for quite some time.

There is certainly some force in the government’s argument that July 19 is a valid pivot point given the school holidays and looming winter. It can be used to slowly restore businesses and jobs and hospital waiting lists that have all suffered in lockdown. But briefing some newspapers “Freedom Day” rhetoric while urging continued caution is a tricky game to play.

The PM’s new soundbites about caution may well be heard by much of the public. But with the Commons itself sending the most damaging message of all (one rule for them, one for the rest) by allowing MPs to ditch masks while forcing staff to wear them, the dangers are obvious. Shop and tube staff don’t enforce mask wearing as it is, imagine the arguments once refuseniks get a legal licence next week.

When he emerged from hospital last year after his own bout of Covid last April, the PM declared: “If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger, which I can tell you from personal experience it is, then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor.”

The difficulty is that his own mixed messaging has turned his public health policy into a half-Nelson, the wrestling move that can be overturned by a determined opponent. As Horatio looks down Whitehall towards Downing Street with one eye, there’s an uneasy feeling among MPs and ministers about the unlockdown gamble.

And the real half-Nelson may be a feeling that while the public are being left to do their duty, the PM is somehow shirking his. Let’s hope (there’s that word again) his message of encouraged caution works.

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Ever since Gordon Brown blundered into giving pensioners a measly 75p rise in their pension, politicians have been terrified of upsetting the grey vote. Back in 1999, the Treasury was so pleased with low inflation that it had failed to spot the PR disaster of the tiny increase it entailed in all index-linked benefits.

Brown never repeated the error, and indeed paid his penance by swiftly making his temporary winter fuel allowance a permanent fixture, as well as introducing free TV licences for the elderly and pension credit.

During the 2010 election, David Cameron was bounced by Brown into keeping the measures. The Tory leader went further by bringing in the now infamous ‘triple lock’ that guarantees to uprate the basic and state pension in line with earnings, prices or 2.5%, whichever is the higher.

In 2015, the Conservatives did dip a toe in the dangerous waters of cutting “pensioner perks”, as some called them, announcing they would withdraw state funding of the free TV licence for over-75s and ask the BBC to foot the bill instead. The blame game still plays out, but a survey by AgeUK found that Tory voters will be hit hardest.

Fast-forward to today and it appears that Rishi Sunak is preparing to think the unthinkable and not honour the triple lock pledge that was reaffirmed in the last Tory manifesto. The chancellor has in some ways the perfect cover in the form of the pandemic and the huge costs it has inflicted on the whole nation.

The young in particular have been hit hard by joblessness, on top of student debt and the UK’s chronic inability to offer them affordable housing. With the third wave of Covid powering a fresh tsunami of cases among the under-30s, it seems they are in for their share of ill-health too. While ministers seem bent on a form of herd immunity, long Covid is the fear that stalks many a young person’s Whatsapp chat.

The demands for “intergenerational fairness” have been getting louder and Sunak seems to have listened. Of course, he was subtle about it on the breakfast sofa shows, but the message seemed pretty clear: the triple lock will be tweaked, amended, possibly suspended to save valuable cash.

In a masterclass of political hint-dropping, the chancellor said that yes, the triple lock was still government policy “but I very much recognise people’s concerns”. “We want to make sure the decisions we make and the systems we have are fair, both for pensioners and for taxpayers.” It was straight out of the overseas aid playbook: the overall aim is to stick to the manifesto but the pandemic has forced a rethink.

That’s why the chatter in Whitehall and among MPs is that the Treasury is considering a possible suspension of the triple lock for one year only, just as happened on the pledge to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid. The hint was all but official when even Boris Johnson refused to kill off the speculation on Thursday. “We’ve got to have fairness for pensioners and the taxpayers,” he said.

Whereas Brown was trapped into a PR nightmare by linking pensions to (low) inflation, Sunak is obviously keen not to suffer from a similarly self-inflicted, locked-in syndrome. With pensions now linked earnings (which are soaring at 8%), even a temporary way of avoiding the £3bn cost would save the Treasury serious money. Pensioners could still get a rise, just not a mega rise.

Insiders stress that nothing is decided and it will all depend on how the numbers look later in the year ahead of the spending review, but no one is killing the idea of a brief suspension of the full triple lock. The fact that both the PM and chancellor sounded like they were coordinating their message (on various outlets) shows there is a softening up exercise going on at the very least.

With Keir Starmer’s shift from constructive to destructive opposition, Labour will inevitably try to seize on any change as an outrageous theft from pensioners’ purses. But what everyone will be trying to gauge is just how many Tory backbenchers try to prevent any unpicking of the lock. Will those who were gung ho about a temporary cut to aid now bite their tongues?

It will certainly be a test of Sunak’s political skills, though he does perhaps have time on his side. Just as with the international development ‘cut’, opting to do this in the middle of a parliament (and the middle of a pandemic) gives him room to make up for it in the run up to the next election.

