Does Rishi Sunak really think the scientists are moving the lockdown goalposts?

The cabinet appears to be split over the road to normality, with the chancellor urging restrictions be eased sooner, writes John Rentoul

Rishi Sunak, on a high street he wants to revive (Reuters)

The cabinet split over Covid-19 restrictions reopened dramatically this morning, with a headline in the Conservative Party’s house newspaper, The Daily Telegraph: “Sunak concerned scientists are ‘moving goalposts’ on lockdown.” 

After two months in which the tension at the top of the Tory party subsided, it appears to have resumed. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, is reported to be arguing once again for restrictions to be eased more quickly; Matt Hancock, the health secretary, and the government’s scientific advisers are urging patience; and Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is in between, but currently leaning towards keeping restrictions. 

The chancellor is reported to think the scientists have shifted the target from preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed to getting case numbers down still further, to much lower levels, before ending the restrictions. 

The Treasury has tried to rubbish the report without actually denying it. A source told Politico they had “no idea where the story has come from” and another source (or possibly the same one) used a word meaning garbage to describe it. That reminded me of Charlie Whelan, press secretary to a previous chancellor, Gordon Brown, who once admitted that one of his chosen methods of playing down a story was to describe it as “bollocks” rather than “untrue”.  

The denials have been assisted this time by the claim in The Telegraph that Sunak “has told allies that Britain is approaching a ‘fat lady sings moment’ when lockdown must be lifted, never to return”. As a Treasury source told Politico, the “fat lady sings moment” is “not something he would say”. Indeed, it is not something that anyone sensible would say. But it is the kind of thing that a certain type of Tory MP might say, and therein lies the clue to the archaeology of this story. 

The anti-lockdown faction of Tory MPs is still there; its members have been merely sleeping during the current restrictions. Having been defeated by the fact of the faster-spreading variant of coronavirus, it is now rousing itself for the next battle. Sunak, its leader in cabinet, had actually retreated before the November lockdown, to which he readily agreed. But now he is being urged to take up the standard of liberty again. 

The “moving the goalposts” argument has been deployed by anti-lockdown MPs. It is unlikely, however, that this morning’s front-page lead story is a deliberate attempt by Sunak to position himself to win support from the MPs who will decide the first stage of the next Tory leadership contest – but equally the chancellor won’t want to tell such MPs what they don’t want to hear. Thus it is quite possible that some of them think that he is more definitely on their side of the argument than he might actually be, and out of such complexities are journalists’ scoops born. 

This story is essentially true I believe, in that Sunak is arguing to lift restrictions earlier, for the sake of jobs and the wider health of society, even if he doesn’t think the scientists are moving the goalposts. Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, had a persuasive response to that charge in yesterday’s No 10 briefing, which is that, although the pressure on the NHS is starting to ease, the exponential nature of infections means that easing too early could mean it would “get back into trouble extraordinarily fast”. 

But there are bound to be differences of view as the light from the end of the tunnel gets brighter, and as new information comes in about the danger from new variants and the effectiveness of the vaccines. 

In those discussions, Sunak is likely to be on the “open up early” end of the spectrum, while Johnson gives every appearance of a prime minister who has been chastened by his experience of trying to keep things open for too long. He is acutely aware of the danger of having promised good times around the corner too often – even though yesterday he could not resist quoting Captain Sir Tom Moore’s catchphrase, “Tomorrow will be a good day”.

However, I suspect that Johnson will continue to lean towards keeping the restrictions until the pressure to lift them – including from the chancellor – becomes irresistible.