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At the end of a weekend in which the nation was meant to be on self-enforced coronavirus lockdown, but the parks and streets and markets appeared to look more like the carnival scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it is perhaps worth a quick **record scratch** **freeze frame** to try and work out how we got here.
It’s not merely that in a pre-recorded statement on Monday night, weighed down with as much personal gravity as the unbearably light prime minister could manage, he enforced a lockdown he has several times ruled out.
That is one of the more straightforward aspects of confusion to wrap one’s head around. It is harder to understand why it has not happened already.
It is very easy to shout abuse at the throngs of people photographed in, say, Victoria Park food market on Sunday lunchtime. We know it’s easy because Piers Morgan has done it.
It’s very easy to either laugh or cry at the vast queues of non-socially distanced shoppers outside your local Asda.
But there can be no doubt that people are profoundly confused about what they should and shouldn’t and can and cannot do, and there can be no doubt that that is not entirely their fault.
Whenever the advice on coronavirus appears to contradict itself, the stock answer, from Boris Johnson or from his leading scientific advisers, is that all that has changed is the speed through which we are moving through the gears of a fixed plan. But even within that context, the information meted out to the British public, who don’t all necessarily pay as much attention to what’s been said as a political journalist might, has been a truly impenetrable mess.
On Sunday evening, Johnson gave a press conference, standing alongside the deputy chief medical officer, Jenny Harries, in which he made it clear that the public would have to stop congregating in public or face new coronavirus enforcement measures.
On 10 March, not even two weeks ago, Dr Jenny Harries was interviewed on BBC Breakfast, and when asked why the Cheltenham Festival was ongoing, and the weekend’s Premier League football fixtures had not been cancelled, she said the following: “The virus won’t survive very long outside. It will lose its viability to transmit disease, and so many outdoor events particularly are relatively safe.”
For many of us watching, that was something of a seismic intervention. The nation does not need armchair epidemiologists, and for those of us who had been tentatively wondering whether it was not slightly mad that millions of people were about to start cramming into giant stadiums all weekend, this provided reassurance. Two days later, the Premier League announced that a full weekend’s football fixtures would go ahead. Had the Arsenal manager, Mikel Arteta, and the Chelsea player, Calum Hudson-Odoi, not tested positive for coronavirus, it is more than reasonable to imagine those matches would have continued as usual.
Now we are meant to accept - indeed we must accept - that the Victoria Park food market poses a mortal threat, when not a fortnight ago, when France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and much of the US were bringing in the kind of shutdown that is now a certainty here, we were publicly reassured that football matches were fine.
The weekend’s devastating write-ups of the last 10 days, principally in The Sunday Times, suggest that even the government’s panel of scientific advisers were divided on the correct way forward, which certainly goes some way to explaining why the public seem so unable to find consensus themselves about what they are meant to be doing.
On Friday 13 March, Sir Patrick Vallance told Sky News that “herd immunity” would be required to beat coronavirus, which would involve 60 per cent of the population becoming infected. Professor David Halpern, the head of the Behavioural Insights Team, better known as the nudge unit, used the term in a television interview.
Two days later, the health secretary Matt Hancock would write in The Daily Telegraph: “We have a plan, based on the expertise of world-leading scientists. Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy.”
We now know that the approach changed after the terrifying findings by the Imperial College scientists, that the plan risked 250,000 deaths. I say “we”. Many people don’t know. Many people don’t follow it that closely. They don’t have a clue what’s going on, and no small factor in that is the government saying something is “not part” of the plan, when what they mean is that it’s not part of the plan anymore.
The role of the prime minister in all of this is nothing short of stunning. Can it really be barely a fortnight since he appeared on live television, bragging about going on a hospital visit and shaking hands with coronavirus patients, and then had his spinners quietly seek to correct the record? That one’s own eyes and ears are no longer meant to be believed?
On Friday evening, asked whether he would see his mother on Mother’s Day, he told the nation, “I hope I’ll get to see her.” On Saturday night, after 10pm, a further statement was issued, urging the country to “do the right thing” and not see mum this Mother’s Day. Even for those half-paying attention, this news will not have arrived until Mother’s Day itself, which is a touch late to change one’s plans.
The panic-buyers are mocked, even though they have been given every reason to panic. News of quarantining the over-70s for four months appears late on a Saturday night on Robert Peston’s blog, and a week later, it doesn’t appear to be happening at all.
(Various doctors still insist to me that this plan is by far the most sensible. A forcible lockdown for those vulnerable, and an attempt to achieve some sort of herd immunity among the rest. Though we trust the experts, even though they don’t appear to trust one another, it is not being pursued.)
London is going to be locked down, say the newspapers. Then Boris Johnson says it can’t possibly happen and talks tedious drivel about this great “land of liberty”. (It is a land of liberty, prime minister. And the people of this land of liberty, on their own free will, are very loudly asking to be locked in their own homes. They really are.).
And now lockdown is upon us, weeks after other countries, armed with the very same science as us, did the same. (Yes, other countries are in different positions, following different courses. But we are now pursuing a strategy of containing the virus, and there is no point pretending that de-containing it for a couple of weeks has helped. As of now, the consequences of that now aborted strategy look set to be among the most devastating events this country has ever known).
On Saturday afternoon, to give but one example, Essex Country Parks proudly boasted that they had scrapped car parking fees (the right decision, given the potential for queues to use the machines.) They loudly called for people to enjoy a nice, socially distanced walk in the park. On Sunday afternoon, having been unsurprisingly swamped for Mothers' Day, they announced they were shutting all their parks until further notice.
Self-isolation... social distancing... these are phrases that meant nothing to anyone two weeks ago. They mean nothing to most people even now. Dig for Victory. Careless Talk Costs Lives. These slogans resonate with people who were born generations after they were ever even used. The coronavirus glossary baffles all who go near it. There is no discernible public information campaign. The advice to stay two metres apart from people has come almost entirely from three lecterns in 10 Downing Street which do not appear to be two metres apart themselves. For the first few of these occasions, the journalists in the room sat shoulder-to-shoulder.
It is not yet two weeks since the budget, in which £30bn of public funds were made available for a coronavirus stimulus package. Nine days later, that amount was increased to at least £330bn, the railways are nationalised and the government is paying private sector wages directly.
It is hard to say we didn’t know we would be here. We chose to be here. Being here was the policy.
Impeccably well-connected journalists say that behind the scenes, Boris Johnson has been tremendously effective – leading, delegating, making decisions. I find this very easy to believe. Even Johnson’s biggest critics, of whom I must count myself as one, cannot in good faith ignore countless similar reports of the last few months.
Both Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have praised his determination and focus, in private meetings, to find a way forward on Brexit. The Irish deputy prime minister, Simon Coveney, who is something of a hero for Remainers, said not that long ago that “Boris Johnson’s visit [to Dublin] was a success.” He added that Johnson had been key to the last-minute breakthrough (and it was a breakthrough).
What has been surprising, over the past nine months and never more so than now, is that Johnson, a performer first and foremost, should have succeeded in private and failed in public.
But the public matters. It really matters. Failures are already locked in. Terrible consequences are grimly, horrifically inevitable.
It did not need to be this way.
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