Boris the great communicator bounces back

If a week is a long time in politics, then three weeks without a Prime Minister is a political lifetime. After a near-death experience at the start of April, a newly recovered Boris Johnson has returned to Downing Street. Today he gave an impassioned speech to a nation that has changed markedly in his absence.

“I want to thank you, the people of this country, for the sheer grit and guts you have shown and are continuing to show,” he said, speaking from outside Number 10 in a throwback to the age of political normalcy.

When the PM was first admitted to hospital, public spirits were still high. Barely two weeks into lockdown, with schools scheduled to be off anyway for the Easter break, these strange circumstances could have been viewed as some kind of odd extended holiday.

Since then, it seems fatigue has set in. After five weeks of being unable to see friends and family, stuck in an endless cycle of Netflix and Zoom calls in a confined space with the same people (or, for some, utterly alone), with trips to the supermarket the only permitted way to break up the monotony, the government knows that Pollyanna-esque Blitz spirit could be giving way to frustration.

This will be exacerbated as other countries – from Hong Kong to Denmark to even the disaster zone that was Italy two months ago – have begun relaxing restrictions, or at least announcing guidance as to when and how they might be lifted. In contrast, the UK government has refused to even hint at the outline of a plan, putting up a rotation of ministers at the daily press briefings who echo the refrain of “light at the end of the tunnel”.

Johnson’s mission today, therefore, was twofold: make it clear to the public that he is well and truly back in charge, and give the nation’s spirits a much-needed boost.

“I in no way minimise the continuing problems we face, and yet it is also true that we are making progress,” he declared, crediting “our collective national resolve” for the success in preventing the health service from being overwhelmed.

“If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger – which I can tell you from personal experience it is – then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor.”

We have grown used to less colourful variants on the theme of British grit and resilience over the last few weeks – from Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock, Michael Gove and others. But as Prime Minister, elected less than five months ago with a sensational 80-seat majority, Johnson alone had the authority and the mandate to go further, and voice sentiment that his ministers have not dared to acknowledge: how much these lockdown measures are costing us, both economically and in terms of fundamental civil liberties.

“I know how hard and how stressful it has been to give up, even temporarily, those ancient and basic freedoms – not seeing friends, not seeing loved ones, working from home, managing the kids, worrying about your job and your firm,” he said, addressing head-on, with his usual rhetorical bombast, concerns which other ministers have tried to skirt around.

“So let me say directly also to British business, to the shopkeepers, to the entrepreneurs, to the hospitality sector, to everyone on whom our economy depends: I understand your impatience.”

That sense of impatience is both real and justified. When Johnson was admitted to hospital, there were warnings about some of the inevitable unintended consequences of the lockdown. Today, those warnings are reality. Since the crisis began, 1.5 million people have applied for Universal Credit on losing their jobs. One million employees were signed up to the government’s Job Retention Scheme on the first day of applications, with eight million more expected to follow – at an estimated cost of £40bn this quarter. Tens of thousands of businesses have already collapsed since March. Entire sectors are at risk of annihilation.

Calls to the national domestic violence hotline are up 49 per cent, and there have been 14 domestic abuse killings in less than a month. Calls to mental health hotlines have increased too. Referrals for suspected cancer cases, meanwhile, are down 80 per cent, with similar decreases for other medical referrals. There are fears that people with health conditions unrelated to Covid-19 are not getting the diagnoses and treatment they need, leading to avoidable deaths.

On the other side of the equation is the necessity of avoiding a second peak, of controlling the spread to ensure that the health service can cope, and – to be blunt – of saving as many lives as possible. As someone who was himself almost a victim of coronavirus, Johnson will be all too aware of the risks of moving too fast.

His performance, then, was a delicate balancing act: urge continued restraint and endurance, re-inspire the public’s trust in the government, while communicating a sense of progress, hope, and of real progress of weeks of stagnation.

There was language in the speech that we have not heard before and that indicates a shift in the bunker-mentality that has endured since Johnson was hospitalised. While the Prime Minister refused to spell out the next steps, he was bold enough to admit that “difficult judgments will be made”, and promised “maximum possible transparency” in doing so.

Perhaps Downing Street has been too pront to drip-feeding the public withsimplistic messaging, not trusting them to understand the trade-offs of decision making, Johnson struck a different tone. “I want to share all our working and our thinking, my thinking, with you the British people,” he insisted.

And for the first time, there was the acknowledgement that working out a way forward is not just about “the science” (as though that were one unified and specific thing). It requires rigorous and open debate.

“We will also be reaching out to build the biggest possible consensus,” he said. Johnson promised “across business, across industry, across all parts of our United Kingdom, across party lines, bringing in opposition parties as far as we possibly can.” Labour’s new leader Sir Keir Starmer, who faced Dominic Raab at PMQs last week, will be reassured, as will those in the business and medical communities who might have felt shut out.

Johnson has aspired to the rhetorical and political brilliance of Churchill throughout his career. And while coronavirus is a very different type of crisis to the Second World War, his words today had echoes of that Churchillian adage: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

“I ask you to contain your impatience,” Johnson urged, “because I believe we are coming now to the end of the first phase of this conflict.”

What the next phase will look like is still anyone’s guess, though there were hints that we will start to hear more over the coming days. But while Boris Johnson may not scale the lofty heights of Churchill, it is a relief in itself that Britain has its Prime Minister back at the helm.