Boris Johnson can’t resist setting himself up to be judged – and it is hurting him

The prime minister’s spent weeks confidently predicting that one step or another would be achieved by an ambitious-sounding deadline, writes Andrew Woodcock

Boris Johnson has watched as a number of coronavirus-related deadlines have slipped (Getty)

When Boris Johnson insisted at the daily Downing Street coronavirus briefing that it was “too early” to judge his handling of the pandemic, he was following a hallowed political rulebook.

If there’s blame to be apportioned and you don’t think you can avoid it, then at least put it off as long as you can.

If you can get through a crisis unscathed, then maybe voters will “move on” and forget about it. If they are not willing to let it lie, then an inquiry can be launched, allowing you to dodge questions by saying you won’t “pre-empt” its conclusions. And with any luck, by the time it reports, passions will have calmed, demands for your head abated, and you may even have moved on yourself into a comfortable retirement where angry headlines can no longer hurt you.

So despite the UK soaring to second place in the world Covid-19 tables and precious little prospect of a return to normality heaving into view, Johnson was insistent that any judgement was “premature”.

We must wait until all the data is in, until the pandemic has burnt itself, before reckoning the scale of damage in deaths and job losses and shuttered businesses. Then it will be time to make comparisons and draw judgements.

One problem with this approach for Johnson is that he simply can’t resist setting himself up to be judged. By a splendid coincidence of timing, his protestations came exactly 12 weeks since he said that in 12 weeks’ time we would be able to tell whether we had “turned the tide” on coronavirus.

Equally, he’s spent the past few months confidently predicting that one step or another would be achieved by an ambitious-sounding deadline, only to have to ditch his goal or manipulate figures to be able to claim to have met it by the due date.

His promise of a test, track and trace system by the end of May was fulfilled by dropping the “track” element – the smartphone app mired in technical problems – and going ahead with the launch despite there being little work for the tracers to actually do.

All this done, the Tory peer hand-picked to run the “world-beating” service rather spoilt the show by cheerfully admitting it was “not gold standard” but she hoped to improve it over the summer.

It can’t have helped either that his concern not to judge his performance too early isn’t shared by the scientists who advise his government.

Moments before the PM’s appearance at the No 10 lectern, Imperial College London’s “Professor Lockdown” Neil Ferguson told MPs that, looking back, he now believes that starting lockdown earlier could have saved as many as 25,000 lives.

And standing alongside Johnson, chief medical officer Chris Whitty had no compunction in admitting that there was a “long list” of things he regretted about the UK’s response, principal among them delays in testing.

Far from waiting for the end of the outbreak to assess what had worked and what hadn’t, he said: “We always look back – that is the whole point of having the scientific and medical method. You look back and you say, ‘What could we have done better and what can we do for the future?’”

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling history of mankind, the author identifies the key to scientific progress as “the willingness to admit ignorance”. Earlier societies didn’t ask themselves how to improve life because the feudal kings and priests who led them insisted all the answers were contained in their traditional structures and holy books. Only when people admitted they didn’t know everything could advances be made.

In a way, Wednesday’s briefing neatly crystallised the difference between the political and scientific mindsets. The politician has to pretend he knows everything and has made “the right decisions at the right times”. The scientist knows that the route to the truth lies through being ready to admit when you got it wrong.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor