The end of lockdown is in sight. It’s been quite a ride

A “one-way road to freedom”. That’s a new one on me. What if the road turns out to be a dead-end? The Prime Minister could live to regret his choice of words if he is forced to do a U-turn and roar back in the direction of Lockdown Alley.

But let’s hope not. Let’s hope he’s right and that a lighter touch response to Covid allows the country – or at any rate, England – to reach Normal Town before the summer, autumn, Christmas, spring of 2022 … whenever.

For the rest of us, I suspect, caution remains the better option. The mantra we hear most these days is “No one is protected until everyone is protected” and its variant, “A risk to one is a risk to all”.

Most of the time, expressions such as these are confined to Facebook or Radio 4, or to Downing Street press conferences accompanied by the instruction, “Next slide, please”. We press Like or nod approvingly. For though clichéd, they make sense and chime with that other well-worn refrain, beloved of politicians when the chips are down, that the first duty of government is the protection and security of the people.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that even though they’re bored out of their minds and jobs are disappearing faster than snow in the Sahara, most people are willing to put their survival, and that of their families, ahead of libertarian notions of  “freedom”. This is certainly what they are telling the pollsters.

I say “most” out of more than journalistic caution. For there are undoubtedly millions of others, young people in particular, who have had it up to here with lockdown. They want to get back to work. Not only that, they are desperate to get back to a time when a night out in the pub, or a chicken tikka masala with friends, or a game of football in the park, was not, generally speaking, the prelude to a criminal record.

Older Britons can certainly sympathise, for we, too, have suffered. If you haven’t seen your 80-year-old mother for six months or haven’t been able to visit your husband in hospital since he had a stroke on New Year’s Eve, or if the last time you were able to hug your grandchildren was, well, it’s hard to remember, you know what I’m talking about.

Schoolchildren are missing class, or at any rate their classmates. They can’t wait, apparently, to get back to the familiarity of bells ringing, raincoats steaming and homework, marked and corrected, slapping onto their desks – though whether their enthusiasm is matched by the resolve of their teachers is a moot point.

Parents, many of whom, let us be honest, are not exactly up to speed on the national curriculum, are at the same time fed up with their imposed role as educators. They know how little they know, and now they also know how hard it is to get facts into the heads of 12-year-olds who would far rather spend their time playing video games.

But for the elderly, the sick and infirm and the greater mass of Britons who are merely praying for all this to be over, there is, I suggest, a pained apprehension that, as far as Covid-19 is concerned, we shouldn’t run until we have learned to walk. One result of the health crisis is that we have all awarded ourselves the equivalent of a GCSE in epidemiology. We know that viruses can mutate and become more deadly and that vaccines, marvelous though they are, are not a guarantee of long life and happiness.

For this reason, unless you are a 16-year-old boy whose hormones have reached boiling point or an office-worker of either sex, aged 24, who hasn’t enjoyed a night out since the August bank holiday, the tendency is to say, don’t rush, don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t, in other words, elevate hope above wisdom and experience.

In the old days, we would have called this British phlegm, or the Spirit of the Blitz. Today it is just common sense. We know the Grim Reaper is out there scouring for souls and we don’t want to give him the satisfaction. We have learned to live with the flu; we’re not ready to die – alone – with Covid.

It is different if you’re running the country. If you are a minister, or a Tory MP reading through a hundred angry emails each morning, getting the “R” rate down and protecting the NHS isn’t the only game in town. There is also the pesky matter of shuttered high streets and the economy that used to keep them supplied. The furlough scheme can’t go on forever, and constituents who have lost their jobs and can’t pay their mortgages are the stuff of which Labour landslides are made.

Looking back from what might – might – be viewed as the turning point in the UK, we can see how the Government’s strategy has evolved since the World Health Organisation first advised of “cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology” in the Chinese city of Wuhan on 31 December, 2019. The Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser, as well as top academics at SAGE and senior officials at the Department of Health, were informed shortly after that something was brewing and that they should be alert to at least the possibility of a pandemic. The question is, how high up their list of priorities was it from Day One and at what point did they grab ministers by the throat to make sure the message was getting through?

Boris Johnson was in Brussels on 31 December getting ready to sign the historic Brexit trade agreement with the EU. He clearly had other things on his mind. It is likely that his health secretary, Matt Hancock, was equally distracted. It was a big day for Britain, with an equally big month to follow. It wasn’t until 31 January, four weeks later, by which time Covid-19 had reached Italy, that Hancock announced he was considering “some quite significant actions” that could lead to “social and economic disruption”.

We know the rest: hand-washing, masks, the two-metre rule, the Rule of Six, working from home, pub closures, the mass furlough scheme, the first lockdown, pub closures (again), the second lockdown, the easing of restrictions and, somehow, miraculously, the purchase of 407 million doses of anti-Covid vaccine, enough to inoculate everyone in the country six times over.

The PM himself has emerged from the crisis with a better reputation than he deserves. He barely acknowledged Covid in the early days, going without a mask, absenting himself from meetings of the Cobra emergency response committee and shaking hands with everybody he met, including England’s rugby captain Owen Farrell, the boxer Anthony Joshua, even, by his own account, Covid patients in hospital in Kettering as late as 27 February.

But we all live and learn, unless we die first, which is very nearly what happened to Boris when he contracted a serious bout of the virus and spent two weeks in intensive care.

Since then, having become a father again and having lived through the ordeal of his top advisor Dominic Cummings testing his eyesight in Barnard Castle, good sense has prevailed and the guidance from Downing Street has been based on the trusted maxim, better safe than sorry.

Is that about to slip? With the economy stuck in the slough of despond and with millions of jobs on the line across the country, we are hearing a different tune from a leader who is not only prime minister but, lest we forget, First Lord of the Treasury. While continuing to push the message that it is all hands to the pump on Covid, he is turning his attention to the preservation of jobs and the restoration of growth.

His approach is, again, entirely understandable. Who would thank him if he restored the populace to good health only to inform them that while they were at home watching Netflix, the economy went down the tubes? In 2024, which is when the next general election is theoretically due, Covid is likely to have moved into the rear mirror. It won’t be the last pandemic to hit the world, but it is unlikely that another pestilence will have come along in the space between seeing this one off and the arrival of its successor.

The government’s reckoning is bound to include the likelihood that, four years on from the present crisis and with the Red Wall at stake, voters will be more concerned with employment numbers, inflation and the housing crisis than with the impact of Covid, including even the death toll in the UK, which today exceeds 121,000.

Their assessment may be right and it may not. Politics is a gamble and the calculation includes a host of variables, including the extent of collective memory loss and the long-term remedial impact of vaccines. If the re-opening of Britain goes well and a third lockdown is avoided, all well and good: Johnson and Hancock will take the kudos and run. If not, the lugubrious figure of Keir Starmer will be there, like an undertaker sorrowfully shaking his head in contemplation of a plane crash.

It is ordinary Britons who will sit in judgement when the last Covid coffin has been lowered into the last Covid grave, and they will not deliver their verdict lightly. It is one thing to do a U-turn on Brexit; moving too fast in the face of a deadly pandemic, no matter the caveats, will not so easily be forgiven.