Blame game narrative against Johnson fails to stand up
There can be no doubt that the Cummings row has become the starting point for an evolving Left-wing narrative about Boris Johnson’s administration.
Johnson is the cavalier who went around shaking hands and mingling with rugby crowds while a lethal virus was sweeping Britain, and whose dither and delay in introducing lockdown has cost nearly 40,000 lives. On the other side are the roundheads, the voices of reason who supposedly pleaded with Johnson to take the virus more seriously but whose scientific advice was rebuffed until it was too late.
The narrative doesn’t stand up because Johnson and his ministers did not rebuff scientific advice, at least not at that time. Everything announced by the Government in the early days echoed advice that was individually expressed by members of Sage, the scientific advisory committee.
Was the Government ignoring the science in pursuing a “herd immunity” strategy? Not according to how Graham Medley, Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, saw things at the time. On March 12, the day that the term “herd immunity” came up at the Prime Minister’s press conference, he told Newsnight: “We’re going to have to generate what we call herd immunity … and the only way of developing that in the absence of a vaccine is for the majority of the population to become infected.” Ideally, he added, he would put all the vulnerable people in the north of Scotland and then gather everyone else in Kent “and have a nice big epidemic in Kent so everyone becomes infected”.
Was Johnson being cavalier when shaking hands in hospital? Not according to Prof John Edmunds, also of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was asked that specific question on Channel 4 News on March 3. “I think now the risk is pretty low,” he said. Advice to the public on how to limit the spread of the virus, he said, “is not for now – it will come in the coming weeks and months”.
Was lockdown being considered by Sage at this time? Not according to
Edmunds, who in the same interview referred to the lockdown in Wuhan by saying: “We’re not going to anything nearly as stringent as that.” Nor was lockdown on the menu in the infamous paper published on March 16 by Prof Neil Ferguson and his team from Imperial College, which claimed there would be 250,000 deaths unless the
Government changed course. They modelled four possible policy actions: “case isolation”, “home quarantine”, “social distancing” and “schools and university closure”, but not full lockdown. The first two were then already in force. On that same day – March
16 – the Prime Minister responded to Ferguson’s paper by recommending people voluntarily refrain from gathering in pubs, theatres and other places. The only measure Johnson was to leave for another four days was the closure of schools and universities, and for good reason.
Other scientists, including Prof Medley in his March 12 interview, were warning of possible negative consequences if schoolchildren – who were unlikely to suffer much from the disease themselves – ended up being looked after by more vulnerable grandparents.
Johnson’s opponents have attacked his failure to ban large public gatherings such as the Cheltenham Festival – held between March 16 and 19 and now blamed by some for a claimed cluster of deaths in the Gloucestershire town. Yet Johnson was following the advice of Sage, which on February 11 said that banning mass gatherings would have a low impact on the spread of an epidemic. What the Prime Minister could be accused of is failing to take economic advice – there is no evidence that economic modelling informed the decision to introduce lockdown. Scientific advisers were allowed to reign supreme during that period at least.
If the Government has shifted its position on how to tackle coronavirus, from one of reluctance to cancel sporting events to one – following the Prime Minister’s near-fatal illness – where it seems scared to relax restrictions, it is because many scientists have themselves shifted position. As Jonathan Van-Tam said yesterday, even the latest wave of unlocking has the backing of the Sage consensus.
Which takes us to another big assumption: that political decisions explain the relative virulence of the virus between countries, or at least most of it, rather than structural factors such as density or even luck. This is also why the Prime Minister is now getting blamed for apparently overseeing what currently looks like the second-highest per capita excess deaths in Europe.
Clearly, errors with care homes have been a major driver of deaths, and here the critics may well be right.
Yet this virus has only been in existence for six months – long enough for virologists to model its structure but too little to understand its full effect on the human body. We don’t really know yet how it is spreading. The two-metre recommended gap for social distancing is not much more than guesswork. We don’t even really know whether a lockdown is the best way to contain Covid.
In deciding early on that he was going to let the science dictate policy, only too late did the Prime Minister realise just how shaky and uncertain the science is. He may now have chosen to chart his own route, finally taking account of broader factors such as economics, but the blame game has already started.