Careless words could cost PM the goodwill of a long-suffering public

Keeping a consistent and clear message to maintain morale is one of the most important lessons of war

When this whole saga began, you may recall, Boris Johnson was very fond of war analogies. Britain had been forced into battle against a “hidden enemy” which would only be defeated by unified action and national resolve etc.

Last week Matt Hancock was at it again: the country was “as close as you can get to fighting a war” which required constant vigilance and sacrifice etc.

With all these nostalgic metaphorical calls on the British Blitz spirit, you might have thought that the fundamental principles of wartime government would have been observed regarding the use of language – which is of such huge importance in ensuring the confidence of the people in a crisis.

So what are the basic rules for a government addressing its population in a war against a foreign power which should also apply (as per Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock’s analysis) to a viral epidemic?

First, there should be consistency and an appearance of agreement between all members of the government (and its official policy advisers) at all times.

Second, there must be an unshakeable sense of calm clarity which is to say, an absolute prohibition on any statement that could give rise to hysteria or panic.

Finally – and most important of all – there is the urgent need to maintain public morale, the collapse of which would be catastrophic: pessimism and hopelessness are the true enemies in any war effort.

It is only fair to say at the start that this pandemic has been so unpredictable that most of the established rules for dealing with health crises have been pretty useless. So I am not talking here about the practical matters of organising hospital resources or instituting testing, which have been largely a matter of trial and error throughout the world.

Whatever mistakes were made – or not – about lockdowns and tracking regimes will have to be debated on empirical scientific grounds sometime in the future. But political leadership is something governments can control and on which they can be judged now.

It would have been beyond the reach of almost any politician to evaluate properly the solutions, which were at various points conflicting, being offered by the scientific experts.

But where politicians should have their own expertise is in the words that they use to present their case for action. Even if they cannot control events, they can control the description of them.

The present Prime Minister is known to be less than assiduous in his command of factual detail but he has an awesome capability with language and an unrivalled understanding of its force. So there is really no excuse for the imprecision and bluster which has created confusion and despondency at best, and outright rebellion at worst.

It would take some beating to produce a statement more utterly meaningless than the sentence uttered by Mr Johnson at his briefing on Friday: “We can’t fool ourselves that we are exempt from a second wave.”

What in the name of God does that mean in actual life-changing terms? Is it a cautious way of saying that we are now, at this moment, into a second wave of the virus?

Or that we might be, but there is no way to be sure? Or that we are not yet in a second wave but if we persist in our dangerous habits (which until a few hours before this announcement, were acceptable) we shall be in one?

And what exactly is this dreaded thing – a “second wave”? What are the criteria for determining that it has arrived? How can it be distinguished from occasional lingering flare-ups of the first wave? All of these questions are left hanging in the air.

What will remain in the minds of most people are those terrible words, “second wave” which keep being repeated wildly and loosely by almost everybody in a position to pronounce on policy, producing a vague vision of thousands more victims dying alone in overflowing hospital wards. Is that what the Government wants – to scare everybody back into submission to the rules (whatever they are now)?

At the time of writing this column, the only thing that can be indubitably and unquestionably stated is that there has been an increase (not a huge one) in the number of positive tests for the virus in some areas. Even to label these “new cases” is dubious because so many of those testing positive are not, in any perceptible sense, suffering from the illness. The fact that they are carrying the virus has been discovered by a vastly increased use of testing. For all we know, they may not be “new” instances of the virus at all: they may have been positive for quite a long time before random testing found them.

Again as I write, there has been no increase in hospital admissions so this rise in the number of positive tests seems not to be equated with what most people would understand by the emergence of a “second wave” of the pandemic. We have not had an increase in disease, we have had an increase in positive tests – which logically would follow from a massive increase in testing.

So why bandy around this peculiarly emotive and almost indefinable term (“second wave”) when you could just speak, strictly correctly, of local recurrences? And why is there so little reference in official pronouncements to the fact that treatment of actual cases of the disease has improved so much that it has become a manageable condition for many patients? That is genuinely good news and would, presumably, affect the outcome of any future second wave.

Many people, I gather, are beginning to suspect that the Government deliberately plays down good news for fear that we will all just throw out the rule book and run riot, thus putting the NHS under threat of being overwhelmed once again. (Except, of course, that the NHS never was overwhelmed.)

The populace has been, as ministers constantly acknowledge, extraordinarily forbearing through this on-again, off-again suspension of life as we know it.

But – you can feel it in the air – the goodwill is running out.

The populace has been, as ministers recognise, unusually forbearing in this on again, off again suspension of life as we know it