Boris Johnson is finding out that words can come back to bite you

The prime minister’s upbeat tone can help but not if he is promising too much, writes Andrew Woodcock

Boris Johnson is having his statements questioned by Labour leader Keir Starmer (Reuters TV)

One of the most fundamental dilemmas facing any politician is the question: how much to promise?

Do you make big claims of the marvellous improvements you can make in the country’s fortunes to build confidence and win support, at the risk of disappointing voters when things turn out less gloriously than suggested?

Or do you follow the mantra of Tony Blair, who always said it was better to “under-promise and over-perform”, in the hope that the public will be pleasantly surprised to get anything from what you have presented as a perilous and doubtful enterprise?

There is no doubt that Boris Johnson falls in the former camp, and it’s a tendency that now appears to be rebounding to his discomfort.

The current prime minister is the kind of politician who can’t see an upland without describing it as “sunlit”, can’t imagine a future that isn’t bright and can’t contemplate the British people without reflecting on their ingenuity, their energy and the general likelihood that they are going to deal handsomely with whatever life throws at them.

It’s a trait that has served him well so far, particularly after three years of the joy-sappingly downbeat leadership style of Theresa May.

It is arguable that without his ability to discern a golden pathway in what many saw as the train ride over a cliff of Brexit, he would not have been able to secure Britain’s departure from the EU.

But it’s not an approach that has served him well in the coronavirus crisis.

From the start, his tendency has been to emphasise how things are not so bad and will probably turn out all right, without necessarily having the information to back up his claims.

His first public mention of the disease involved a prediction that the UK’s response would be to “take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other”.

Even as he warned about the need for better hygiene and the impossibility of visiting elderly relatives, he couldn’t resist saying it was alright, he was still shaking people’s hands and was hoping to see his mum for Mother’s Day. As the UK struggled to get a testing programme going, he announced out of the blue that we’d soon be testing 250,000 a day, and when Matt Hancock a month later (and with much manipulation of statistics) got the number up to 100,000, he popped up again to unexpectedly double that figure.

At every step of the way through lockdown, his solemn warnings about the daunting challenges ahead have been rounded off with a confident declaration that Britain would come through it all “stronger than ever”.

And when he wanted to signal a cautious and limited easing of lockdown the following Wednesday, he couldn’t help couching it in positive enough terms to trigger a rash of over-excited headlines about freedom from restrictions.

Now he is facing a Labour leader in the shape of Keir Starmer whose speciality appears to be to go back painstakingly over his past statements and ask: “It didn’t really turn out that way, did it?”

His latest hit was a piece of advice sent out by the government in the early days of the epidemic, in which it was confidently stated that it was “very unlikely” that care homes would suffer coronavirus infection.

Johnson’s response was to insist the words had been taken out of context and used unfairly. Be that as it may, we can be sure that Starmer and his team are at this moment poring through all the statements made by the PM over the course of the crisis to find examples of unjustified optimism. And Johnson being the kind of politician he is, we can be pretty sure they will find them.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor