If Boris wants to copy his hero from Jaws he’ll need to be a lot braver

Acabinet minister was interviewed on today this week. big deal. isn’t that what the programme has been doing for about 60 years? indeed it is — but not for the past three months. there’s been a government boycott of serious programmes and boris Johnson has not appeared on today since the election.

He’s ordered his cabinet to stay away too. Or maybe it was his puppet master Dominic cummings who issued the orders? We may never know. either way — and i speak as a listener now rather than a presenter — it was a pretty stupid thing to do. both stupid and, in the longer term, counter-productive.

it’s easy to see what the programme gets out of it. Great chunks of air time filled with the minimum of effort and zero expense. Ministers don’t even get a fee.

all it takes is a couple of phone calls to a spin doctor and bingo! that’s the 8.10am slot filled for the next day.

admittedly, the resulting interview can often be deeply boring, but there’s always the chance that the ministers will say something they didn’t mean to, or take the opportunity to stir things up in the hope of getting promoted. and anyway, you can’t really claim to be the bbc’s flagship news and current affairs programme if you never speak to the most powerful politicians in the land — let alone the Prime Minister himself.

as for him: it’s maybe not such a problem. boris Johnson is not exactly short of opportunities to appear on the airwaves and when he does it’s on his terms. He’s been happy to engage in orchestrated social media stints or answer questions on the breakfast sofas about changing nappies.

Meanwhile, he’s ducked the attack dogs on today or newsnight.

but he did allow a cabinet minister to appear this week. He had no choice. if coronavirus is even half as serious as we are being told, he could hardly treat it in the arm’s-length way he’s been treating the victims of floods. Seeing your home destroyed is a disaster from which people recover. the threat of a loved one dying is different.

So we had the Health Secretary Matt Hancock answering reasonable questions from nick Robinson for a quarter of an hour this week and giving equally reasonable responses. and we learned? in all honesty, not very much. Mr Hancock is a powerful figure but boris Johnson is his boss. He decides what happens next.

THE problem is no one really knows what we’re meant to do. ‘Keep calm and carry on’ is a great slogan — but that’s all it is. even something as simple and sensible as endlessly being told to wash our hands leaves us a little puzzled. What if we’re indoors all day? What if we never shake hands with strangers? Or family? Do we still have to keep washing them? and if so, why?

nor do we know whether to expect more draconian measures. closing schools. cancelling big sports events. Stockpiling food. even shutting down Parliament.

the truth is nobody knows what’s going to happen with the virus. the most eminent scientists accept that a vaccine will eventually be developed — but not in time to deal with the current epidemic.

While we wait, many more of us will almost certainly be infected and the NHS has no way of dealing with them all. it will have to return to its founding principle: according to need. that means those who are already sick and the very old. the rest must be cut loose.

i pondered all this a couple of days ago in a train on the central Line of the London Underground. it was a typical rush hour. thousands of people trying to fight their way into the station. then barging each other aside to get to the ticket turnstiles. then fighting to get on to a train that was already packed to the gunnels.

i swear i could have lifted my feet off the ground and been carried through the doors by the sheer press of people.

For the entire journey, every part of me was squashed against God knows how many other people who were all rammed against each other, some of them sniffling, many of them speaking foreign languages.

and then, when i finally got home, i washed my hands.

it’s hard to escape the suspicion that it must be a pretty dumb virus if it had existed on that train and hadn’t managed to infect at least half of us. What chance do we, all of us potential victims, have of evaluating the risks for ourselves?

in these cynical times you might think that public health messages have had their day. aren’t we so much more sophisticated than we were years ago when we would meekly accept the slogans of the nanny state?

Surely, only Jacob Rees-Mogg listens to nanny? Maybe — but history tells us that sometimes the state really does get it right.

When measles and mumps were a serious threat the message to parents was clear. if children got measles, they were to be shut in their room with the curtains drawn and not allowed out.

My grandmother got the message. When my father came out in spots she did just that and when she had to go out to buy food she ordered him to stay in his darkened room.

but there had been a snowstorm overnight and now the sun was shining. the allure of a snowball fight was irresistible to a small boy. He escaped. and he paid a terrible price. the brightness of the sun on the snow deeply damaged his optic nerve and he lost his sight for many years. He never fully recovered.

NOW, mercifully, we have a vaccine that has killed off measles. Or at least we thought it had. then the appalling andrew Wakefield produced his so-called ‘research’ that ‘proved’ there was a link between the jab and autism.

it was rubbish. He’d deliberately distorted his ‘evidence’. Sadly, some naïve people believe it to this day and measles is on the rise — in spite of the effort by newspapers like this to draw attention to the scandal.

We may be about to find out whether we are still as socially obedient to public health exhortations as we once were.

china was able to stamp on the virus because it is a totalitarian regime. its citizens do what they’re told. they’ll be locked up if they don’t. in France the unions hold sway. their members have a habit of listening to what the authorities say and doing the opposite. Staff at the Louvre walked out rather than risk their health.

My hunch is that the british public will grumble but then take a realistic view of things. they will carry on.

What is the alternative? Do we want to see the armed Forces on the streets, barking through megaphones at those they spot shaking hands or, God forbid, kissing? Do we expect to see panic buying and the Government in a bunker?

this is a test for the country and for boris Johnson. i suspect his instinct is to behave like his hero: the mayor who tried to keep the beach open in Jaws. He wants to appeal to the good sense of the british people.

the admirable chief medical officer chris Whitty has shown, so far, it can be done.

Mr Johnson should take a leaf out of his book and end his pointless boycott of today.