Back Boris – he’s raised his game, his party should do the same

Many years ago, in one’s long distant youth, about the time when the Dead Sea was just seriously ill, in our Wolf Cub pack we were subjected to an inane game called Man the Lifeboats. A cub-master rejoicing in some implausible nom de guerre such as Mowgli or Akela, armed with a whistle, would shout successive contradictory commands that would send us running down the hall, only to be halted in our tracks to turn back, colliding painfully with our fellows; on the command “Man the lifeboats!” we had to sit down abruptly, usually causing the rest of the pack to fall on top of us like a collapsed rugby scrum.

There was an element of Darwinian natural selection to the exercise, as the runts of the pack, trampled to one-dimensional proportions, were carried off for medical experimentation by charlatans sporting elementary first-aid badges on the sleeves of their jerseys. The whole pseudo-Jungle Book experience was testimony that Mr Kipling inspired exceedingly bad games.

And your point, caller? Until lately, the Government’s handling of the Covid crisis must have reminded many of the older generation of the chaos generated by the contradictory commands in a game of Man the Lifeboats. One can easily picture Boris, a wolf cub’s cap perched erratically, Just William-style, on his tousled head, like a Spectator cover caricature, manically blowing his whistle to generate stampedes and confusion. “Get back to the office! Stop! Go home!”

Until lately, that is: “lately” dating from his broadcast to the nation on Tuesday evening, when Boris significantly raised his game. The Prime Minister looked as if he had noticeably aged, following his personal encounter with the Covid virus. He did not, however, seem enfeebled or apathetic. He was energetic, but not (as formerly) manic, and crystalline in his lucidity, where in the past he has sometimes been confused to the point of incomprehensibility. Above all, he has not lost his skills as a communicator.

That is something the malcontents on the Tory back benches would do well to ponder upon. “Boris isn’t up to it” is the dernier cri, joined in now by Labour, grateful as ever for a “nasty party” type of own goal from Conservative in-fighting. You do not have to be a fan of Boris to recognise his political abilities. Against all the odds, he provoked his opponents, firmly entrenched under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, into conceding an election which he won with a majority of 80 seats, stripping Labour of its core vote in the process. By 31 January he had cut the Gordian knot of Brexit.

Agitating to get rid of Boris now is like saying the Duke of Wellington was past it, six months after Waterloo. Not up to it? In that case, which charismatic communicator on the Tory benches do they have in mind as a better prospect? Rishi Sunak? We need him where he is and he requires to show his mettle over a longer term in government. Michael Gove? From force of habit, he would probably sabotage his own leadership campaign. Jeremy Hunt? Aw, puleeze! Who, then? Let them name him/her – we need a good laugh in these grim times. The parliamentary Tory Party’s penchant for setting up a plaster cast of great Pompey’s statua behind their leader in moments of adversity is both self-destructive and out of tune with Conservative voters and the country.

Boris is still, potentially, up to the job. On Tuesday night, his outline of the trajectory of the pandemic, the exponential growth of infections, the danger to life, was stark, factual and incontrovertible. When he said that “the iron laws of geometrical progression are shouting at us from the graphs that we risk many more deaths”, he spoke to the heart of the nation. This was reality, however unpalatable. This was what the public has been demanding for years, that a politician should tell them the truth. For the “Don’t take away my liberties” brigade he had an irrefutable response when he said “these risks are not our own”.

In the peroration of his statement he addressed the challenging philosophical issue at the core of a Conservative government’s response to a national health emergency, by balancing the collective interest with the responsibility of the individual: “Never in our history has our collective destiny and our collective health depended so completely on our individual behaviour.”

That accurately spells out the equation. In times of emergency a government must impose restrictions, but a Conservative government would prefer to fight contagion through the voluntary self-discipline of individual citizens. That is completely compatible with Tory principles. It is a healthy contrast to the nonsense being spouted by many self-appointed champions of liberty (“This governmental rule by decree must end forthwith” – the Telegraph view), echoed by innumerable denunciations of “tyranny”, “our lost liberties”, “the threat to freedom”, and so on.

Matched against the exponential rate of infection recorded in the graphs to which the Prime Minister referred, those accusations sound, at best, narcissistic, at worst, like shrieks from the barred windows of the asylum. The irony is that our liberties are indeed seriously threatened, in many respects already lost, but not by Covid precautions. Where were all those doughty mask refuseniks and champions of liberty when totalitarian hate laws were extinguishing free speech in Britain? Even now, the Holyrood soviet is processing the most repressive anti-free speech law in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For those who want to fight to preserve our freedoms, there are plenty of causes urgently demanding support. Demonising necessary and justifiable precautions against a deadly disease is not libertarian, it is plain stupid. The country is supportive of the Prime Minister’s measures – with one large caveat. YouGov polling after his broadcast found 78 per cent of respondents supported Boris’s proposals, with 44 per cent “strongly” in favour; only 17 per cent were opposed, the highest proportion being among the 18-24 age group.

The caveat, however, is that 45 per cent of respondents believe the measures do not go far enough. They are right. What is the point of shutting pubs at 10pm? The virus is not a nocturnal creature, it can infect drinkers all day. It is outrageous, in the light of the infection statistics, that pubs should be allowed to open at all. They are not an essential service; even those of us who have spent too much of our lives on licensed premises must accept that in current conditions they are infection factories. If small pubs were forced to close, they should be financially compensated.

So, cries the corporate lobby sceptically, where is the money going to come from? In fact there are plenty of dripping roasts still to be skimmed. For a start, it is time to scrap HS2 instantly. Its costs have soared over the £100bn mark – an absurd price to pay for transporting businessmen to Birmingham half an hour faster. Such projects generate exponential cost increases at the best of times; under the handicap of Covid restrictions the delays and expense would be unimaginable.

HS2 is the kind of massive infrastructure project that appeals to Boris (like a bridge to Northern Ireland); he needs to demonstrate his maturity by sacrificing it immediately to the national interest. As for other funding to pay for the Covid emergency, it is time to stop throwing money at “all the green c***” (cf. David Cameron). Britain’s climate policy needs to become measured, to provide a response to the manageable, familiar, evolutionary climate change that has always occurred, rather than engaging in throwing trillions at alarmist scenarios in an orgy of competitive virtue signalling. In any case, the money originally envisaged simply is not there any more.

Our priorities have been badly skewed by PC lobbies (why did you not warn us about the virus, Greta?) Climate fear was exaggerated by people who, in the luxury of unprecedented security, felt guilty and needed something to worry about. Now we are back in the real world, the whole “post-modern” Potemkin village demolished, as we face a plague, little better prepared than when our ancestors confronted the Black Death in the 14th century.

The measures outlined by Boris do not go nearly far enough; it is to be feared their inadequacy will cost lives. That inadequacy, now that Boris has wakened up to real and present danger, is at least partly due to concern about “libertarian” rebels on the parliamentary benches. It is to be feared the force that will eventually crush that rebellious tendency will be the geometrical progression shouting from the graphs of infection progress of which the Prime Minister spoke. He at least seems to have recovered his grasp of the situation and that ought to secure him tenure of office, on the “Hold very tightly onto nurse” principle, for the immediate future at least.