Anchorless Boris is allowing Britain to drift towards another lockdown

The Government lacks a strategy for dealing with the virus, and the blame game has already started

Let it not be said that Boris Johnson has lost his gift for metaphor. The country, he says, is now undertaking a mission to “stop the surge, arrest the spike, stop the second hump of the dromedary, flatten the second hump.” He admitted that he couldn’t quite remember if it is a dromedary or a camel that has two humps – but the image is fairly clear. Britain, he thinks, is facing a second Covid hump. What is not clear, in the slightest, is what he intends to do about it.

The art of the leader is to campaign in poetry and govern in prose – and the Prime Minister is, famously, a master of prose. But so far, he is governing in riddles. If there is a second hump, does he think it could be as big as the first? Does he seek to flatten it, to stop it getting unmanageably big? Or to stop it entirely? If so, drastic action will be needed now. It’s not just that the country can’t understand his coronavirus game plan: his Cabinet, too, is baffled.

The truth is that even the Prime Minister doesn’t know. The test-andtrace technology has – to put it politely – not worked out the way he wanted. He has no Plan B. Meanwhile, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, has been visiting him with terrifying graphs, numbers and predictions of what will happen if the Government doesn’t act – unless he has a better idea. Which he doesn’t. Local authority leaders call up, also asking for lockdowns. In the absence of a national strategy, he acquiesces.

The result is a creeping lockdown, now affecting one in seven Brits. Polls show confidence in his handling of the pandemic at an all-time low.

The panic in Whitehall isn’t just about a second wave. The official scientific advisers are worried that the coming Covid inquiry will be more like a trial, seeking the guilty men who resisted lockdown.

A blame game has already started. Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, has his defence ready: that he argued hard for lockdown, but was rebuked by Whitty. Poor old Whitty now feels rather exposed and has swung the other way.

Advisers advise, prime ministers decide. Boris could decide not to rush things, to wait and see just whether these new cases do translate into a surge in illness or hospital cases – in a way that they did not in Sweden. He could tell the Covid team that he has a broader remit. He needs to factor in all the effects of lockdown: the extra cancer fatalities, the domestic abuse and the deaths of despair that always follow economic collapse. The Prime Minister’s policy could be simple: to act only if the NHS is at serious risk of being overwhelmed. To merely “flatten” the camel hump.

Or he could go all-out for eradication – and “stop” a second hump. This is the zero-covid policy pursued by New Zealand, a country that closed its borders but lost just two dozen souls to the virus and is now enjoying life close to normal. Eradication would mean far stricter measures now: the curfews, no socialising and perhaps more stay-athome orders. It would be grim, but it would be coherent. People could agree or disagree, but at least they’d know that No10 has a plan.

So how to find a plan? This takes us to the biggest missing ingredient in the Covid debate: evidence. Most of those around Whitty are firm believers in lockdown. If it is so effective, it ought not to be hard to publish evidence proving this point. There have been no end of Covid experiments world over, so we should by now know far more about what works and what does not. But the reports that are being used by the Covid response team are still a closely guarded secret. I’m told, for example, that the Government is sitting on a study that will prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that local lockdowns work.

But there still is no sign of it. With Glasgow, the North East and parts of Wales now all under some form of lockdown, it’s odd that more hasn’t been said to assure people that such drastic measures will have the desired effect.

Leicester was one of the first cities to face extra restrictions when Covid cases surged in June. A big report was published on the problem. But there has not been much scrutiny of why, in the end, this never fed through into an increase in Leicester’s hospital numbers.

We also need to be told more about the Government’s underlying assumptions. Do Whitty’s officials, for example, still believe that anyone who has not had the virus (and, ergo, has no antibodies) is susceptible to it? This was the original theory, but we now have studies suggesting that as many as half of us could have T-cell immunity – perhaps due to previous exposure to the coronaviruses behind the common cold. This matters hugely for models which seek to predict how bad a second wave could be.

The point of publishing evidence is that it can be scrutinised by experts – such as Carl Heneghan at the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University. It was his blog that alerted Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, to the fact that the official “Covid death” figures included anyone who once had the virus, but died from another cause (i.e. being hit by a bus). Hancock was shocked to learn this, and ordered an inquiry. But what struck me at the time was not the error, but that the Health Secretary didn’t know. That he had been fed duff information for so long.

How many other errors, now, are lying undetected? How many policies are now being decided on an untested or false premise? Prof Heneghan has been repeatedly calling for more evidence, pointing out that there is – now – no excuse. The emergency powers ministers took to bypass Parliament mean that far less is open to scrutiny. The lack of openness and transparency has created an environment where mistakes are far more likely to be made.

Without evidence, it’s hard to fix on any Covid strategy. And without a strategy, the Prime Minister will end up anchorless and not in control, the whip hand lying with his scientific advisers. It’s not leadership but a recipe for drift, chaos and confusion – at a time when the country is in dire need of leadership.