Boris Johnson says Christmas parties should go ahead despite new restrictions

Christmas parties should not be cancelled, insisted Boris Johnson, despite announcing a series of measures to control the spread of the Covid omnicron variant. Speaking at a Downing Street briefing, the prime minister said: "The best way to ensure we all have a Christmas as close to normal as possible is to get on with Plan B, irritating though it may be it is not a lockdown. It is Plan B, it is what we set out a while back. And to get your boosters and get your jabs." In response to whether parties and nativities should be cancelled, he added: "They should not... in my view, they should not be [cancelled]. They should follow the guidance, of course, but we don't want nativity kids to be cancelled, we think that it's okay currently to keep going with Christmas parties. "But obviously everybody should exercise due caution, have ventilation, wash your hands, get a test before you go, give yourself - and everybody else at the party - the confidence they're going to be meeting someone who is not contagious. Those are simple things people can do." Asked if mandatory vaccinations would become mandatory, Mr Johnson said he does not want a society or a culture where people are forced to get vaccinated. "I don't think that's ever been the way we do things in this country, and we've been able to achieve through the voluntarism of the British people huge numbers of our population. "There is going to come a point, if we can show the vaccines are capable for holding omicron, that's the key thing that we need to test... I do think we're going to have to have a conversation about ways in which we deal with this pandemic. "I don't think we can keep going indefinitely with non-pharmaceutical interventions, I mean restrictions on people's way of life, just because a substantial proportion of the population still sadly hasn't got vaccinated." Read more here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/... Subscribe to The Telegraph on YouTube ► https://bit.ly/3idrdLH Get the latest headlines: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Telegraph.co.uk and    / telegraphtv   are websites of The Telegraph, the UK's best-selling quality daily newspaper providing news and analysis on UK and world events, business, sport, lifestyle and culture.