At home and abroad, Boris is now winning the Covid political war

Downing Street has scored a real moral and public relations victory against the EU on vaccinations

If successful politics is all about messaging and news management, Downing Street really seems to have got the hang of it. Either that or the Prime Minister has been on the receiving end of fortuitous triumphs, like a lucky general whose adversaries make spectacular unforced errors.

To have the EU move overnight from trashing the reputation of the UK’s AstraZeneca vaccine – so discrediting its effectiveness that thousands of European doses were going unused – to threatening a block on vaccine exports to the UK and wartime confiscation of manufacturing facilities in a demand for more of the very vaccine that it tried to devalue would have been good enough. But no sooner had the bizarre contradictions and alarming legal precedents in the EU position begun to unravel than along came, by an extraordinary coincidence (or not?) on the very same day, a leaked NHS letter showing that the UK’s own immediate vaccine supply appeared to be in doubt.

By God, what a gift. The Government got a slew of newspaper front pages juxtaposing Ursula von der Leyen’s thunderous warning of all-outvaccine-war with the news of a forced slowdown in our own magnificent rollout programme.

So maybe not a coincidence? As Matt Hancock said in his press briefing, delivery of the vaccines has always been “lumpy” and this particular glitch was not going to cause any disruption to the roadmap dates or interfere with any vaccination appointments already booked. Nothing much to worry about, then. In fact, both of the descriptions of this – very temporary – delay are almost certainly true. There will be a brief hiatus to do with the supply from India – and it will make almost no difference to the scheduled stages of the end of lockdown, or even the predicted vaccination targets (since those were running ahead of schedule anyway). There have quite possibly been a number of previous such letters sent out by the NHS about hiccups in supply, but this one – leaked to the media on that particular day – had a stupendous effect on news coverage of Mrs von der Leyen’s bombshell.

Then again, perhaps this is just journalistic cynicism. Anyway, it is not an accusation of any sort of dishonesty. Everything that was said was genuine (both the NHS letter and Mr Hancock’s dismissive account of it) and, if it was a tactic, it was fair game in what is becoming an increasingly irresponsible propaganda war being waged by the EU in a quite hysterical attempt to save its credibility. In the meantime, there will almost undoubtedly be unnecessary deaths directly attributable to the words and actions of European leaders who are playing political games that have more serious consequences than a bit of headline manipulation for home consumption.

Downing Street has won a genuine moral victory as well as a public relations one. It made a succession of good calls on vaccine requisition and then handled the distribution of those vaccines superbly – even with occasional supply problems taken into account. But it isn’t just in verbal contention with the EU that Downing Street is getting cannier. There has been over the past week a systematic attempt to come to terms with the history of our national Covid struggle. Now, with the present circumstances coming good (a world-beating vaccine programme, numbers of cases and deaths heading downwards, and promising predictions of economic recovery), it clearly seemed to be time to admit earlier misjudgments.

The two biggest mistakes made at the start of the pandemic are generally thought to be the failure to close the borders – particularly to travellers from China – early enough and to lock down internally before the spread of the virus had got out of control. (Both of these points are still subject to argument, but they are the most persuasive criticisms made of early policy.)

The Government has made an explicit point now of accepting that these decisions were wrong. But, crucially, it has pointed out that they were made following the official advice of scientific advisers who believed at the time that closing borders would be pointless because the virus was already circulating in this country, and that too early an introduction of lockdown measures would result in public “fatigue” and loss of compliance. You may recall Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty saying these things quite explicitly at press briefings – a fact which they now admit without reservation.

So this admission of error may seem to be framed rather cleverly in the least damaging way possible: yes, we did the wrong thing but it wasn’t our fault. We were just doing what we had always promised to do – following The Science. But what ministers were actually doing was following the advice of particular scientific experts who would always have been (I am sure) prepared to admit that they were fallible. Because science does not consist of immutable truths and individual scientists are not handing down inviolable sacred doctrine.

Perhaps the single biggest mistake that the Government has made (and is possibly still making, although it drops hints that this is changing) is to misconstrue the nature and objectives of science itself. Scientific endeavour is a way of examining phenomena, adducing evidence for competing theories and putting rival interpretations forward for debate.

Scientists argue with one another all the time, in their symposia and their publications: that’s the whole point. That is how science progresses. Doubt is at the heart of it: a rejection of medieval certainties. Descartes, reputed to be the founder of modern rationalism, began by resolving to doubt everything it seemed possible to doubt until he was left with only his own existence as undeniable because he was the one doing the thinking. (This lone certainty was later refuted by even more modern thinkers, who argued that all that could be asserted was that thought existed, not a person thinking.)

To blame the scientists for giving what turned out to be bad advice is unfair: mistakes and revisions are essential to their occupation. What should never have happened was that elected leaders handed over responsibility for political judgments to people who were unsuited to that role and unaccountable to the country.

Our elected leaders handed over responsibility for political judgments to people who were unsuited to that role