Johnson is right – it’s time to put our trust in the common sense of the British people

IT’S not going to work,’ the exasperated Minister said, abandoning his defence of the Government’s roll-out of its lockdown exit strategy. A second Minister agreed. ‘Boris is doing his best. But the No 10 comms team live in a different world. They’ve lost the room.’ Even a new, ultra-loyal ‘Red-Wall’ Tory MP couldn’t hide his concern. ‘The public mood is moving against us. My Facebook page hasn’t been this negative since I was elected. Coming out of lockdown was never going to be easy – but I’m worried if we don’t act quickly and give a comprehensive explanation, the message is going to get lost.’

In truth the message was lost long before Boris presented what he cautiously called his ‘first sketch of a roadmap for reopening society’. A series of chaotic pre-briefings and reverses meant, by the time the PM delivered a perfectly competent address, his words had been lost in a clamour for detail and clarity.

When they came, the result was only more confusion. We could all now picnic, so long as we kept two metres from any stranger. But not in the presence of more than one person we actually knew. We could now visit parents. But only at the sacred distance of two metres. And one at a time. With a ten-minute gap. Our children were to be allowed to return to nursery. But only if they could be made to respect social distancing, stuck to a one-way system and made sure not to share their pens. Anyone who couldn’t work from home had to return. But not by public transport. To set foot on a Tube, bus or train would be nothing less than a dereliction of ‘civic duty’.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, last week was the moment the Government attempted to shelter the nation from Covid-19 by ushering it through the gates of Hades. As one No 10 adviser told me: ‘I’m going to try and explain what the strategy has been, but you’re going to have to bear with me, because I’m basically making this up as we go along.’

FIRST there is the fundamental dichotomy of a government attempting to give clear guidance to a nation that essentially wants to hear two different messages. The message Ministers will protect us all from the virus. And the message they will simultaneously allow us all to go back to our normal lives.

As one official explained: ‘Take the issue of schools. All our private polling was showing people wanted the schools to go back. So we started briefing we were going to allow the schools back.

‘And suddenly the private polling showed people were getting scared at the idea of having to send their children back to school.’

Then there’s the concept of ‘following the science’. Ministers are haunted by the knowledge that in most previous pandemics the second wave proved far deadlier than the first. Hence the need for what’s been called a ‘step-by-step approach’ to ending lockdown.

But each delicate pigeon step, when taken in isolation, seems irrational to those of us yearning to run. ‘The idea was we’d open up gradually,’ said a Minister, so the thinking was, ‘Right, we’ve said you can’t see anyone outside your immediate family. So first we’ll say, “OK, now you can meet one person.” Then we’ll expand it to two. Then four, and so on. But when you actually say only one it’s like, “Well, I’ve got two parents. Or the three grandkids” and the whole thing just looks mad.’

And there’s a third problem. A number of Ministers believe Boris and his No 10 advisers are now excessively in thrall to the ‘R Number’, basically the rate at which t he virus i s spreading through the population. As one said: ‘We’ve got this new alert system based on it. And that’s now the only metric we’re going to use to decide on how we end lockdown. Not mortality rates or hospital capacity or the economic cost or the impact on mental health or anything else. Just this new whizzy R Number.’

Forget the snappy scientific jargon. And the charts, the graphs and the new slogan urging us all to ‘Stay Alert’. The reality is the Government’s initial attempt to ease us out of lockdown has backfired. And it’s backfired for one simple reason – Boris and his Ministers are trying to achieve the impossible.

In 2020, in one of the world’s most mature liberal democracies, the State is actually attempting to stipulate – literally to within a matter of feet and metres – the proximity within which its citizens can interact. It is effectively attempting to eradicate from our society the flu, a virus that has been ever-present since around 410BC, and doing so without a vaccine or cure or any significant form of natural immunity. And it is attempting to stipulate who we can all meet, where we can meet them, how long we can meet them for, what we can do while we’re in their presence, how our meeting must be recorded and how the recording must be shared with the Government and others in the interests of health and safety.

This is an untenable position for a Government elected on a pledge to set Britain free. And for a Prime Minister defined above all else by his boundless can-do optimism.

The cold reality is we face a binary proposition. We either have lockdown and mandatory social distancing. Or we have an end to lockdown and mandatory social distancing. But what we cannot have is what is currently being proposed, which is the halfway house of a state-imposed ‘lock-in’. A situation where rather than be isolated on our homes, we attempt to isolate ourselves in our places of work.

Just think of your own average workday. Your journey in. Your work environment. Your lunch break. Your journey home.

THINK about how practical it would be to go through all this and never stray within two metres of another human being. It’s so fantastically impractical, anyone who even stops to consider the idea for even half a minute can see the unsustainability of it.

It’s time for Boris and his Ministers to invert the telescope.

Until now we have been thinking about how we can hide away from the virus. Now we have to start thinking about how we can live alongside coronavirus.

If it means massive investment in a raft of new Nightingale hospitals, so be it. Distribution of a national supply of effective PPE to every citizen. A 500,000 daily test network. A state- of- the- art – with appropriate privacy guarantees – tracking and tracing network. Resources should be no barrier to these practical safeguards.

But we also have to go further, and shift responsibility for the fight against Covid-19 out of the hands of Ministers, and into the hands of the British people. And as Boris himself said, let common sense prevail – over who we want to meet, when and where we want to meet them, and how much risk we wish to accept.

Because if we don’t, the British people are going to seize that responsibility anyway. As one senior Tory said to me: ‘The big mistake everyone is making is thinking lockdown has worked because Ministers advocated it.

‘It worked because people thought it was the sensible thing to do. And now that view’s changing. On Thursday evening my high street was as busy as it’s ever been. So I spoke to my local police chief, and he said, “We’ve basically given up.” ’

The Government’s lockdown of Britain has broadly been successful. But the launch of its strategy to exit lockdown has not. Boris has momentarily and uncharacteristically lost the room. He must act quickly and decisively to recapture it.

We need to stop hiding away from the virus and start thinking about how we can live alongside it