Our leaders have no good choices. We can only wish them well...and hope for the best

That was then and this is another world

As we follow our leaders, our leaders follow the science. Or so they tell us at the grinding press conferences that tick off these days of contagion.

Whenever the questioning seems a little sticky – about the length of lockdown, for example, or the efficacy of wearing a mask in public – ministers, in London or Edinburgh, rush to hide behind the white coats and clipboards of their advisers.

They are, they insist, simply acting on the guidance of the scientists. That’s fine as far as it goes but that is not necessarily very far when scientists can disagree, from lab to lab, country to country. Of course, ministers will listen to the scientists but ultimately the decisions are their own.

And, it is now obvious, those decisions are going to become increasingly difficult in the weeks and months ahead. Indeed, when Boris Johnson returns to work this week, ready or not, he will face horrendous, harrowing choices, with every way forward fraught with risk and peril.

Whenever our leaders are asked to properly justify the decisions taken in the weeks before Covid-19 reached our shores and in the weeks since, there will be many shades of grey. Some, however, will be darker than others.

It will be many months before that reckoning takes place, of course, before Britain and the rest of the world has an accurate understanding of just how much devastation has been wreaked by this coronavirus.

The cost in lives lost and broken by the disease and in the other, possibly more, lives lost as patients with unrelated conditions miss scans, diagnoses and treatment as the NHS moves to combat this urgent new threat, will be almost unquantifiable. Similarly, the economic cost is already almost unimaginable.

If there was, and the evidence inches higher every day, a complacency in Downing Street in the weeks before the virus gripped Britain, a fatalism that there was not much to be done to slow its spread never mind stop it, then there will be an accounting for that. But that was then and this, now, is another world.

The mechanics of how Britain might begin to emerge from lockdown will soon start to take shape, with the need to turn the wheels of a stricken economy tempered by the fear of another wave of Covid-19 and many, many more deaths.

Exactly how or when the process might begin is still unclear but what is becoming clearer with every day that passes is how our lives will be utterly changed. How we work, how we relax, everything, will be transformed for years to come. The sheer scale of that change is still hard to imagine but perhaps it is better that way.

In the meantime, we can only wish our Prime Minister and our First Minister well. They have the most difficult decisions to make on our behalf, whatever science they follow.