Tory hardliners think the economy matters more than people’s lives. They’ve got it all wrong

Even if lifting lockdown did boost parts of the economy for a very short time, you must also factor in the loss of economic output from all those struck down

It is nice to see Boris Johnson back at work. I mean, I’d rather he wasn’t our prime minister, but to adapt a phrase, a bad PM is better than no PM.

This morning, standing in front of 10 Downing Street again, he sounded lively, and almost echoed Churchill in the last, real, war when he said that we are at the end of “phase one” in our own conflict with this “invisible mugger” – the “end of the beginning” as Churchill put it.

He seems in no hurry to lift the partial lockdown. Good.

Health or wealth? It is the most pernicious of false choices. It is being posed by some of the more reckless commentators on the populist right, and by restless Conservative backbenchers.

We are not even at the stage of getting the new infections firmly down. The peak has only been passed because of the lockdown. It is artificial; lift it and the deaths start piling up again.

The idea that we’re ready to loosen our restrictions is like a paratrooper, halfway down, seeing that their parachute is doing such a good job that they decide they no longer need it and slip it off. Just as well, then, that Johnson is back to tell these zealots “no” – very publicly in Downing Street, and at the very first opportunity.

Lifting elements of the lockdown early would risk disaster – in economic terms, as well as in loss of life and damage to health. We have not yet got coronavirus under control. Any increase in the transmission rate – which would surely follow more shops opening or a return to public transport – could spiral into another wave of infections.

It is impossible to fine tune a pandemic like tickling the accelerator on a car; you will not know for two weeks if you have overdone it, and then you’ll have to slam the brakes on. The NHS and care sectors would be overwhelmed, at huge human cost. It could bring the government down, and it wouldn’t even get the economy back to growth, such would be the chaos.

But let us take a callous view for a moment, and take a view that loss of life is a “price worth paying” to keep the national debt down. It is true too that more jobs will be lost, wages cut and businesses bankrupted the longer the lock down goes on. Yet even if lifting lockdown did boost parts of the economy for a very short time, you also need, in a grim utilitarian calculus, to factor in the loss of economic output from all those struck down by this appalling disease, young and old.

Moreover, the panic and chaos that would soon infect the economy would be just like another virus, destroying economic life just as surely. It is an unsustainable option.

If you are as frightened of Covid-19 as you should be, then you won’t want to get on a bus, in the pub or get back to the office anytime soon – none are worth dying for. We will just have to borrow our way out of this one, collectively, and pretty much write off 2020.