Can the vaccine news rescue the government’s reputation?

When voters next head to the polls, will they have forgotten about the misery and incompetence they endured in 2020, asks Sean O'Grady

Matt Hancock will hope that a political turning point has arrived (PA)

Cynics might detect a degree of theatricality in Matt Hancock’s recent lachrymose behaviour, but the health secretary should be allowed a tear or two of relief that a Covid vaccine has arrived. The pictures of the first recipients, Margaret Keenan and William Shakespeare, were genuinely moving. Could this also be a political turning point?

Ministers, not least Mr Hancock, must hope so. Public approval for the way they have handled the crisis has steadily declined since the spring, taking a particular hit after May when the revelations about Dominic Cummings’s behaviour enraged many. It had a broader political effect too: the Conservative Party’s lead over Labour shrank by some 9 percentage points and confidence in the government’s handling of the pandemic slumped. The “Dominic Cummings Effect” had a pronounced and lasting effect.  

Since then a succession of lockdowns, tiering systems, the exams fiasco, testing setbacks, confused messaging, a gradually rising death toll and the second Covid wave has seen the government’s ratings fall still further. The latest polling, from King’s College London and Ipsos Mori suggests that two-thirds of people think the government failed to prepare properly for the second wave, and for the first time more than half the population distrust the government’s response to the pandemic, despite the high profile of liked and respected experts such as Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England. The public may have had some of its faith in experts restored during this crisis. A majority of the country thinks that the government’s performance has been a national humiliation. In Scotland, public attitudes towards Boris Johnson are especially harsh, and he has famously underperformed Nicola Sturgeon, even before he decried devolution as a “disaster”.