Nearly two months after lockdown began, coming out of it was always going to be a difficult message to sell. It might have been easier if the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, had been a little happier about Downing Street’s plan to announce an easing of the stay-at-home restrictions away from parliament on Sunday night.
Boris Johnson had claimed it was because restrictions had to be altered for the Monday. But in truth the goal was to secure as large a TV audience as possible – although keeping the Speaker onboard meant vital explanatory documents had to be held back until the Commons was sitting on Monday.
In the gap, fateful confusion was sown. Traditional media management required trailing the prime minister’s anticipated easing to the Sunday newspapers, and boldly Downing Street decided to brief its most reliable weekend paper, the Sunday Telegraph, with the revised slogan, “stay alert”.
That morning, though, there was little to back it up. How on earth was it possible to stay alert against a virus? Was it really time to drop the clearly understandable “stay at home” message, even though there were still around 400 people reported as dying every weekday? With little else to do, people rapidly shared their own versions online. “Be Vague, Cover Our Backs, Shirk Responsibility” said one of the many memes circulating.
So the slogan – and the ensuing bafflement – became the story. The Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, tweeted out the Telegraph front page saying it was “the first I’ve seen of the PM’s new slogan”. Welsh and Northern Irish administrations, responsible for their own health policies, followed suit – and a day later Labour-run Wales briefly suggested it would be policing its own border with England. Bewilderingly suddenly, the integrity of the United Kingdom appeared in question.
Johnson’s presidential address came at 7pm and an extraordinary audience of 27.7 million people tuned in to see a tired-looking and unapologetic prime minister read from his prepared script. “No, this is not the time simply to end the lockdown,” Johnson said, while a series of coloured graphics swirled, suggesting that primary schools could reopen in early June and perhaps even bars and restaurants from the start of July.
The prime minister may have only just survived his own brush with the disease, but the 13-minute broadcast was not a moment for reflection. No apologies of the sort offered up last month by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, who had admitted his government was “not prepared enough”. Nor the informal honesty of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who gave a simple explanation of the significance of the R reproduction number.
The British public’s scepticism rapidly turned to satire. Little more than an hour later, the comedian Matt Lucas spoke for a baffled nation, mimicking the voice of the prime minister. “So we are saying don’t go to work, go to work, don’t take public transport, go to work, don’t go to work.” Johnson’s statement was no longer a political announcement; it had become a cultural event.
Conversations buzzed in chat groups: who was really being “actively encouraged” to go into work and what would the situation be on public transport? And – in a nation starved of social interaction – would it be possible to meet a line of friends, all 2 metres distant from one another, or both parents in a park?
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, sought to explain the next morning. People could meet both parents outside as long as they stayed 2 metres apart. Except the government had to rush out a clarification to say, no, people can only meet one parent a time from outside their household, a baffling restriction that made less sense as the week wore on and rules to allow estate agents into homes were relaxed.
It fell to Phillip Schofield, the perennial This Morning presenter, to voice the growing national frustration. “You literally couldn’t write this. If this was in a farce on the telly I would go: ‘That is a bit far-fetched, no government would arse it up that much,’” he declared in a studio rant that left his co-presenter, Holly Willoughby, unable to get a word in.
A day later Matt Hancock, the health secretary, went on to ITV to give the presenter some answers. But he ended up agreeing on-air that “summer is cancelled” and that people should not hug each other until a vaccine was found. It was as if the government could not catch up.
The repeated missteps were a gift to Labour, whose new leader, Sir Keir Starmer, had been struggling to cut through, while the public had rallied around the government, the NHS and Johnson himself as he recovered from his serious brush with the deadly virus.
Starmer was granted his own special broadcast on Monday. “After all this, all the sacrifice and the loss, we can’t go back to business as usual,” he said. And just as Downing Street finally thought it had managed to explain what the “stay alert” phase meant, Starmer successfully ambushed Johnson on Wednesday lunchtime at prime minister’s questions.
Switching to the crisis in care homes, he challenged a clearly unprepared prime minister. Brandishing official advice that was valid until 13 March, Starmer coolly accused the government of having “seeded” the epidemic in care homes by transferring in Covid-19 patients from hospitals.
Johnson vainly tried to deny the advice existed. Then Downing Street claimed, wrongly, that Starmer was misquoting. The Daily Telegraph sketch writer Michael Deacon wrote that Johnson had been taken apart “like a Duplo train set” – and the sight of an effective, organised opposition attack left Tory MPs spooked.
If there had been a truce over coronavirus, it was well and truly over – and pollsters recorded a shift in mood. This week YouGov reported that 65% of Britons believed that the government’s messaging had been “not very clear” or “not clear at all”. They also saw Johnson’s net approval rating fall to plus 22 – behind Starmer’s at plus 23.
It is too soon to say whether the government has bounced back from a week of disastrous communications, or whether the lifting of lockdown – and its necessary nuance – will continue to be dogged by frustration and confusion, but Schofield can be seen as a new barometer.