Sudden changes of direction continue to define Boris Johnson’s coronavirus leadership

Another lockdown has been announced. Schools have been closed. We are back to staying at home, protecting the NHS and saving lives. As with the previous two lockdowns and the scrapping of the government’s desire to let people enjoy Christmas, increasingly alarming data and warnings from doctors and scientists made the decision seem inescapable. All the same, the past two weeks have been yet another spectacle of rapidly changing messages, confused parents, frustrated teachers and a worried public.

The extraordinary difficulties facing government during the pandemic – Covid is a fast-moving picture and the choices it forces upon ministers are hard – do not fully explain this approach to taking decisions. The prime minister’s desire to communicate the optimistic case and his tendency to wait until action is unavoidable still defines the government’s approach in a way that does nothing to improve its chances of success.

Johnson is not learning how to support the country through abrupt policy changes 

The prime minister has pinned the latest policy shift on the new variant. But its impact has been projected more than two weeks ago, the point at which the Christmas advice was changed and many parts of the country went into Tier 4. In the latest press conferences, the prime minister and his advisers acknowledged that the big difference between Tier 4 and the new lockdown is the need to close schools to stop the spread because even Tier 4 was failing to stop the new variant – not because children were more at risk from becoming ill. Yet throughout Christmas the government was adamant that it would keep schools open and maintain the summer’s public exams.

The aim is laudable – and shows the government learned one lesson from the first, long lockdown – the loss of education to a cohort of children, in which the most disadvantaged were hardest hit, many in ways that they will struggle to reclaim. Yet the consequence has been to force schools into expensive preparations – for lateral flow testing of secondary pupils, for example – which they have suddenly had to abandon. They have yet another about-turn to manage, as they try to resume online learning. The government has failed to give schools the necessary preparation for closure or for online learning – or for a replacement for the summer’s exams. There are understandable calls now for children to be given laptops, free mobile phone access to data, and the technology they need to have these lessons. Yet again from the government, the answer is “we are considering those points’. Ministers are failing to prepare – or even to show that they have considered these questions – and Johnson is failing to show the country that his team has done the work to support the country through abrupt and repeated changes of direction.

Party management should not be defining Johnson’s approach

The November lockdown, the move to Tier 4 measures and the Christmas reversal were all accompanied by noises off from his more resistant MPs. In the Commons vote on lockdown 2.0, Johnson saw 34 of his MPs rebel against the measures, on the December vote on new tier levels it was 55 MPs. He seems likely to face less opposition to these latest measures but will still face pressure on when to open up and ease the lockdown. We may see the same problems again.

While there will rightly be yet more focus on failures in Department for Education and its secretary of state Gavin Williamson, the buck stops with the prime minister for these decisions. There are now many accounts of the splits in the Cabinet, with Michael Gove and Matt Hancock reportedly pushing for harder measures sooner and others, including the education secretary, resisting. Differences of opinion in the Cabinet are not themselves a bad thing: they make for better policy. But more chaos has been created by the way this decision process was played out in public. Johnson himself was saying publicly on Sunday that schools would stay open, with DfE staff reportedly told on Monday morning that would remain the case.

It appears that new briefing during the course of Monday, particularly that from the chief medical officers, as Chris Whitty said in the press conference, forced a change in position. The prime minister accepted rising case numbers meant lockdown had to happen. But it is hard to fathom why he conveyed such a sense of certainty on Sunday when the possibility of a change of position was likely. While No.10 argues that it was the numbers of infection rates on December 29 which tipped the balance, SAGE advice from late December warned that without school closure it was ‘highly unlikely’ that a lockdown would reduce the infection rates sufficiently. Ministers should have considered the implications – a further tightening, and closure of schools – rather than insisting they were contemplating no such thing.

Covid is not a normal problem

Unlike with the Xmas closure, the public are better prepared for, albeit increasingly weary of, the changes the government’s decision will mean for their lives and public opinion also shows strong support for the measures. The Christmas narrative about the extreme pressure facing the NHS has been hard to miss. Many businesses are already closed, with many already in virtual lockdown under tier 4. The prime minister’s problem is not in taking the country with him.

No.10 is, nevertheless, trying to manage a fine balance between repressive restrictions and economic or libertarian concerns, and argued that it did everything possible to keep schools open. All government policy involves party management and cabinet debate, listening to conflicting advice, explaining trade-offs and persuading the public. But Covid is not a normal policy problem. Mistakes on decisions can lead, within days or weeks, to the deaths of citizens. A year into this pandemic, however, and the government is continuing to make the same mistakes – and create the same delays, confusion and damage – which have become characteristic of its response. The handling of the latest lockdown suggests that prime minister has still not found a way to take the right decisions at the right time.