Holiday chaos leaves the public frustrated – but Boris Johnson’s popularity won’t suffer

Even gloomy news about the spread of new coronavirus variants is unlikely to dent the prime minister’s opinion-poll ratings, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson toasts freedom from Covid restrictions while warning it may have to be postponed (PA)

The coronavirus vaccines are amazingly effective. They have immunised the prime minister against unpopularity. Single doses offered a surprisingly high level of protection, but double doses have made him invulnerable.

So although holidaymakers are scrambling to get back from Portugal, and millions more find it impossible to plan, Boris Johnson continues to bask in public approval.

Scientists suggest that new variants of the virus are more of a problem than they thought, and that the fourth and final stage of lifting restrictions may have to be postponed. In which case the pressure to extend the furlough scheme beyond September may grow, costing the taxpayer (or, rather, future taxpayers) more billions. And yet public opinion, in normal times so willing to think the worst of politicians, seems almost saintly in its willingness to give this government the benefit of the doubt.

Today’s YouGov poll putting the Conservatives 16 points ahead of Labour was carried out before the latest setbacks. All we can say definitively is that neither Dominic Cummings’s vitriolic attack last week on Johnson’s (and Cummings’s own) handling of the pandemic, nor Keir Starmer’s personal interview with Piers Morgan on Tuesday, had a significant impact on levels of party support.

But I doubt that holiday chaos, mixed messages and day-by-day fluctuations in headlines veering between optimism and pessimism will have much effect on the prime minister’s standing with voters. People care more about their holidays than they do about Cummings’s hindsight-based account of Downing Street dysfunction or Starmer’s difficult relationship with his father, but they don’t blame the government for a second summer away from a Mediterranean beach.

Throughout the pandemic, one striking feature of public opinion is that it has wanted longer and stricter restrictions than those imposed by the government. It has been critical of Johnson for not shutting society down soon enough each time, and for not shutting the borders completely. Individually, we may want to go abroad on holiday, but collectively we are quite happy for no one to go anywhere.

For a while at the end of last year, Johnson was thought to have handled the Covid-19 pandemic badly, mainly because he had not been quick or strict enough. He was saved by the vaccines, but the underlying view has not changed, which means that if holidays are disrupted and if the 21 June unlocking is delayed, he will not be blamed.

Mark Harper and Sir Graham Brady, the leaders of the Conservative backbench anti-lockdowners, can insist until they are blue in the face that 21 June must go ahead as planned, but as long as the number of coronavirus cases is rising public opinion will not be with them.

What was interesting about Cummings’s evidence last week was that he confirmed that Johnson is a card-carrying anti-lockdowner himself. If he weren’t prime minister he would be standing with Harper and Sir Graham in the Commons, and writing Daily Telegraph columns making fun of people who are too scared to come out of their houses.

But he is prime minister and he wants to win the next election, and so with various colourful expressions of annoyance and frustration in private (although not private for long), he has always bowed to the scientific advice and hence to public opinion.

Harper and Sir Graham – and probably Johnson too, in private – think that the British public really ought to be more impatient with the restrictions, and fed up with scientists who keep changing their minds according to the evidence. But they are not, and as long as Johnson stays just the right side of the centre of gravity of public opinion, he will remain popular.

I assume that the vaccines will go on being medically effective, and that we will return to some kind of normality soon – if not as soon as Harper, Sir Graham and the prime minister (privately) would like. But it is then that Johnson’s problems will return, because the vaccines will gradually lose their political effectiveness, and the government will become just another bunch of politicians having to make unpopular decisions about taxing, spending and borrowing.