Boris Johnson is acting too slowly on Covid – again – but will he be blamed?

When something similar happened a year ago, the prime minister did – for a time – appear to pay a price in public opinion, writes John Rentoul, but his popularity quickly recovered

Boris Johnson is reluctant to act – but Keir Starmer is reluctant to criticise (UK Parliament/AFP via Getty)

It is Peter Pan time. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again, as J M Barrie wrote. At this time last year, many were up in arms about Boris Johnson ignoring his scientific advisers. The Sage minutes for September had just been published, revealing that the advisers had urged the government to impose a short “circuit-breaker” lockdown to bear down hard and early on rising levels of Covid-19 infection.

Today, Edward Argar, the health minister, all but confirmed to Nick Robinson on the Today programme that the scientific advisers have urged ministers to reintroduce restrictions but that they had taken a political decision not to. “Ministers set out the stance, but don’t go into the detail of what advisers do or don’t say to them,” Argar said. “There’s a range of advice, views and considerations.”

Asked directly if Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, was advising “plan B” to be triggered, Argar avoided the question: “What we have to make a judgement call on is when is the right time to do plan B and whether it is the right time to do plan B.”

A year ago, the story ended in the crisis of a hastily convened news conference on Halloween at which a new lockdown was announced. This time the prime minister must be hoping it will be different.

He has good grounds for thinking that it will be, because the vaccines will undoubtedly mean that any new wave of infections will result in far fewer hospitalisations and deaths than it would have done last year. But the numbers are clearly bad enough to prompt the scientific advisers to think that the government needs to go further than Sajid Javid, the health secretary, did at yesterday’s news conference.

That means that Westminster will now spend several days obsessing about plan B without being sure what this means. The one thing we know it means would be stronger advice or compulsion to wear masks in crowded indoor places. The scientists think that masks would probably make a small difference, but they are highly visible and easier to debate than advising people to work from home or restricting large events.

Hence the displacement activity of talking about masks. In this we are ably assisted by Javid’s contortions yesterday, when he said that people should wear masks in crowded indoor places, and that ministers and health leaders “have all got our role to play in this”. He didn’t want to tell his fellow Conservative MPs to cover their faces in the Commons chamber, but told Sebastian Payne of the Financial Times, who asked him the question: “I’m sure a lot of people will have heard you.”

It is remarkable that masks have become a partisan signalling device in the Commons, with all opposition MPs wearing them during Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday (apart from Ian Paisley Jr of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Angus MacNeil of the Scottish National Party), while only half a dozen Conservative MPs did so. Whatever virtue is being signalled by Labour MPs it did not extend to wearing masks during the party’s annual conference in Brighton last month. But it is Javid who is struggling with the charge of hypocrisy, because he knows there is no way Tory MPs would wear masks just because he asked them to.

Yet the politics of this is far from clear cut. It might be thought that the prime minister would be in trouble if, once again, he appeared to be being forced into imposing restrictions too late. But it was notable that Keir Starmer stayed off the subject at PMQs, preferring to embarrass Boris Johnson rather effectively over online terrorist incitement.

This may be because opinion research suggests that the “Captain Hindsight” attack on Starmer has cut through. It wouldn’t matter if Starmer were right to press for early and tough action against the virus, as Sir Patrick Vallance has argued in the past and is presumably arguing again, it would probably earn him few plaudits among unpersuaded voters. As it is, Starmer has held back from calling for plan B, leaving it to Tony Blair not only to call for plan B but to set out what it might consist of.

After all, the prime minister was too slow to act a year ago, and although he did for a time appear to be paying a price in public opinion, his popularity quickly recovered when the vaccines rolled out. The voters seem prepared to allow Johnson a remarkable degree of latitude.

A YouGov poll yesterday found that most of the public thought that other recent prime ministers would have handled the crisis better – 29 per cent thought Margaret Thatcher would have handled it best and only 9 per cent named Johnson. But no matter how badly Johnson is thought to have managed the pandemic, he remains ahead in the opinion polls.