Harry de Quetteville:

Seeking herd immunity is not a satisfying quick fix, but it does acknowledge that this will be a long war

Iwent to the Tutankhamun exhibition yesterday. It was a blockbuster with no queues, no jostling to catch a glimpse of the treasures of Ancient Egypt. Quiet as the boy-pharaoh’s grave. “Like the country’s on a war footing,” someone said behind me. And indeed, as we left, there was an elderly chap on the way in, complete with gas mask.

Which war, though, is this? What kind of enemy is the coronavirus? For in the experience of most Britons alive today, war is something that happens elsewhere, and then is over quickly. Ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 took just over two months. Removing Saddam about half that. All it took was overwhelming firepower and a swift declaration of “Mission accomplished”. Easy.

We are being disabused of the first part of this comforting delusion now. Coronavirus was always coming to these shores in a big way. And yet, until this week, we couldn’t quite take it seriously. These things happen abroad, don’t they? It even says so on the tin: Mers, the last coronavirus to scare the living daylights out of health authorities, stood for Middle East respiratory syndrome. When this one was thriving close by in Italy, I still heard it said, and am sure you did, too: “Well, that’s Italian organisation for you.” Such careless talk will have cost lives here.

None the less, somehow we are still clinging to part two of our contemporary conflict gospel: that this war will be quick.

It is easy to see why. From China come pictures of business not quite as usual but not far off, the number of new cases dipping towards zero even as ours spike. Italy has, meanwhile, clasped the disease in an iron grip. From Milan to Palermo there will be many now looking at our approach and shaking their own heads with scorn: “The British! Doing nothing.

E incredibile!!”

We can beat this virus, the news from beyond the Channel proclaims. The right measures, draconian as they may seem, can put this genie back in its bottle.

Well, that may be right, for we must admit that every nation is experimenting. Every nation is seeking to deliver the best outcome for its citizens. But delivering the best is not the same as hoping for the best.

And as it stands, acting as though the coronavirus will somehow be a one-off episode, like an air-raid that we can wait out in our bunkers, is indeed hoping for the best.

Far more likely is that coronavirus will be with us for years, perhaps forever, and that consequently the best way of dealing with it is to build up increasing levels of resistance in the population. In this theory, herding everyone into isolation is not dealing with the problem so much as storing it up for another day – until it emerges to strike a people who have lost their fear of the disease without acquiring immunity to it.

This, surely, is the nightmare scenario, where shock and awe only superficially does the job, where Mission Accomplished means nothing of the sort, and subsequent, understandable, complacency leads to catastrophe.

On the battlefield, that was the case in Afghanistan after 2001, and Iraq in 2003. Indeed, as the mourning relatives of Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon, killed north of Baghdad on Thursday, would remind us, those swift wars of two decades ago are still claiming lives today.

No. As Graham Medley, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Newsnight this week, it is the Blitz spirit that is required. A spirit of endurance, and one that comes from the top. An attitude which, more than three years – years! – after the declaration of the Second World War, saw Churchill declare “not the end... not even the beginning of the end. But, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

How best to prepare for such a long haul? How should the Government best nudge our behaviour from the short-termism of today to the longtermism of old? It will not be easy. Because although the long campaign will be gentler – easier on the NHS and on supply chains while resistance gradually builds among the population – it will be more grating, more moralesapping.

What we all, around the world, secretly want to hear is that life will shortly return to normal. Nothing will be as telling as whether or not governments give in to that desire.

It is their job not to.

Those Beijing authorities now confidently claiming corona is beaten are the same authorities who hid the outbreak in the first place. Doubtless Tehran will declare the virus crushed while the secretly dug mass graves are still fresh.

The alternative attitude, of professional realism to foster herd immunity, seems to be that of the British Government. It does not offer a quick, satisfying, fix, or even the prospect of a quick fix. And that can feel gloomy. But it would be a mistake to confuse gloomy with halfwitted. And half-witted not to see that promises of the quick fix are the gloomiest promises of all.

follow Harry de Quetteville on Twitter @harrydq; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion