British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to go into self-isolation after contact with his Health Minister Sajid Javid, who is ill with Covid-19.

The government seat Downing Street announced on Sunday - just hours after a spokesman announced the opposite.

Meetings with his cabinet will be attended from the Checkers estate.

At first it was said that Johnson and his Treasury Secretary Rishi Sunak would take part in a pilot project and therefore take daily tests instead of self-isolation. The decision had sparked an outcry over hundreds of thousands of Britons currently sitting at home after being asked to quarantine for 10 days by the National Health Service (NHS) for contact with an infected person.

For Johnson, who, according to the government, is currently at his Checkers estate, the incident comes at an inopportune time. Almost all corona measures in England are to be lifted on Monday. Although the number of infections is currently increasing dramatically. The government justifies this with the high vaccination rate. 88 percent of adults in the UK have now had a first vaccination. Almost 68 percent have already been vaccinated twice. The connection between new infections and hospital admissions as well as deaths has been weakened considerably, so the argumentation. The number of new infections within one week per 100,000 inhabitants was last given as 360 (as of July 12).

For some observers - especially those from political opponents - Johnson's decision comes too late. Labor leader Keir Starmer wrote in a statement: “This government is falling into chaos. Once again, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were caught thinking that the rules we all obey do not apply to them. ”The Treasury Secretary appeared to respond to the allegation in a Twitter post. "[...] just the appearance that the rules do not apply to everyone is wrong," wrote Sunak. The Prime Minister's former chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, also spoke up. "That's what happens when this prime minister tries to be 'my own chief of staff'," Cummings wrote in a post on Twitter.

For others, however, the development was foreseeable. Shortly before the decision, the former Conservative Finance Minister David Gauke wrote on Twitter: “I'm guessing that the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister will go into self-isolation at the end of the day.” Only half an hour later he added: “I should have should write: 'Within an hour'. "