Boris Johnson will have to take the blame for this coronavirus crisis – his premiership is a wreck

The prime minister will face the music after Professor Neil Ferguson said beginning the lockdown a week earlier ‘would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half’, writes John Rentoul

(Getty)

In any other trade, Boris Johnson would have turned up at the daily news conference and said: “I’ve managed to book an urgent appointment to get my hair cut; I’m off; Rishi’s in charge now, so if you have any questions, you’ll have to ask him.”

But in politics prime ministers tend to go on being prime minister, and to cling to the job long after they appear to have lost it. Thus this prime minister had to go in front of the camera, with a prepared minor announcement designed to make people feel better, having found, by the time he got to the dining room in No 10 where these things are filmed, that one of the government’s top scientific advisers had said the Covid-19 death toll is twice as high as it should have been.

Everyone who has ever worked in No 10 tells the same story. Life in that building consists of a relentless struggle against chaos. It is firefighting, never knowing where the next flames are going to erupt.

Earlier today, Johnson must have felt that the latest outbreak was under control. He had survived Prime Minister’s Questions without serious mishap (although praising the US as a “bastion of peace and freedom” struck a discordant note). He had been on the defensive about the government’s failed attempt to get most pupils back at primary schools before the summer, but was able to make just enough of Labour’s equivocation on the subject to see him through.

Now he had a plan for another small easing of the lockdown so that he could appear to be in control of events. If lone parents couldn’t send their children to school, they could at least form a “support bubble” with another household so that they could get some help with looking after them.

The plan to allow people living alone to merge themselves into another household seemed a sensible and cautious step that would alleviate one of the commonest hardships of the lockdown: the isolation of people living on their own. There would have been complaints that the guidance wasn’t clear, but he might have hoped to emerge from the briefing with people feeling that things were slowly moving in the right direction.

Except that, an hour and a half earlier Professor Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist who quit as a government adviser having admitted a breach of social distancing rules last month, told a select committee of MPs that locking down the country a week earlier “would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half”.

Some people might have imagined that this was the moment Johnson’s premiership was over. They might have compared it to the pound’s withdrawal from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992 that marked the end of John Major’s time in No 10, although that removal van didn’t actually arrive for another five years. Or to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, which helped force Tony Blair’s departure a year later. Or to the exit poll on the night of the 2017 election, a disaster which Theresa May miraculously survived for another two years.

That may be an overreaction. If anything, Prof Ferguson’s comment was directed at himself and his fellow members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage). Prof John Edmunds, another member of Sage, said something similar at the weekend: “I think it would have been very hard to pull the trigger at that point, but I wish we had. I wish we had gone into lockdown earlier. I think that has cost a lot of lives unfortunately.”

Prof Ferguson admitted he was speaking with the benefit of hindsight – “second guessing”, as he put it. Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser and chair of Sage, and Prof Chris Whitty, chief medical officer, again protectively flanking the prime minister today, made the same point.

But I doubt if that will be enough to save the prime minister in the court of public opinion. As Keir Starmer said in the Commons earlier, “it just doesn’t wash” for Johnson to say that the British death toll cannot be compared with that in other countries.

It is already clear that the UK will have one of the worst death tolls from coronavirus, and whatever the complex reasons for that, I expect Johnson will be blamed. From now on, he, like Major, Blair and Thatcher, is fighting to stay in No 10.