Coronavirus: Ever-stranger new normal leaves politicians on guard - BBC News
The tensions between the desire to move on and judgements about what's best to protect life remain clear.
The lecterns emptied, the lights were turned off, the union flags left hanging behind the grand double doors of the Downing Street room that's staged nearly a hundred briefings in the last few torrid months.

The prime minister's announcements about how England will take a big step out of lockdown came pretty much as billed.

It promised a new phase, and Boris Johnson and his team hope, a new political era, where they can lift their heads from the intense operational struggles of managing coronavirus, to make the next set of decisions about how the country will cope with the after effects, particularly the economic consequences, of three months of extraordinary lockdown.

At that last outing in front of the cameras (at least for now) it was abundantly clear that this is not the moment to breathe a huge sigh of relief, not a moment when we can return to our lives carefree, and not a moment when the government can assume the dangers of the disease are going only in one direction.

The tensions between the political desire to move on and the scientific judgements of what's best to protect life were extremely clear. The government's top scientists and medics used almost every opportunity to urge caution and restraint.

The relaxation of the two metre rule, in particular, does not mean it's time for everyone to get close, Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty warning of the dangers of a "distorted" message that lets the population move on without heeding the precautions.

Remember Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are taking a slower approach to England.

And so in the coming days we enter as a country, a strange half world where the intensity of the dangers from the virus have faded, but not disappeared - not normal life, as we know it, back with comforting familiarity, but a new, ever-stranger normal where the public and our politicians must remain on guard.