A prime minister who dreamt of being a new Churchill is having nightmares about Cromwell instead. Indeed, such is the strangeness of pandemic politics that last week, Boris Johnson was practically demanding to be compared to Old Ironsides. “I don’t think there has been anything like it since Cromwell’s time,” Johnson said last Wednesday of the Covid rules he promised faithfully to stand by during the Christmas period.
Perhaps the only person who appeared surprised when Johnson, less than 72 hours later, scrapped those rules was the man himself; the look of bafflement on his face as he announced that he was indeed cancelling Christmas suggests that, like many politicians, he himself may actually believe the words he conjures up every time he finds himself in a tricky corner.
But where does that cancellation leave the PM? Measured in his own terms, he has surely failed: he is now doing something he desperately did not want to do and had promised just days earlier not to do. Hence the barrage of brutal headlines, social media sniping and whispers about his future.
On the face of it, that might all seem justified. A politician who does something that will sadden and inconvenience many people cannot expect a good coverage — especially if that thing also hits the bottom line of many media groups that rely on consumer spending for their revenues. Nor can a leader who repeatedly sends his troops out to defend positions that he quickly abandons count on their loyalty forever.
Neither media nor Conservative parliamentary anger are small things, yet they also count for rather less than the views of the wider public. And my bet is that the public will ultimately forgive Boris Johnson for cancelling Christmas.
The British public are generally less political, more pragmatic and far more subtle than those of us who do and write political things for a living. While the SW1A bubble — Johnson included — may be consumed with binary choices between Cromwellian authoritarianism and Cavalier libertarianism, most voters judge governments by results and circumstances, and politicians by their intentions.
Start with the circumstances. For an awful lot of people, it is clear that the Government is facing extremely difficult problems to which there are no wholly good answers. Poll after poll shows that solid majorities of those surveyed are broadly supportive of restrictive policies that cause economic pain and personal sadness. That’s not because Britain is a nation of authoritarians. It’s because voters think that a pandemic that has killed 60,000 people requires unusual interventions.
Those interventions include changing our Christmas habits. Before that agonising retreat over the festive Covid amnesty, the same polls were consistently showing that a majority of people wanted the rules to be tighter. After the “cancellation”, YouGov found that two-thirds of voters approved of the decision.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe