The government is stoking division and confusion over Christmas parties

This time of year was always going to be challenging, but we need clear unambiguous advice, writes Ian Hamilton

Is the lack of coordinated messaging more deliberate than accidental? (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

It seems our government has thought of the perfect Christmas gift to give Covid – confusion. Are Christmas parties permitted or not? This depends on which official you listen to, according to our Boris Johnson you should party like never before. But in the same room at the same time his recently rebranded head of Public Health, now called UK health security agency, Jenny Harris advises against this by telling us not to socialise “when we don’t particularly need to”.

Given that no one actually “needs” a work Christmas do or large family and friends knees up then the advice from the person the prime minister entrusts with the nation’s health is that Christmas parties are off.

This was always going to be a challenging time, although hardly unexpected as Christmas falls on the same day every year. It was also something of an inevitability that we’d be facing some new variant of Covid and so it is with the emergence of omicron, which we still don’t know much about. It will take a few weeks before we know exactly how transmissible it is and how effective, if at all, the current Covid vaccines are at reducing transmissibility, symptoms and fatalities.