Boris is worried lockdown has gone too far, but only he can end it
While the PM continues to recuperate, the vacuum in No 10 has made decisive action impossible
At the end of last week, the Prime Minister was beginning to wonder if the country was taking his advice too much to heart. He asked us to stay at home – and we have. At each daily press conference, medical and scientific advisers talk about how well the rules are being observed. What they don’t say is that this was not quite in their original plan. Government modellers didn’t expect such obedience: they expected workers would carry on and parents would leave at least a million pupils in school. But things worked out very differently.
The deaths caused by Covid-19 – up another 881 yesterday – are shocking. But so, too, are the effects of the lockdown. “Our message was supposed to be: keep working, but work from home if possible,” says one minister. “But that message has got lost.” The Treasury expected three million claimants for its “job retention” scheme. Nine million are now expected. The plan was for about one in five school pupils to stay in class: not just the children of key workers, but also those regarded as vulnerable or with special needs. Instead, it seems, just 2 per cent of pupils turned up.
This was troubling Boris Johnson during his initial Covid selfconfinement. He’d started to discuss this with colleagues. Had they overdone the message? The stay-athome exhortations were issued with such vigour because it was assumed – wrongly – that Brits would not really listen. Instead, we’ve become as obedient as Swedes, while the Swedes – in their collective refusal to lock down – are behaving like Brits. But it’s hard to soften the lockdown message with the Prime Minister, the main messenger, out of intensive care – but, until he fully recovers, out of action.
Other options are being discussed. Perhaps adverts, politely telling us that our country needs us to work. (As one minister puts it: “somebody has to pay for the NHS”). Parents, too, might be urged to send their children to school after Easter – if they qualify. But it’s easy to see how employers, workers and parents have gone to ground. “Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives” – a message honed by Isaac Levido, the Tory election campaign chief – has worked. All too well.
Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, had been working with the Prime Minister on the next step: how to stop the end of lockdown being seen as a question of “lives vs money”. As a former economic adviser, Mr Hancock is certainly mindful of the money: a £200 billion deficit could mean another decade of austerity. But other figures – infections, mortality rates and deaths – are rightly holding the national attention. Phasing out the lockdown needs to be spoken about in terms of lives vs lives. Or, crudely, whether lockdown might end up costing more lives than the virus.
Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, has worried about this from the offset. In meetings he often stresses that a pandemic kills people directly and indirectly. A smaller economy means a poorer society and less money for the NHS – eventually. But right now, he says, there will be parents avoiding the NHS, not vaccinating their children – so old diseases will return. People who feel a lump now may not get it checked out. Cancer treatment is curtailed. Therapy is abandoned.
Work is being done to add it all up and produce a figure for “avoidable deaths” that could, in the long term, be caused by lockdown. I’m told the early attempts have produced a figure of 150,000 – far greater than those expected to die of Covid.
This is, of course, a model – just like the model for Covid deaths produced by Imperial College. But estimates of lockdown victims are being shared among those in Government who worry about the social damage now under way: the domestic violence, the depression, even suicides, accompanying the mass bankruptcies. But these are deaths that may or may not show up in national figures in a year’s time. It’s hard to weigh them up against a virus whose victims are being counted every day.
The Cabinet, now, is split into three groups. Some think still the lockdown is, if anything, too lax. (One minister has even proposed adopting a Frenchstyle system, demanding that no one steps outside without papers authorising them to do so.) Then we have those who think the cure is already worse than the disease and want to phase out lockdown at the earliest opportunity. Then a third group who think it doesn’t matter what Government thinks. Public opinion, they argue, led us into the lockdown, so only public opinion can lead us out. The trick is to be ready to seize the moment when it comes.
Dominic Raab is in no place to settle these disputes. When he chairs meetings he stresses that, as First Secretary of State, he’s there just to facilitate discussion and carry out the boss’s instructions. When he arrives in No10, he is guided by the Prime Minister’s officials, rather than his own. When asked, he says that Britain has “a Cabinet system of government” with each minister running their own department. In theory, this is true.
But in practice, the Government was designed as the Boris show. The Treasury and the Cabinet Office have been fused with No10 to create a triangle of power under his control. Sajid Javid resigned as Chancellor in protest at all this, regarding it as a dangerous power grab. What, he said at the time, if No10 erred? The question no one really asked was what would happen if this command-andcontrol Napoleonic model were to suddenly lose its Napoleon.
For the moment, this might not matter: this is not the time for any big decisions. The Covid picture is still too unclear, the uncertainties too great. Other countries are still taking only small steps. Denmark is reopening primary schools and Austria small shops. Even Italy is looking at reopening its factories. Roberto Speranza, its health minister, has said this will mean “learning to coexist with the virus, because it won’t disappear”. That’s another way of bracing Italy for an increase in Covid deaths as the price of returning, slowly, towards normal life.
It’s a difficult call for anyone other than a PM to make. But with latest forecasts saying that a quarter of the British economy might have gone by the summer, it’s a decision that will be better made sooner rather than later.