Coronavirus diary: I didn’t think any of it applied to me – but suddenly it did

John Rentoul looks back at how we came to realise that the world was being turned upside down

Another day in lockdown – more questions and uncertainty lie ahead (Angela Christofilou)

I was woken by the silence. That is when I should have known the world was about to change. Usually, the planes start flying out of London City airport at 6am, but I am so used to them I don’t hear them. I mean, I was so used to them I didn’t hear them. That morning, 10 March, was before anything had really happened. The government had told us to wash our hands, and some people had stopped shaking each others’. Offices, including The Independent, were getting ready for staff to work from home, although we weren’t sure that would be necessary. And people were travelling less, hence the lack of planes.

Even so, I didn’t think any of it applied to me. It being Tuesday, I went to the House of Commons as normal. I travelled by Tube, and thought nothing of it. I did a day’s work and came home. It was the last time I was there. The next day was Budget day. I expected to watch from the press gallery as Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn went through the motions of prime minister’s questions – likely to be an even lower-key encounter than usual just before the main event. Then I would be writing about Rishi Sunak’s big speech.

But the first news of the day was that Nadine Dorries, the junior health minister, had tested positive for the coronavirus. I can do the Budget from home, I thought. It is not as good, because part of the political intelligence about a big event comes from the buzz of ideas and conversations in the press gallery offices. But one of the things about my job is that it is perfectly possible to do it remotely.

Sunak’s Budget was out of date before he sat down (AFP/Getty)

I don’t know Dorries, but she is one of the people I might pass on my way to the office. Some of the journalists I work with might have met her recently. Suddenly coronavirus did apply to me. Having half-thought that I’d probably already had it (I think almost everyone did), I now thought I probably hadn’t and, although I wasn’t worried about my own health (the prime minister had already said that for most people it was mild), I didn’t want to spread it, so it was not worth going to the one place I knew where someone definitely had got it.

So I watched the Budget speech and wrote about it from home. The chancellor announced £30bn of extra spending, paid for by borrowing, to deal with the effect of coronavirus. At the time it seemed the main economic impact might be that as many as one in five people might have to take time off work. We didn’t know it, but by the time Sunak sat down, his Budget was already out of date. The prime minister was preparing to make a dramatic announcement the next day.

The mayor himself wasn’t shaking hands. At the time, this was unusual, especially for a politician, and more especially for one on the lookout for votes

The previous week I had been to a reception for journalists held by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. It is an annual event, although this year it was more important because there was an election coming up. You could tell there was an election coming up because Khan and his staff kept using the phrase “two-horse race”. I think this was designed to suggest that Rory Stewart, the Tory independent, was a no-hoper trying to break into a contest between Khan and Shaun Bailey, his official Tory opponent. To me, it suggested that Stewart was Khan’s real challenger.

None of that matters now. The election has been postponed to next year, and looking back it was strange that so many people packed themselves into a tiny space – the mayor holds his parties in what is no more than a corridor in the glass bulb of City Hall with a fine view of Tower Bridge and the City. The mayor himself wasn’t shaking hands. At the time, this was unusual, especially for a politician, and more especially for one on the lookout for votes.

Khan was told that if Prince Charles offered his hand he should shake it (PA)

Khan told me he had just been at an event with Prince Charles, which had raised the question of whether they should shake hands with each other. Khan had consulted his aides, who told him he would have to take the prince’s hand if it was offered. It was, and Khan said he was surprised that Charles shook hands with everybody. I remember being surprised that Khan was surprised. Shaking hands with people is, after all, Charles’s job. (Three weeks later, Charles tested positive and went into isolation.)

Khan’s reception was two days after Boris Johnson held his first news conference on coronavirus. He was flanked, for the first time but closer than two metres away, by Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, in a room in 10 Downing Street full of journalists. “I continue to shake hands,” said the prime minister. In words that would soon become notorious, he tried to sound cheerful and business-as-usual: “I was at a hospital the other night where I think a few there were actually coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know.”

I was at a hospital the other night where I think a few there were actually coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know

Boris Johnson

People were free to make up their own minds, he said, and with a nod to his medical and scientific advisers, he added: “Our judgement is washing your hands is the crucial thing.”

We can now see that the period from the election on 12 December until the prime minister’s news conference on 12 March, the day after the Budget, was a three-month phoney peace. For political journalists, Brexit was a total war that had lasted three and a half years since the referendum. For all that time there was one story. If it had been plotted by the gods, they laid a false trail that dominated most of the narrative, of Theresa May’s doomed attempt to find a compromise acceptable to the EU and to the UK parliament. Then there came the great plot twist, by which Boris Johnson managed, with unexpected help from Jo Swinson and Jeremy Corbyn, to turn his failure to deliver Brexit into an election triumph six weeks later.

Our actual departure from the EU, on 31 January, was an anticlimactic epilogue. It happened during the phoney peace, in which I wrote articles with headlines such as: “Keir Starmer is likely to win the Labour leadership race, because politics is returning to boring normal.”

I usually keep a short list of ideas for possible articles. In the week of the Budget, I had three items on it: David Frost, the prime minister’s EU negotiator, who seems an interesting person (someone had just told me he was a keen Labour supporter at university); another attempt to explain why Heathrow expansion would (and should) never happen; and something on Corbyn’s view of party democracy, which didn’t extend to bringing back elections to the shadow cabinet. After the intensity of the Brexit years, it seemed as if politics had returned to some kind of normality. I thought I might even have time to go to the dentist.

