If the PM had made the decision about the booster mission weeks ago, we might not be in this mess

As so often in the past, the prime minister is having to rely on the health service and the military to rescue him from the consequences of his own mistakes

Boris Johnson gave the NHS little advance warning of this new national vaccine booster mission. Why wasn’t the health service made aware of what would be expected of it – jabbing all adults over 18 in England by the end of the month, meaning more than 1 million people a day – weeks ago? If it had been, we perhaps wouldn’t be facing a crashing NHS website and no lateral flow tests.

As so often in the past, the prime minister is now having to rely on the health service and the military to rescue him from the consequences of his own mistakes. They’ll try, as they always do, because they are dedicated and put public service first – unlike the man in No 10.

It’s worth reflecting on how we got from Boris Johnson’s jolly optimism about this Christmas being incomparably better than last year to a “national conversation” about mandatory vaccines.

Using a Jonathan Van-Tam sort of analogy, Britain’s vaccine programme was 4-1 up against Covid-19 at half time, but the arrival of a key substitute in the Covid-19 attacking zone has transformed the dynamics of the situation. Taking delta off the field and putting new signing omicron on – with the specific remit to get round our vaccine defences – means it’s now 4-3: omicron is fast and has still got plenty of legs.

Like in football, it’s all too easy to blame the manager, but when you’ve got Boris Johnson in the dug-out… well, I’m afraid that’s the inevitable conclusion. Assistant coach Matt Hancock has had trouble off the pitch, and the manager himself has been distracted. He has made errors.

Again, like football, hindsight can turn us all into Jurgen Klopp – but there’s more to it than that. There were misjudgements along the way, and Johnson has to carry the can for those that could be foreseen and were warned about, such as relaxing lockdown too hurriedly, and not running Plan B earlier.

At the moment, Johnson is in all sorts of trouble. He needs to answer questions, but he doesn’t like awkward spot-game analysis or press conferences.

Why, for instance, weren’t NHS staff told exactly what was coming their way? As one health practitioner put it: “This morning please spare a thought for NHS staff who – at exactly the same time you did – found out last night from Boris Johnson they’d be delivering 1 million boosters a day from… today.”

Indeed, why wasn’t the booster programme implemented weeks (if not months) ago? It does seem odd. You can only assume that the NHS teams tasked with this “national mission” weren’t informed in advance because Johnson – that master of presentation – didn’t want the details leaked, maybe because it would deflate the impact of his big speech. That would seem to be missing the point, rather.

As to why we weren’t doing all the jabbing weeks ago, the answers are a bit more convincing. Boosting the booster drive would have taken resources away from dealing with the backlog of non-urgent cases that GPs and hospitals were starting to work through, and, besides, there was no sign of a new variant of concern, and certainly not one that would be so clever at evading the existing vaccines at double-jab strength.

That really was an unpleasant surprise, as was the astonishing speed of transmission. You have to make some assumptions about what is going to happen. With hindsight, the experts and the politicians should have been more cautious about what the next variant was going to be like, rather than implying it was going to be more like the common cold.

The medics say that omicron is “mild”, but what they mean by “mild” could be 1,000 times worse than the worst flu – plus hangover – you’ve ever had. As long as you can breathe unassisted, it’s “mild”. That’s the context.

Like delta, omicron may also not kill you, because of vaccines and new treatments (though there has now been at least one reported fatality linked to the new strain), but could mean a short spell in hospital – hence the impact on the ambulance services and the wards.

So, vaccines are still the answer. Sajid Javid says that he is in personal charge, but it feels too much of a coincidence that the highly effective former vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, was reshuffled out of the job and into education at a critical point – momentum was lost when he was rowled by the relatively low-profile Maggie Throup, who is no-one’s idea of a fireball. It was rather like selling your premier league star striker, and taking a chance on a mediocre recruit from League 1.

Now, Javid says the UK’s performance on booster jabs is better than the rest of Europe, which may be true, but that’s not been the case with vaccination of children and younger people – the big spreaders during this pandemic.

We also let our guard down too quickly on “non-clinical” measures. Had social restrictions and mask-wearing been retained through our complacent autumn, then infection and hospitalisation rates of delta would have been lower; and the NHS further ahead on reducing the backlog of non-Covid cases.

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That would mean more capacity now to deal with the new variant. And, without any hindsight, we did always know that the coronavirus mutates – and a new, more dangerous variant was pretty much bound to turn up at some point.

Returning to the JVT/football analogy, Johnson has long since lost the national dressing room. Distressingly, we now hear people saying that they’ll refuse to comply with masks and modest requests for caution when mixing indoors, because Johnson and his gang are such an obnoxious, party-loving bunch of hypocrites.

It’s not rational, but it’s real enough, and dangerous. His fan base are turning against him. We can’t go on with this.