Don’t attack a PM with trivialities at the moment when he is saving lives

Sir Keir and the media foolishly imagine that voters care more about wallpaper than vaccines

Everybody I have run into in the last week – neighbours in the street, shopkeepers, staff at the hairdressers – has offered a spontaneous anecdote about their wonderful encounter with the Covid vaccination programme. Based either on their own direct experience or that of someone they accompanied to the local vaccine centre, they have expounded on the pleasantness and efficiency of this massive national exercise. I cannot recall anything like this unanimous outpouring of personal gratitude for a government policy before.

Some of the more extended conversations included concerns about the broader future: for the economy, or employment or children’s education but, perhaps remarkably, even these potential problems were not blamed on the Government but regarded simply as consequences of an unprecedented global crisis with which all countries have had to cope. And not a single one of these conversations with real people contained a reference to Downing Street wallpaper. Which made a peculiarly startling contrast with the broadcast media who were talking about nothing else. Or not quite nothing else: for much of last week, the main news programmes were leading on the horrific events in India, making the story about the Prime Minister’s decor (which the broadcasters clearly found more exciting) seem grotesquely trivial.

Even by the usual standards of Westminster Obsessions vs Real Life, this latest chapter is a shocker. Was there no inkling anywhere at the editorial levels of those news operations, of just how hideous the contrast would be between footage of countless makeshift funeral pyres in Bangalore, and the possible transgression of regulations about loans for refurbishing a government flat? Did it occur to the legions of correspondents who ecstatically piled in on the “sleaze” allegations that their reports would have been preceded or followed, only moments apart, by visions of the kind of Covid hell that this country had been spared by what the public regards as the actions of the Government? Most people – even the ones whose political orientation would incline them to believe the worst of Boris Johnson and his government – probably didn’t quite grasp what the actual breach, if it occurred, might have been. (That any loan for prime ministerial expenses, even when repaid, must be recorded so that it is publicly visible.)

What did attract some general notice was that this overblown farrago seemed to emanate from the character who, only a matter of months ago, was being treated by these very same broadcast journalists as the personification of evil – none other than Dominic Cummings of Barnard Castle fame. In fact, many of these very same broadcasters had been so busy venting at Mr Cummings at the time of that notorious road trip that they failed to ask what would have been the fatal question: does your wife drive?

Now, astonishingly, Mr Cummings’ breaches of confidence are the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, the Cummings-Barnard Castle incident was a much greater threat to the Johnson government than this latest “scandal”. I knew many real people who were absolutely enraged by it, feeling that all the sacrifices they had made to follow the lockdown rules had been treated with contempt first by a chief government adviser and then by a prime minister who refused to sack him. You may think that this will cast some doubt on the value of any further disclosures from Mr Cummings – and that it would be wise for the media to take that into account. But what about the claim that the Prime Minister said he would rather see “bodies piled high”, than force another lockdown? What is the headline here: “Man Under Intolerable Pressure Blows Top and Blurts Out Something He Doesn’t Mean”?

We will see in this coming week’s election results whether – as I would maintain – Mr Johnson’s enemies have made the two most elementary mistakes in political strategy. So eager were they to find a way to discredit him that they seized on the wrong person at the wrong moment. They put the man who was, very recently, the least popular person in the country up against a man who is – at the moment – probably at his highest point of popularity. Bad move. But not without precedent. I can recall a moment back in the early, almost forgotten, days of Tony Blair’s ascendancy when precisely such a miscalculation was made. Not long after winning a landslide in 1997, Mr Blair was hit by the allegation (which proved to be true) that he had personally intervened to alter government policy at the behest of a Labour donor. In response to a request from Bernie Ecclestone (who really was a major party donor, unlike Sir James Dyson who was not) Formula One racing would be exempted from the proudly publicised tobacco advertising ban. This had the look of a genuine scandal which could not be justified (as the manufacture of ventilators could) on any argument for the greater good.

For a historical moment, Mr Blair seemed to be in big trouble. He appeared on the BBC’s On the Record programme to face the music, so heavily made up that he looked like a Punch and Judy puppet, and failed to provide any plausible account of the events. His protestations that he was “a pretty straight kind of guy” relied entirely on the force of his personal appeal and were widely derided. One Tory shadow minister was quoted as saying: “These revelations blow the lid off what looks to have been a culture of deceit in Downing Street under Tony Blair [who] has some serious questions to answer.” Sound familiar? If you remember this incident, you may recall what happened next. Absolutely nothing. Nobody cared. Mr Blair went on to win two more election victories and was only eventually discredited when he joined forces with George Bush on the Iraq intervention – which, of course, affected (and ended) the lives of many real people, unlike the Bernie Ecclestone affair.

Lesson: if you want to derail a government, don’t do it on technical grounds which few ordinary voters care about. And don’t attack prime ministers at the moment when they are busy saving lives.

‘Journalists who once regarded Cummings as the devil incarnate now treat his briefing as the Sermon on the Mount. Real people, however, remember Barnard Castle’