It’s not ‘too early’ for Boris Johnson to admit he’s wrong – he’s just too much of a coward

The prime minister says we must ‘learn lessons’ from the coronavirus death toll his own scientist said could have been halved, but he also says it is ‘too early’ to learn them.

“In the long run, we are all dead,” the economist John Maynard Keynes said, while getting annoyed at the government for thinking everything would be fine if it just did nothing.

Keynes was quite the soothsayer of his day, but 2020 was a vision too far for him. Now, what happens is our government does nothing and in the long term, they get away with it, because in the short term we’re all dead.

When Boris Johnson wandered out for the Downing Street press conference, which has now come to be his weekly audience with the country of which he is nominally in charge, he did so to the rather awkward background mood music of one of his own scientific advisers having said, an hour previously, that if he’d introduced lockdown a week earlier, around 25,000 fewer people would now be dead.

That is what is known in journalese as a “bombshell” but the word doesn’t quite suffice. History only records two bombshells on anywhere like this scale, and they were sufficient to end the Second World War.

Professor Neil Ferguson, whose own terrifying modelling on likely fatalities had led to the lockdown in the first place, had told the Science and Technology Select Committee that a week’s delay, in March, had doubled the death toll.

It’s hard to tell whether this frank admission (and it was an admission – Neil Ferguson had been part of the advisory group that had “unanimously” advised against implementing lockdown immediately) had shaken the prime minister.

The prime minister never looks unshaken. In purely aesthetic terms, he has been fleeing a deadly blast radius all of his adult life.

It’s also hard to know quite what the prime minister makes of Ferguson. A few weeks ago, Boris Johnson and various other cabinet ministers were all very angry with him for breaking the rules on lockdown, for which he did the decent thing and resigned immediately.

Now, one imagines, they are even more angry with him for having done the decent thing and resigning. If he’d just refused to quit and made up some rubbish about driving his car to test his eyesight, he would have made them all look a lot less stupid.

Anyway. Johnson had brought with him two reasons why everyone should just ignore what Neil Ferguson had said about the 25,000 preventable deaths. It was, as always, “too early” to compare what has happened in this country, which has the highest excess death rate in the world, with what has happened in any of the 203 others, which don’t.

But we would also learn that it was vital to “look back” to “learn lessons”, to see “what could be done differently,” from now on.

It was important, then, to “learn lessons”, but far too early to say what those lessons might be. That phrase about “learning lessons” was uttered, by my count, six times by the prime minister. One might hope that this great orator, communicator, might have been able to alight on a different formulation, it being the day it had also been announced that the nation’s children aren’t be going to be learning any lessons at all, for six whole months.

Perhaps the lesson we can all learn is that old one from science, about Brownian motion, just by watching the daily Downing Street briefing, where the blame for everything having gone so utterly wrong seems to move in random around the screen under the heavy and continuous bombardment in all directions from molecules of utter bulls***.

This country has been debating for a while whether or not it has “had enough of experts”. Boris Johnson likes nothing more than to say he has been “guided by the science”, even when almost every other country in Europe, if not the world, was guided by its science in the complete opposite direction.

Other countries, like Norway, implemented lockdown even when the scientists seemed to be suggesting a herd immunity strategy might be preferable. Other leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, have given clear explanations of where he believes he made mistakes.

It is not the passing of insufficient time that is preventing Boris Johnson from doing the same. It is an insufficient supply of moral courage.

There were one or two tens of millions of us, a few months ago, looking at lockdowns being introduced in every comparable country in Europe, listening to World Health Organisation experts on pandemics, warning about the dangers of inaction. There were one or two people wondering, if the region of Lombardy has been locked down to protect the rest of Italy, why are there still flights between Milan and London and no one getting off them is being checked or screened for anything.

There are, therefore, one or two million people who won’t be shocked to learn that the UK missed 90 per cent of the cases in which coronavirus arrived in the UK, and that the vast majority of it did so not via China but via Italy and Spain. There are one or two thousand people who especially won’t be shocked, not merely because it was so crushingly obvious at the time, but because they are now “sadly” dead.

“We understand a lot more about the virus now than we did then,” was Sir Patrick Vallance’s view on the matter.

Of course, the world does not need armchair epidemiologists. But some comparisons really can be made without any great expertise. Everything there is to know about Johnson has been known for a long time. There is no one we can blame for our terrible mistake.