Is Boris Johnson toast? His personal ratings have been declining steadily since last May and Labour now have their biggest lead over the Tories since 2013. But whether the Prime Minister survives is an open question: there may yet be a path back.
Partygate comes just as general support for restrictive Covid measures is dramatically running out. Already in early December, as the Omicron wave arrived and various scientists and experts began to call for the usual kinds of restrictions, the customary majority in favour of another lockdown was evaporating. A massive 68% of people opposed closing pubs and restaurants; 64% opposed stay at home orders.
Since then, the trend has only accelerated. New YouGov polling, seen by UnHerd, reveals a dramatic shift in opinion since before Christmas: support for every one of ten different restrictions tested has fallen even further, and none of them now commands majority support (not even “encouraging companies to allow people to work from home”, the most popular at 49%). Fully 75% of people on December 16 felt that Covid was getting worse in the UK and only 9% felt it was getting better; by January 11 it had swung completely, as 37% felt it was getting worse and 38% felt it was getting better. Public anxiety is falling away as fast as the Omicron wave itself.
Meanwhile, the cohort of scientists who projected disaster without a Christmas lockdown has been humiliated, as their disaster spectacularly failed to materialise. It has left people with the lingering question: what about the previous restrictions? What about all those months we spent trying to navigate those byzantine regulations — how many of them were really necessary?
Into this atmosphere the stories about No 10 parties started to break. They couldn’t have been better designed to reinforce the suspicion that some of the past two years’ exertions might have been a waste of time. If they weren’t taking the rules seriously in Downing Street, was that because they knew they were partly theatrical and that some of them were pointless? The one-way systems in pubs, the daft signs outside on the street, the endless barked inanities on loudspeakers… were they taking us for fools? The public went along with it and gave the authorities their trust, despite coming face to face with absurd scenarios every day. It’s possible the current rage towards Boris is made more acute by a sense of embarrassment — maybe even shame — that everyone went along with it for so long.
So Boris Johnson has a choice. Either he accepts the role as sacrificial cow of the Covid era, soaking up all its insecurity and anger, and allowing himself to be ritually slaughtered so that we can all move on. Or he can acknowledge the role he has played over the past two years, and show us the way out of it.
England is now uniquely positioned to lead the world out of the Covid era — and this alone could save the Johnson premiership. The fact that his government managed to restrain from imposing freedom-curtailing restrictions over Christmas against the advice of Whitty and Vallance, Gove and Javid, an array of activist scientists and the Labour Party, was a decision of global consequence.
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