Quarantine won’t help Boris Johnson, even if it is the right thing to do

It is hard to work out what the prime minister’s calculation is, writes John Rentoul. Perhaps he thinks the level of voluntary compliance is high enough to be effective in controlling the virus

Johnson is faced with the kind of choice that Tony Blair says always faces prime ministers: whether to cut off their arm or their leg (Getty)

Are the quarantine rules just for show? Sometimes Boris Johnson gives the impression that he changes the rules when the scientific advice changes, but without seriously intending to enforce them.

The new rules requiring travellers to isolate themselves for 14 days after returning from Belgium seem to be voluntary. As with the quarantine imposed on arrivals from Spain last month, there seems to be no intention to try to enforce the rules or even to check up on people after they have left the airport.

The same problem besets the track and trace system: there seems to be a large minority of people who won’t be tested, won’t pick up the phone to contact-tracers, and won’t isolate. People don’t want the inconvenience of isolation, and don’t want to be the cause of imposing it on others.

It is hard to work out what the prime minister’s calculation is. Perhaps he thinks the level of voluntary compliance is high enough to be effective in controlling the virus. Or perhaps he recoils instinctively from intrusive enforcement by the state: I remember his incredulity when a journalist suggested at a news conference just before national lockdown in March that the police might be involved in enforcing social distancing: “The police?”

The answer is probably a bit of both. And even if he isn’t a principled liberal, he is enough of a politician to know that trying to police private lives will only lead to conflict.

The optimist in him will have been encouraged by today’s figures from the Office for National Statistics, a survey that suggests the number of cases across England was lower than last week’s estimate. The ONS cautiously says that the trend “may have levelled off”. If so, it has done so at a low level: only one in 1,900 people are estimated to have Covid-19. So far, voluntary changes in behaviour do seem to have been sufficient in bringing infection levels down; and it may be that voluntary restrictions are all that are needed to keep them down.

The problem is that the voluntary approach will weaken if large numbers of people are perceived to be breaking the rules. Then Johnson will be under pressure in the opposite direction, from public opinion, his scientific advisers, and the shadow cast from the future by the public inquiry. The British public supported the quarantine on arrivals from Spain: 51 per cent said it was right to take immediate action. One third (33 per cent) thought it was right but people should have been given more notice; only 8 per cent were opposed to quarantine altogether. People also tended to oppose an exception being made for the Balearic and Canary Islands.

Then there are Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer. They are understandably nervous about allowing the virus to get out of control again, having been criticised for acting too slowly in February and March. Johnson, with half an eye on the public inquiry, has to follow their advice, while constantly pushing for schools to reopen and jobs to be saved.

Thus Johnson is faced with the kind of choice that Tony Blair says always faces prime ministers: whether to cut off their arm or their leg. On one side he has the majority of the public, who want stringent, even authoritarian measures to suppress the virus, and who probably expect the government to pursue a “zero Covid” policy, which is unrealistic – or which would lead to 1930s levels of mass unemployment.

On the other side, the prime minister knows that fewer people are in hospital with coronavirus than since the start of the outbreak, and that fewer people overall are dying than would be expected at this time of year – using Whitty’s favoured measure of excess deaths from all causes. Hence Johnson’s appearance of straining, with Vallance and Whitty holding him back, to open the country up again.

He cannot be explicit about his preference for the voluntary approach, because if he said it was up to people to decide whether or not to follow the rules, fewer people would. He has already undermined his authority on that front by appearing to tolerate his adviser Dominic Cummings deciding how to interpret the rules for himself. But it may be that voluntary compliance will be enough. We have to hope so.