The PM deserves praise for keeping Britain open and the recovery on track
England is now the freest place in Europe. Shops and schools are open, vaccine passports have been dropped and the last lingering Plan B restrictions should go later this month. Nightclubs remain mothballed in Malmö, Mullingar and Munich, but they thump out their hypnotic beats in Manchester. What Boris Johnson once called “the inalienable free-born right of people born in England to go to the pub” is again, well, inalienable.
British blood cells are brimming with antibodies: 95 per cent of us carry them, according to the Office for National Statistics, making us, as Professor David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine puts it, the bestplaced population in the northern hemisphere to get past the pandemic.
Our economy is surging commensurately: new figures show we regained our pre-pandemic GDP in November, before the eurozone. The phasing out of furlough payments has not stopped us having, to all intents and purposes, full employment.
We did not stumble into this happy situation by luck. We got here because ministers made hard decisions in the teeth of resistance from opposition politicians, public health doomsters and panicky journalists.
We led the world with our vaccine roll-out – not once, but twice. That in turn was possible because we had left the EU and stayed out of its common procurement scheme.
At the same time, the PM defied the Eeyores to lift restrictions. When he ended the lockdown in July, epidemiologists called it a dangerous and unethical experiment and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) predicted that hospital admissions would rise to between 2,000 and 7,000 a day. In the event, they fell. When omicron hit in November, Neil Ferguson’s team warned of 5,000 deaths a day and Sage once again predicted thousands of hospitalisations. Again, the PM ignored them and, again, he was vindicated.
That, in my book, matters vastly more than whether he wandered into his garden while officials were drinking alcohol. I appreciate that this view puts me in a minority.
We are drawn to stories on a human scale and find drinks in gardens easier to visualise than vaccine rollouts or infection rates. This particular story gives us an outlet for the accumulated frustrations and grievances we have built up over 22 months. Nothing annoys us more than the idea that the people imposing restrictions on the rest of us were ignoring those restrictions themselves.
In our understandable indignation, we overlook our own infractions. I was berated on Friday by a friend who told me she had been cooped up while the PM had been, as she put it, “gallivanting around”. Actually, in May 2020 she was driving regularly to her daughter’s house and having neighbours to tea in her garden, but I could see that she had genuinely edited these things from her memory.
She is not alone. According to a YouGov poll, 68 per cent of us say we did not break the rules at any point in 2020, with 20 per cent of us admitting to breaching them “once or twice” and five per cent confessing to more than that.
It’s not that the respondents are lying. Rather, as any pollster will tell you, it is that human beings are notoriously bad at recalling their own attitudes and actions. Just as almost no one remembers having backed the invasion of
Iraq – though contemporary polls showed large majorities in favour – so people now misremember their behaviour in lockdown.
None of this is to exculpate the PM who has, by his own admission, been a damn fool. The moment allegations of gatherings in Downing Street emerged, he should have put all the information before the public. The various explanations he might have offered then – that people stepping outside for a drink after sharing an office all day is hardly a party; that it was safer to be out of doors; that most of these events happened while he was elsewhere – are now redundant.
The immediate question, though, is not whether Boris Johnson was in the wrong – everyone, including him, accepts that he was. It is whether someone else would do a better job. Specifically, whether someone else would keep our economic recovery on track.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that, as the disease recedes, life will automatically return to normal. Plenty of people want to hang on to various aspects of lockdown: working from home, assessments instead of exams, universal basic income, the prioritisation of the NHS over other public spending, a permanent enlargement of the state.
By and large, the people pushing for these things are the ones enjoying the PM’s travails. They understand that his easy temper and libertine inclinations are a natural antithesis to the dirigiste society they want.
Indeed, one of the few policy positions that unites Dominic Cummings – the source of many of these stories – with the irreconcilable Remainers and angry wokesters who revel in them, is a conviction that the PM did not lock down hard enough.
True, some Tories opposed the prohibitions. But how many of the PM’s credible successors are in that category? Every front bencher went along with the lockdowns. Sure, they may have given favoured journalists to understand that they voted for them under duress, but they voted for them.
I often think that you need to have watched government at close hand to realise how difficult it is for any politician, even a prime minister, to take on the administrative machine. It is not simply a question of determination; it is also a question of time. Get on top of one part of the Blob, and the other parts bulge around you.
I spoke and voted against the Plan B measures in the House of Lords, and have railed against the lockdown on this page since it began. But I wonder whether any alternative Prime Minister would have been steadier in resisting the public health Jeremiahs, or readier to risk being blamed had things gone wrong.
We are all subject to hindsight bias. Now that Sage has three times been shown to have been too alarmist, plenty of MPs are letting it be known that they would have been quicker to reopen. But would they?
There is something especially distasteful about the way Labour politicians have taken to shroudwaving about people who were prevented from seeing dying relatives when, at every stage of the epidemic, they were pressing for even tighter restrictions.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Boris Johnson were to be replaced as Prime Minister. There would be an immediate clamour for a snap general election – something his successor would have to expend a great deal of capital to resist.
Meanwhile, every journalist would scratch around for past lockdown infractions. Even if the new PM turned out to be purer than pure, is there any guarantee that he or she could hold together the coalition that Johnson assembled in 2019?
This last question is the critical one. The PM was not elected because Tory MPs were fond of him. Recall that, as recently as December 2018, they voted by 200 to 117 to keep the lamentable Theresa May, largely because they distrusted Johnson.
Their attitude changed when, a year later, he led his party to its greatest victory since 1987. All MPs have constituents who, though they had never voted “for the Conservatives”, were happy to vote “for Boris”.
Electoral popularity is the PM’s superpower. Without it, he would be like Spider-Man without the sticky threads. Or, to use a more Johnsonian metaphor, like Achilles without the Stygian bath, or Perseus without the magic helmet, or Hermes without the winged sandals.
At present, unsurprisingly given the week he has just had, the PM’s approval ratings are the lowest they have ever been – minus 52 per cent – while Labour is 14 points ahead. But that could quickly change. Voters had a sense of what they were buying in 2019: a leader who was slow to blame others and a touch shambolic, but also authentic, patriotic and keen to deliver.
He has delivered Brexit, vaccines and an end to lockdown. But, so far, he has avoided the tougher choices – on deregulation, on the cost of living and, above all, on balanced budgets. His MPs know that he has run out of lives, and these choices will determine his survival.
More to the point, they will determine whether, as we clamber out of the Covid chrysalis, we spread our wings and become an independent, wealthy and global nation.
The question is not if he was wrong – everyone, including him, accepts he was – but if someone else would do better