The Guardian view on the Tories and Omicron: a retreat from reality
At the start of the pandemic, Boris Johnson had the parliamentary majority and the personal authority to dictate a response. Now he has neither. Tuesday’s huge backbench Tory rebellion demonstrated that a large section of the party has lost the will to impose the social restrictions that are necessary to curb the spread of Covid. That insurrection was partly ideological, reflecting a paranoid libertarian view of public health measures as the gateway to tyranny. But partly it expressed a loss of patience with the whole manner of Mr Johnson’s government – the dishonesty that draws MPs into complicity with venal practice, which in turn makes them unpopular with their constituents.
The danger now is a vicious cycle: a disgruntled party makes life impossible for Downing Street, leading to ever more dysfunctional government, which feeds public discontent that is then fed back to MPs. That is traditionally a death spiral for Tory leaders, although Mr Johnson’s resilience should never be underestimated. In any case, the coming months are sure to be marked by internecine Tory squabbles that distract ministers from the task of managing a health emergency. It is hard to conceive of a worse time for the ruling party to beat such an unruly retreat from responsibility.
A doubling of Omicron infections every two days, as appears to be the current trajectory in parts of the country, will lead to millions of cases within weeks. Even if the variant is milder than Delta and its severity is diminished by vaccination, a small proportion of a big number equates to a terrible cost in sickness and all the attendant social and economic consequences. This is why the chief executive of the Health Security Agency has warned that Omicron poses “probably the most significant threat” since the start of the pandemic.
What many of the Tory rebels seem not to understand is that suppressing the rate of infection is vital not just to protect individual health but to maintain a functional health service when there is already a backlog of treatments, and staff are exhausted and unable to deliver care if required to self-isolate. The same applies in many sectors.
In these circumstances, the ideological subordination of collective endeavour to a fetishised notion of personal liberty is facile and dangerous. Also dangerous is a situation in which the prime minister is unable to confront the folly because he has no political authority over his MPs. Worse still, Mr Johnson has no moral authority in the country when it comes to the exercise of social responsibility, given reports of flagrant rule breaches in Downing Street and at Conservative headquarters during the last lockdown.
More regulations might yet be required. The prime minister has pledged to recall parliament if so. Given the irrepressible rebellious spirit among Tory MPs, those measures might only be enacted with the support of Labour MPs, as was the case on Tuesday. That was the responsible thing for the opposition to do, since the alternative meant having no plan for the Omicron wave. But it is not a sustainable arrangement, because the prime minister cannot be trusted to grant the policy input that Keir Starmer is entitled to give in exchange for keeping the nation’s pandemic response on the road.
For years, British politics has been dominated by the ideological fixations of the Conservative party, and its capacity to inflict them on weakened leaders. That unruly dynamic gave us a hard Brexit, and it is now sabotaging the fight against Covid. A party so detached from reality cannot be trusted with the levers of power; a prime minister who was installed to embody that irresponsible spirit will never be able to control it. Even if he battles on, Mr Johnson’s fate is sealed. He is the hostage to the Tories’ ungovernable tendency, which should be his disqualification from leading the government in a crisis.