Colin Brazier: Whether there was a party last Christmas at No. 10 is not a matter of life and death

So, on Monday the train carriages will be deserted again. Offices will empty and the Zoom meeting will return as a fact of life for millions of employees who’ve been told by the Prime Minister tonight to work from home from the beginning of next week.

For people outside the perpetual psychodrama of Westminster politics, these are the things that really matter.

And the idea, widely put about today, that this announcement – this Plan B – is nothing more than a cunning ruse to hide the Prime Minister’s blushes about a Christmas party a year ago during a previous lockdown, is frankly contemptible.

Am I being naïve? Is Boris Johnson above calling that emergency press conference a couple of hours ago merely to provide him with a political smokescreen?

Well maybe he’s not. But anybody looking tonight for evidence of skullduggery is surely on the wrong track

As the government’s chief scientific advisers made clear, things are moving with alarming epidemiological speed.

SAGE only met yesterday to discuss the spread of the omicron variant, an iteration of the virus that has more mutations than anything we’ve seen hitherto.

The number of cases here is doubling every couple of days. Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, is not a man to lose his head in a crisis.

But he looked worried when he mentioned a call he had today with counterparts in South Africa, who are seeing a 300 per cent rise in hospitalizations.

It’s important to note that there is, as yet, no evidence that this new variant is more lethal than those that have gone before. But its transmissibility is a big problem.

The quicker it spreads, the more people will be in hospital, the greater the burden on the health service. The curve, as the saying goes, must be flattened if we are to avoid trouble.

The Prime Minister’s instincts are, as he said tonight, that we must learn to live with covid but, he might’ve added, just not yet.

We can argue about whether he’s right to submit football fans and nightclub patrons to a covid vaccine passport.

We can disagree about the usefulness or otherwise of masks. But on his decision to press the panic button today we can be clear.

This was a prime minister acting on scientific advice, not using omicron as a way of hiding from current political woes.

The sight of Westminster journalists insisting that the Prime Minister should be talking about Christmas parties and the resignation of his adviser Allegra Stratton, will strike many people as perverse. At one point during that press conference tonight that’s all they wanted to talk about. It was peak media bubble.

Only later on did a journalist get around to asking important questions, questions rooted in the real world – not the abstractions of the Westminster lobby.

Obvious questions, like how will Christmas parties be affected? Will my child still be able to go to school? Can carol concerts go ahead? What about the Nativity play?

All the questions forming like a collective thought cloud in millions of minds across England, but studiously avoided by a journalistic pack puffed-up by its own importance and oblivious to how petty they can occasionally seem.

Sometimes, when a bigger story comes along, you just have to move on. That’s not letting Downing Street off the hook. It’s about showing you understand that, in the scheme of things, whether there was a party last Christmas at Number Ten is not a matter of life and death.

To my colleagues at Westminster I say tonight, get over yourself.

Otherwise there’s a very real possibility that the corrosion in public trust you say the Prime Minister’s evasions has caused, may well the result of your own obsessions.