It could also be that on the triple lock the chancellor realises that over the long term he could burnish rather than tarnish his reputation, not least among younger voters who see this as a fairness issue.

The furlough scheme has already helped make him the most popular politician in the UK and he may think he can afford to burn a bit of that capital now. Ending the £20 uplift in Universal Credit and jacking up corporation tax prove he is unafraid of making unpopular decisions.

If he does go ahead and take the bold option on pensions, it would certainly signal that Sunak really does have his eyes on the main prize. Unlike his ‘buy now, pay later’ boss, the chancellor cannot be seen to rely on borrowing as his way of balancing the books. If he can project himself to Tory MPs as firm but fair on tax and spend, he may have a decent crack at No.10 himself.

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It was just four seconds, but it felt like an age. That was the heavily pregnant pause, the strange silence amid the bearpit hubbub, that marked Boris Johnson’s delayed response to a direct hit from Keir Starmer in PMQs.

The Labour leader had picked up on widespread disruption being caused in schools and workplaces by the soaring numbers of people forced to isolate because of Covid’s Delta variant. Businesses were losing staff, holidays were being put at risk, parents and kids were missing school sports days, and some were even denied the chance to watch England in the pub, Starmer said.

Instead of a careful controlled unlocking of restrictions, didn’t the PM’s ‘big bang’ approach mean “we are heading for a summer of chaos and confusion?” Then came that pause. Johnson was still seated, reading his notes, and apparently unaware of Speaker Hoyles’ call to answer the question. “….er, no, Mr Speaker…” he finally blurted out.

PMQs is a chance for an Opposition leader to vent real-time frustrations on behalf of the public, simultaneously making a PM squirm while trying to act as a voice of the voters. And Starmer had been wise to use the weekly exchange to highlight the real concerns many are now feeling as they are ‘pinged’ by the NHS app, even if they are double jabbed.

With Tory newspapers as well as Tory MPs expressing fury at the four-week delay in changes to isolation policy until August 16, this was undoubtedly ripe territory. Starmer knew the real reason for the delay was a sensible fear that ditching isolation now could lead to even higher cases (possibly 25% higher, the Guardian has been told), but he exploited the issue for all it was worth.

Without crediting Dominic Cummings (not least as he’s irretrievably tarnished in the eyes of many of the public), Starmer picked up on the former No.10 adviser’s withering description of Johnson as a wonky supermarket trolley that crashes around uncontrollably. “He is doing what he always does, crashing over to the other side of the aisle,” he said.

It’s unclear if Cummings wants to assert his copyright, but The Trolley is a good attack line on the PM as it focuses not on his ability to mislead or his lack of moral fibre (which the public appear to have spotted and dismissed) but on his competence and that of his government. A fair chunk of floating voters don’t mind a quasi-comedian in charge, they do dislike chaos that affects them directly.

It was Cummings who revealed recently that the PM had told him: “The chaos means everyone will look to me as the man in charge.” The difficulty is that while you can get away with editing the Spectator in such a fashion, it’s hard to run the country on similar lines.

That Johnson replied to Starmer with a tired set of greatest hits (European Medicines Agency, vaccines-vaccines-vaccines) underscored the complacency that some of his own MPs have been worried about since his failure to sack Matt Hancock. And the string of similar non-sequitur answers to the Liaison Committee later may have confirmed that impression.

Asked if he had sacked Hancock, he replied that his Vote Leave bus’s £350m-a-week NHS claim was an underestimate and not worthy of all the ‘hoo-ha’. Asked about today’s confirmed cut in the £20 uplift to Universal Credit, he said jobs were better than welfare. Asked what he meant at the G7 by ‘building back better in a more feminine way’, he talked about the number of women diplomats.

This wasn’t a supermarket trolley with a mind of its own, it was a dodgem car veering forwards, backwards, sideways, moving in any direction other than one that answered a question. The problem may come when the public sees itself in the passenger seat. One man’s cheerful funfair ride is another’s painful whiplash, a condition felt not immediately but sometime afterwards.

Normally, the PM can get away with his chaos theory of leadership because he does it with a smile. The risk comes when, as with his replies to Tory equalities committee chair Caroline Nokes, he does it with a smirk that borders on a snarl. Claiming she “would find fault with almost anything that we did Caroline, with the greatest of respect”, he then added she should “send me a postcard” to suggest a better way to explain his own surreal phrase about building back in a feminine way.

On everything from his lack of a plan for climate change to the absence of a 10-year funding plan for schools, Johnson either changed the subject or promised action would come some day soon. The pauses in policy don’t feel pregnant so much as prevaricating.

