Boris Johnson’s pledge to ‘take control’ of the coronavirus crisis is a risky land grab

Editorial: Already the evidence is mounting that the government is straying too far from the scientific guidance

The government’s spin doctors cannot have seriously wanted their latest briefing translated into headlines. The prime minister is to “take direct control” of the coronavirus, some months after it began, leaving aside the period of his serious illness. It does beg the question raised by the leader of the opposition about who exactly has been in direct control before now.

Certainly Boris Johnson needs to get a bit more of a grip, though that does not necessarily entail gathering all decision-making about strategy and operations into 10 Downing Street. That might quite conceivably do more harm than good. It is not administrative structures that have been mainly found wanting in this crisis but equipment and personnel and the right decisions. It seems unlikely that having this prime minister chairing more key committees will, for example, clear a single care home of coronavirus.

Like a previous assault on the autonomy of the Treasury, this looks like another land grab, but this time at the expense of the Department of Health and Social Care and the public health apparatus. It looks as if Mr Johnson has decided that if everything is done under the direct supervision of himself and Dominic Cummings then things will be well. That is a risky proposition.

Already the evidence is mounting that the government is staying too far from the scientific guidance. The UK’s four chief medical officers vetoed a move to downgrade the Covid-19 threat, yet the government pushed the easing of restrictions as far and as fast as it possibly could – risking a second peak and more loss of life.

Yet even as ministers move, in England at least, to reopen schools, markets, sports and shops, and even as they hint at freeing the pubs, they are also pursuing an increasingly bizarre quarantine plan that threatens to destroy what’s left of the travel, hospitality and airline sectors. A 14-day quarantine of the type announced by home secretary Priti Patel is most effective in the early stages of a pandemic – when ministers rejected the idea.

Quarantine for incoming persons is also more useful when the host country has low levels of infection and transmission, and is receiving travellers from places with comparatively worse problems. This is the opposite of the situation in the UK, whose residents are prevented from travelling on holiday or otherwise to, say, Spain and the Czech Republic. A week in Mallorca or a city break in Prague are currently mere theoretical propositions.

For other destinations, people returning will be required to self-isolate for a fortnight, but with no great effort seemingly being made to police the rules. The Home Office has thus contrived to engineer an inappropriate policy with no substantial benefit to public health that is damaging jobs and is unenforceable anyway. Conservative backbenchers are unimpressed and a promise to bring in travel “corridors” and review the policy in three weeks will probably see it quietly dropped. Ministers should now be seeking a way to climb down from the quarantine fiasco.

Indeed at the daily coronavirus briefing yesterday evening, the prime minister said that the UK will consider the case for “safe corridors” with other countries that have similar or lower levels of the virus and these will be “developed as we go forward”. Although he gave few other details.

Still more concerning is the inadequate test-and-trace regime, the “world-beating” system the prime minister promised some weeks ago. The fact that the testing statistics are unreliable and untrustworthy – according to the nation’s chief statistician – might be a blessing in disguise. Realising the true weakness of our defences against another wave of infections and deaths will be a depressing experience.

What we do know is that the app is not ready, no one is saying what the actual number of tests is, there are too few test-and-trace staff and there are reports that they haven’t been that successful in tracing and isolating contacts. As with the new quarantine rules, little enforcement will be undertaken. No enforcement, for that matter, is proposed for the larger social gatherings now permitted.

The prime minister is unable to master his existing duties, or manage his restless party, still smarting from the mess of the Cummings affair. It should be possible to use his prime ministerial authority to get the important things done, and without trying to run everything from inside No 10. Trying to take direct control of policies and operations that are not functioning properly could make them even less effective.