Who now can take the prime minister seriously?

Editorial: Boris Johnson’s credibility is the real cost of those Christmas social events

(Dave Brown)

Even if the announcement of a version of “plan B” was a diversionary tactic by the government, under pressure from Downing Street’s “partygate” scandal, it is welcome and, indeed, overdue. As soon as the new and threatening omicron variant emerged, minsters should, on the precautionary principle, have immediately implemented measures that would limit social interaction and the spread of the virus.

It seems now that omicron may in fact be more transmissible but inflict fewer cases of severe illness, but that was not known when the news came from South Africa that a significantly mutated coronavirus might soon be circulating with the ability to evade the vaccines. Even now, alongside other more encouraging developments, it does regrettably seem to be particularly resistant to the Pfizer vaccine. All the more reason to spur on the booster vaccine programme.

The usual, now familiar measures, will help relieve pressure on the NHS and save lives. Even without omicron and a stabilisation of the effects of the delta variant, the backlog of cases and usual winter pressures on the NHS were causing severe strain in certain services, most notably in ambulance response times. Therefore restraining delta and omicron was essential simply to allow the NHS to attend to its other urgent work.

More mask wearing, Covid status certification (so-called vaccine passports) and extra working from home are the kind of sensible, proportionate measures that will do relatively little damage to the economy and personal liberties but yield a disproportionately effective result in terms of public health. These sorts of policies have worked before in the pandemic to “buy time”, though the opportunities derived, for example on test and trace, were all too often squandered.

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The challenge now, though, is a novel and unwelcome one: how to persuade the public to obey the rules that those who frame them – in Downing Street – ignore? The scenes in Downing Street give the impression of an arrogant young “elite”, usually not in too much personal danger from Covid, mocking the rest of the population, including the clinically vulnerable, and grieving families, who were following the rules out of a sense of self-preservation and of public duty.

Exactly the same problem arose during Dominic Cummings’s infamous trip to Barnard Castle, and it is worth recalling how much time and political capital the prime minister expended on trying to protect his then senior adviser. It is not so different to his recent, absurd, attempt to defend the parties held in Downing Street during last winter’s lockdown.

Since then, many other serious scandals and failures – sleaze, the refugee crisis, the humiliation of Afghanistan, the part cancellation of HS2, tax hikes, a Brexit stubbornly stuck in stalemate, Covid deaths – have drained whatever authority the prime minister once possessed. He may now be asking people to make modest sacrifices, but who will be bothering to take him seriously? That is the real cost of those Christmas social events.