As the committee was wrapping up, the PM suggested the public just weren’t that interested anyway right now. “I’m sure our viewers may be switching over to the football,” he joked. He was probably correct about the England football team’s rival appeal compared to the dull business of government. But one suspects the long pause can’t last beyond this summer.

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Follow the money. That line from All The President’s Men has ever since been a pretty good guide to a lot of politics ever since, on both sides of the Atlantic. And as the row continues over Boris Johnson’s ‘big bang’ removal of Covid restrictions on July 19, all the prime minister’s men (and women) are switching focus to the financial and economic consequences of the pandemic.

After spending unprecedented peacetime sums on direct wage support, the Treasury is obviously keen to start balancing the books as soon as possible. Last month, the most significant clue that the PM would not allow further delay beyond July 19 came not in any Department of Health announcement but in Rishi Sunak ruling out any change to his timetable for furlough.

Indeed, despite the four-week extension of lockdown, the state’s element of furlough support was cut as planned on July 1. With struggling hospitality firms forced to find extra cash to support workers, it would have been politically unsustainable to further extend lockdown at the same time as Treasury help was withdrawn. The full removal of furlough by the end of September is another reminder of Sunak’s determination to start going ‘back to normal’.

Economic issues certainly dominated the cabinet meeting today, with Sunak leading the discussion to mark nearly a year since his ‘Plan for Jobs’ was unveiled. He also pointed to the fourth month in a row of falling unemployment, and new OBR figures showing two million fewer people were out of work compared to their original forecast.

Liz Truss gave an update on a new Global Investment Summit in October, building on the new giga-battery factory investment in Sunderland. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told colleagues of his forthcoming “innovation strategy”. So, it’s easy to see why the PM summed up at the end by telling his cabinet that “jobs, investment and innovation” would be at the core of his government’s mission “as we emerge from this pandemic”.

But even as the chancellor cited the OBR, there was less welcome news from the watchdog in its latest “fiscal risks” report, which warned he would have to find £10bn a year to fund a black hole on health, education and transport spending caused by the pandemic. Health alone needs £7bn more than current plans allow.

As well as the pandemic, record public debt and climate change (or rather a failure to act early enough on climate change) were the other big risks, the OBR said. No.10 insisted the figures were merely “illustrative”, but those ministers and Tory MPs who back carbon taxes will have been emboldened by predictions that delaying climate action will cost more in the long term.

The black hole in the public finances looks all the more stark when set against the £37bn earmarked for Test and Trace for two years. Which is why I suspect the Treasury will end up raiding that budget as the number of tests actually decreases in coming months (the Test and Trace budget is already underspent for last year, though few have noticed).

Meanwhile, Gavin Williamson confirmed under-18s who had contact with positive Covid cases would no longer need to isolate from August 16. Sajid Javid said adults with two jabs would also be free of the need to isolate, and would not need regular testing to remain free either (such people would be ‘advised’ to take one PCR test, not a daily lateral flow test).

Of course, simply allowing many more people to avoid isolation will be welcome news not just for the individual but also for the Treasury. More people can keep earning and, surely not a coincidence, there will be less demand for people to be paid by the state to stay at home. Sunak strongly resisted calls from people like Jeremy Hunt to offer a simple salary-replacement payment to encourage more people not to infect others.

If you’re worried about losing income from being forced into self-quarantine, you do indeed ‘follow the money’ – via your wages, because the Treasury isn’t going to offer the generous sick pay many have called for. Yet with spending cuts ruled out by the PM, he and Sunak are going to have to work out whether they tax more or borrow more.

The third option of funding public services from ‘the proceeds of growth’ looks unlikely, with anaemic growth rates forecast once the ‘bounceback’ runs its course this year and next. With inflation causing jitters about servicing the current debt mountain, it may be that Tory tax rises (perhaps with the cover of climate change) become a reality.

The PM is taking a risk on unlocking a country with soaring case rates, but the OBR warning shows he faces equally difficult calls on the public finances – even if his public health gamble pays off. Get it wrong and both our health and wealth will suffer from yet another winter lockdown.

That’s why perhaps the most damaging OBR data was this: the UK fall in GDP in 2020 was the second worst behind Spain and the worst in the G7. Johnson messaged Dominic Cummings last year that the UK could end up with “the double distinction of being the European country with the most fatalities and the biggest economic hit”.

Though the UK is not quite the worst, we are certainly near the top of the wrong kind of league tables. The PM will be hoping the feelgood factor of England winning the Euro football championship helps him politically, and everyone is desperate to have some kind of summer joy after our long, long hibernation. But the facts of life of the UK’s finances are as tricky for him as the facts of death of our Covid record.

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You know it’s time to get worried when Boris Johnson starts talking about honesty. Last year, when he was still refusing to trigger lockdown ahead of the first Covid wave, he actually said “I must level with you, level with the British public, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time”.

