Yes, people will die, says Boris – just keep calm and carry on

Britain, like virtually no other country, is being instructed to carry on as normal

Boris Johnson has levelled with the British public once before. It was the high mad summer of 2016, he was standing behind a lectern in a hotel function room in Westminster and he drew in a deep breath. “I have concluded that person cannot be me,” he said, and in so doing withdrew from the Tory leadership contest.

Those of us there that day rushed outside and breathlessly said the word “historic” down our TV cameras, or hammered it into our laptops.

What can we say? It felt historic at the time. But one imagines those who are present at actual historic moments are rarely thrilled by them. On Thursday afternoon, in an oak-panelled room in 10 Downing Street, Boris Johnson – the prime minister these days, somehow – levelled with the British public again.

“I must level with you, I must level with the British public,” he said. “Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”

It has already been observed that he sounded “prime ministerial”. It is hard to imagine anyone not doing so. The weight of the moment is too heavy even for the lightest shoulders. Joe Pasquale would have sounded prime ministerial, given the chance.

He was again flanked by experts of the kind that, back then, Michael Gove was very keen to assert that the country had had enough of.

In a perverse way, he may even have been right. Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser, are the calm voices of hope and reason in these ever more frightening times.

But what the British public are finding it ever harder to ignore is that the expertise they are offering appears to be very different to the expertise in not just France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy and seemingly everywhere else, but Ireland and even Scotland, too.

Big sporting occasions aren’t going to be cancelled. Schools aren’t going to be closed. Sir Patrick had a monitor and a graph with him to explain why. On one, the epidemic launches up like a rocket. On the other, it describes a parabolic trajectory rather more like a gentle hill walk.

The outbreak must be flattened and lengthened, apparently, and to do this, we must all carry on almost as normal. If you have mild symptoms, a continuous cough or a slight fever, you are to “self-isolate” for a week. And keep washing your hands, but that’s it.

Asked why almost all of the rest of Europe are cancelling sporting events and this country is not, Sir Patrick said the following:

“On average one person infects two or three others. You therefore have a very low probability of infecting a large number of people in a stadium.

“Most of the transmission tends to take place with friends and colleagues. Not in big environments.”

Of course, we defer to the expertise of the scientists. Though it is very hard not to dwell on the reality that sporting occasions do not occur when 60,000 people descend from space into some grand stadium then teleport away at the end. They are the focal point of thousands of little get-togethers with friends and colleagues and families, in pubs, in cars, on packed trains. They bring grandparents and grandchildren together like little else. There is also the certain fact that no one, in any football stadium, ever, anywhere in the world, has ever washed their hands for 20 seconds.

The standard displacement activity for a cancelled football match is not a 50,000 strong trip to the pub. It is a disappointed shrug of the shoulders. In these times, it would be replaced with a slight sense of irritation, not some alternative higher risk activity.

We would learn, again, that the grand plan is to move the peak of the virus into the summer. To not go too early with the preventative measures or people will be bored of them when the more crucial time comes.

It is also to alleviate the pressures on the NHS, which is far less well equipped to deal with the crisis than, for example, the far superior services in wealthy Lombardy, which are now completely overrun. China handled things differently too, but China also built two new mega-hospitals from scratch in two weeks.

In highly unusual circumstances, almost all of what Boris Johnson said had been said an hour earlier, by Nicola Sturgeon, who had dialled into the same emergency meeting, and had the same conclusions to share. She has decided to suspend large public gatherings, like football matches, not specifically to contain the virus, but to liberate police and ambulance services from having to attend them when there are other priorities.

It’s not quite the case that we are being asked to hope that we have got it right and the rest of the world has it wrong. Different countries are at different stages, and have handled things differently to this point.

But nevertheless, the advice to the English is different: to accept that people will die, but to carry on almost as normal.

There’s never been a range of mugs, tea towels, posters, pens and everything else with that on. There are weeks and months of this to go, but one suspects that not even at our most performatively British are we likely to be able to go quite that far.