UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave his first speech after recovering from his battle with COVID-19 on Monday morning outside 10 Downing Street.
Said Johnson: “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. And so it follows that this is the moment of opportunity, this is the moment when we can press home our advantage, it is also the moment of maximum risk.”
Johnson added: “This is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle [coronavirus] to the floor, and so it follows that this is the moment of opportunity. This is the moment when we can press home our advantage. It is also the moment of maximum risk, because I know that there will be many people looking now at our apparent success and beginning to wonder whether now is the time to go easy on those social distancing measures.”
Johnson said the UK was reaching a turning point in its battle with the virus, and said he would build a consensus about easing lockdown restrictions: “I want to serve notice now that these decisions [about relaxing lockdown measures] will be taken with the maximum possible transparency and I want to share all our working and our thinking, my thinking, with you the British people. And of course, we will be relying as ever on the science to inform us, as we have from the beginning. But we will also be reaching out to build the biggest possible consensus, across business, across industry, across all parts of our United Kingdom, across party lines, bringing in opposition parties as far as we possibly can, because I think that is no less than what the British people would expect.”