He wasn’t so much levelling with us as admitting belatedly that his own inaction was going to lead to large numbers of fatalities. We now know that “herd immunity”, or at least a mistaken belief that the public wouldn’t accept lockdown, lay behind that apparently fatalism on the part of the PM. Patrick Vallance’s warning that a “good outcome” would be 20,000 deaths was more right than anyone guessed.

On Monday, as he set out his ‘Big Bang’ plan to remove all restrictions on July 19, he was at it again. “We must be honest with ourselves,” he said, “that if we can’t reopen our society in the next few weeks, when we will be helped by the arrival of summer and by the school holidays, then we must ask ourselves: when will we be able to return to normal?”

Of course, there was nothing honest about the false choice he then presented (Dominic Cummings reminded us that Johnson “lies – so blatantly, so naturally, so regularly – that there is no real distinction possible with him, as there is with normal people, between truth and lies.). The PM claimed those who wanted a further delay to the lifting of restrictions wanted to reopen “in the winter”, when the virus will have an advantage, “or not at all this year.”

In fact, his own new timetable, of mid-September for every adult being double-jabbed, presented a real alternative for some critics. Greater Manchester Metro Mayor Andy Burnham, hardly a man who wants restrictions to stay a minute longer than necessary, said that deadline would be the perfect time to think about ending mask wearing.

In other areas of unlocking, such as the end of the work-from-home guidance, a slight further delay to September is attractive to others. And even this prime minister’s gift for shape-shifting can’t turn September into “winter”. Several scientists had been urging less of a “Big Bang” and more of a further phased removal of curbs to smooth out their impact.

To be fair, Johnson did have Chris Whitty on hand to say that “at a certain point” further delay doesn’t reduce hospitalisations and deaths, it just postpones them. But Whitty’s and Sir Patrick Vallance’s caution was palpable on the key issue of mask-wearing, their unease reflected in the way the PM talked swiftly about making decisions on economic and not just health grounds.

The chief medical officer set out his three scenarios for personally using a face covering, but more important perhaps was the immediate context in which he placed those conditions. He pointedly said he would keep wearing a mask right now, “particularly at this point when the epidemic is clearly significant and rising”.

But all the caveats Whitty used for when he would deploy a mask – any situation with an indoor crowded space, when told to by a ‘competent authority’, and when others feel ‘uncomfortable’ – just made the case for continued regulation to avoid individuals having to negotiate and police each scenario themselves.

The real significance of the masks debate is that it gets to the heart of the PM’s shift from governmental action to individual action. With previous Conservative administrations having sold off several nationalised industries, there’s little left to flog off other than Channel 4. But on Covid protections, it now feels as if Boris Johnson wants to privatise government responsibility too. Forget levelling up, this seems to be a levelling down of the morality tale of the pandemic.

One problem with this outsourcing of responsibility is that wearing face coverings is actually (as Vallance pointed out) about protecting others rather than yourself, it’s about public health, not private morality. That sense of duty is precisely why many people get jabbed: it protects them but ultimately protects the whole of society from transmission of a highly infectious virus.

At one point on Monday, some in government even hinted that the clinically vulnerable who want to travel on Tubes should only do so off-peak. There is certainly going to be a battle royal with groups such as Blood Cancer UK, which point out that ditching masks is going to effectively force people off public transport. Let’s see if London Mayor Sadiq Khan makes it a condition of carriage.

The PM’s “if not now, when?” approach was also a real contrast with his earlier pledge to be driven by data not dates. And in his punchiest response to any of the coronavirus updates since the start of the pandemic, Keir Starmer was quick to say Johnson was being “reckless”. Starmer also said ministers should hold off on ditching masks, introduce proper ventilation support and promise to pay more to people to self isolate.

The confused public health message on masks left Johnson saying he would wear one on a packed Tube but not in an empty, late night, inter-city train carriage. Most worrying of all however is not the lack of clarity but the potential tensions it sets up. Appeals to ‘courtesy’ may not work when both mask-backers and mask-haters have strongly held views.

I was struck recently by polling showing that lockdown sceptics tend to be Brexiteers, while lockdown supporters tend to be Remainers. Risk maximisers versus risk minimisers. Gamblers versus safety-firsts. As if the nation isn’t riven enough.

With his latest laissez faire policy on masks, the PM appears yet again prepared to let those divisions play out. Which in turn gives Starmer, if he somehow captures a weariness of all the them-and-us politics, the chance to present himself as potentially a healer of the nation, post-Brexit, post-pandemic.

All of us will be crossing our fingers that the government has got its unlockdown calculations right. But if hospitalisation numbers do start going up, Johnson’s political nerve really will be tested. It’s also worth remembering, as Patrick Vallance reminded us, that we will have to wait until next week for the very latest modelling on the actual number of deaths this ‘Freedom Day’ policy entails.