The government has agreed to allow the biggest superspreader event of the year to go ahead as usual

Editorial: There is no other day of the year when more people mix at close quarters for prolonged periods – across generations and from across the country – than on Christmas Day

(Dave Brown)

As a response to the rise of the Omicron variant, “keeping the data under constant review” is not exactly a call to arms.

The prime minister and his cabinet held an emergency (virtual) cabinet meeting to discuss whether they should approve one of three packages of measures to slow the spread of the virus, reduce the jeopardy to the NHS, protect health and save lives – albeit mostly after Christmas Day. Yet they emerged with nothing.

The usual press conference didn’t take place, because there was nothing to announce. Parliament won’t be recalled. Putting things crudely, Boris Johnson asked his cabinet to consider additional restrictions, and they told him to get lost. It is a tragedy for the country.

It looks very much, then, as though the Conservatives may not do anything until close to new year, or beyond, when the full impact of the Christmas Day wave of infections will be feeding into the data, and the wards.

At that point, even if it is only a matter of days or weeks from now, it may be too late to prevent the NHS from collapsing, with hideous consequences – including the public backlash to the unforgivable blunders now being perpetrated by ministers.

It is not inevitable. Mr Johnson has difficulty persuading his own cabinet and MPs to follow the science. It is an extraordinary state of affairs, and unsustainable.

The prime minister is increasingly a prisoner of his party, and a party increasingly sceptical about science and blase about the dangers to health and the NHS. The disturbing trends in the data detected by Sage and reported by The Independent over the weekend have been wished away.

The advice of Professor Chris Whitty and his colleagues, we must assume, has been disregarded. The Trumpian anti-scientific virus that has taken hold of the parliamentary Conservative Party has infected the cabinet. It is frightening.

Just for a change, Mr Johnson finds himself on the right side of an argument. He has Labour on his side, too, unconditionally, but this seems to embarrass and inhibit him, and he has to have the backing of his senior colleagues. Yet his authority has evaporated – he can no longer lead, because they will not allow him to do so.

He is poorly placed to impose his will on cabinet colleagues who believe that his days are numbered, and are already positioning themselves for the succession. The rebellion last week of more than a hundred backbenchers against plan B shows the extent of that resistance – and irrationality – in the party.

Libertarianism – unthinking, brutally simplistic, punk libertarianism – is in vogue, and every senior Tory on the make is flaunting their defiance of Covid, as if it were Jeremy Corbyn. Except, of course, that in a fight between the Omicron variant and the 1922 Committee, the virus will probably prevail.

The most deluded argument being deployed is that there is not yet sufficient evidence to justify new measures, even as countries in Europe are proceeding towards lockdowns. As Sage tries to explain at every juncture, by the time the hospitalisations and the death trends are clearly on an exponential curve, it is already too late to do much about it.

Acting late means restrictions end up lasting longer and being harsher than they would otherwise be; they also mean more needless deaths. The lessons of 2020 and 2021 have not been learned as we enter 2022.

The booster vaccination campaign, given the relatively low coverage and the seven-day lag for effectiveness, was accelerated much too late for it to make Christmas safe. Nor was there anything like the effort required to vaccinate younger people and children – one area where some European nations have moved faster than Britain.

Many, especially older and more clinically vulnerable citizens, have taken their security into their own hands, and already imposed their own restraints on their behaviour. The new measures will reinforce that; but there is some question about whether overall compliance will be comprehensive enough, given the mixed messages and rank hypocrisy emanating from Downing Street.

With no threat to individual liberties, and not much to the public finances, there was much the government could and should have done now. They could improve sick pay – a constant weakness during the pandemic that has meant that, for many, it costs too much to do the right thing and protect others from infection.

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The supply of lateral flow tests is still not back to normal, again undermining the ability of people to get back to work and into the community when their infection ends.

Most grievous of all, the great superspreader event that is Christmas will be going ahead as normal – in abnormal times. There is no other day of the year when more people mix at close quarters for prolonged periods, across generations and from across the country, than on Christmas Day.

A week or two later, the pressures on ambulances, GP surgeries, and hospitals could prove unbearable. Covid patients and non-Covid care may all suffer.

And even if the risk to public health from Omicron does turn out to be “mild”, the NHS could collapse anyway from a lack of staffing – many of its doctors and nurses are triple-vaccinated, yet have still contracted Covid and so are forced to stay away from frontline care.

The festivities themselves will mean that tougher measures may become inevitable, and with greater economic cost – let alone to the health of individuals and their loved ones. There will be no end of a reckoning, whoever is nominally running the country.