Although I had already been woken by the sound of no planes, and although I had already decided to work from home for the time being, the prime minister’s news conference on Thursday 12 March came as a profound shock. Again flanked by Whitty and Vallance, Johnson said: “I must level with you, I must level with the British public. Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”

He announced that the government was moving from trying to contain the virus to trying to delay its spread. He said that anyone showing the symptoms should stay at home for seven days, and that the aim was to “squash the sombrero” of the graph showing the peak of infections. The government was “considering” banning big sports events, but thought that closing schools could “do more harm than good at this time”. In hindsight, the measures seem remarkably tentative. The prime minister concluded: “Don’t forget, wash your hands and we will get through this.”

At the time, though, it was a lurch into a new, all-consuming single news story. The first two questions from journalists were “How sure are you that the approach is right?” and “How many will die?”

After that, I wrote about almost nothing else in my political commentary. Even articles about Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader were focused on the strange times in which he was to take over. I wrote up a class given by Tony Blair to our students at King’s College London before the shutters came down – and he was asked a couple of questions about the impending crisis. Only my sidelines of pedantry (the Mea Culpa column) and trivia (the weekly Top 10s) kept me from monomania.

Johnson flanked by Whitty and Vallance before the two-metre rule (PA)

The first 11 days seemed to bring unprecedented escalation in the crisis every day. On Monday 16 March Johnson asked people to avoid social contact, imposing what was later described as a “voluntary lockdown”: he urged people not to go to the pub and advised against inessential travel. On 18 March, he was asked about legislating to require people to stay at home and said: “We live in a land of liberty … We don’t tend to impose those sorts of restrictions on people in this country. But I have to tell you we will rule nothing out.” Two days later, the schools closed.

Meanwhile, the chancellor rewrote his Budget twice, first announcing 10 times as much unfunded public spending as in the Budget itself, and then unlimited sums on paying 80 per cent of people’s wages and bailing out companies.

On Monday 23 March, we entered the dreamlike state of full lockdown. The prime minister addressed the nation and said: “We will stop all gatherings of more than two people in public.” People were required to stay at home and shops selling non-essential goods were closed. Since then, time has seemed to stand still.

I recount all this because I think it is important to remember how little we knew when this started, and to try to counter hindsight-based interpretations of what the government should have done. At the time, Johnson appeared sometimes to be lagging behind public opinion. When he was asked on 12 March how sure he was his approach was right, the question meant: why aren’t you imposing a full lockdown as they are doing in other countries? But he was following the advice of the experts, which is why they were standing next to him.

Whitty, the chief medical officer, answered the question by saying that behavioural science shows that “if you start too early, and then people’s enthusiasm runs out just about the peak, which is exactly the time that we want people to be doing these interventions, that is not a productive way to do it; so we want people to do it at the last point that is reasonable, so that people maintain their energy and enthusiasm”.

Since then, and despite time standing still, much has happened. It was only three days after telling people not to leave their homes that Johnson and Matt Hancock, the health secretary, tested positive for the virus. Then came the drama early last month when the prime minister was admitted to hospital, and moved to intensive care “as a precaution” the next day. Followed, three days later, by the ratcheting down of the narrative tension with his move out of intensive care and, after another three days, his discharge to Chequers – the prime minister’s country residence, which also featured prominently in the previous total-immersion news story as the setting for the cabinet split over Theresa May’s Brexit compromise.

Johnson’s video address to the nation, recorded at Chequers on 12 April, was a minor masterpiece of leadership by empathy, praising the NHS and the immigrant nurses who had looked after him and trying to embody, by his vigour and his combination of seriousness and optimism, the Churchillian spirit of KBO.

And then we waited. We wondered at the resilience of the national broadband network, which allowed everyone to watch videos, including of each other, all the time. Experts disputed on social media whether Netflix and YouTube needed to downgrade their entertainments from high definition to standard, but the rest of us were pleasantly surprised that the internet had not collapsed.

On the bright side, lockdown has given us quiet streets, cleaner air and more audible birdsong (EPA)

We noted, too, that the food industry responded quickly to changing patterns of demand, with only strong bread flour for bread makers still in short supply.

We learned about ourselves and the surprising things we enjoy about enforced isolation: the silence, the empty roads, the people being kind to each other and politely acknowledging the etiquette of social distance in public places. The things we miss about the office, or, in my case, both my offices – the idle chat in the press gallery offices in parliament or at Independent headquarters in Kensington.

We learned a lot more about the virus, and a lot more about how much we still don’t know. There is a large and strident group of people on Twitter who are convinced that the government should have ignored Whitty’s advice and shut the country down sooner. (Spending most of my time on Twitter is something that hasn’t changed in lockdown.) But it is also possible that we will end up discovering that many aspects of the lockdown didn’t make much difference to the spread of the virus.

One thing some people are very sure about is that we weren’t ready. At least, they are very sure about that now. I want to listen only to the ones who knew in January what we weren’t ready for. For a while after the prime minister told us many of our loved ones would die we thought we needed ventilators, and for a few days – or it may have been weeks – journalists were intent on asking questions about how many we had, how many were coming and why they hadn’t been ordered months ago. Then it turned out that we didn’t need so many ventilators and that we wanted medical gowns and testing kits. And we still don’t know if face masks make a significant difference or not.

Like most people, I find it hard to accept that some things are not known. Instead of my list of possible articles, I now have a list of questions about the virus and about the economics of recovering from the pandemic recession. I try to find answers, but I try also to reconcile myself to uncertainty.

Meanwhile, I enjoy the quiet, the empty streets, the absence of planes, and the birdsong.