It was 2:15pm on Sunday and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fulfilling his promise to brief rival party leaders on his COVID-19 strategy. It was meant to be a sign of kingdom-wide cooperation, with politics set aside during the crisis, but over the course of a 40-minute conference call, Johnson’s opponents told him that he was getting it wrong.
His new slogan to “stay alert” was confusing, they said, and his plan to start easing restrictions on leisure activities and opening some workplaces might wrongfully convey the message to the public that the COVID-19 threat was over.
Prime Minister Johnson listened — and disagreed.
Illustration: Mountain People
Seven weeks after he had put the UK into an emergency lockdown, with more than 30,000 dead and the economy on its knees, the united political front that had defined the first phase of the British response finally splintered.
The kingdom-wide mission to repel the virus has fragmented along political fault lines, that had deepened during years of bitter wrangling over leaving the EU.
The pro-independence Scottish leadership in Edinburgh denounced Johnson’s England-focused approach, all while the administrations in Wales and Northern Ireland were taking different paths as well. Under a devolved UK, regional governments have autonomy over healthcare and other matters, while centralized powers are reserved for areas such as national security.
The newly invigorated Labour Party, now led by a former chief prosecutor, also started moving away from crisis solidarity, while business lobbies and labor unions have raised the alarm over workers’ safety.
Inside the Conservative government, a blame game was quietly under way. In a series of private conversations, officials and politicians painted a picture of an administration arguing with itself over how to come out of the lockdown, and who was responsible for the errors made so far.
“The Cabinet is clearly split right now,” Conservative lawmaker James Sunderland said.
There are those ministers who want to lift the restrictions and “get the economy going,” and others who prioritize keeping the public safe, he said.
With the COVID-19 outbreak now past its peak in the UK, it is an equation that is set to reshape the political debate, just as it has done elsewhere.
Leaders and entire parties will be defined by how they balance safety and public health on one side, with individual freedom and the reopening of the economy on the other. Inside the ranks of the British government, ministers are weighing up whether to give more support to businesses, through extending payments to furloughed workers, or to lift the lockdown and thereby to stimulate the economy.
The stakes are high. Just a few months ago, Johnson’s legacy looked set as the leader who brought the political deadlock to an end and delivered Brexit. Yet he and his team know that the time will come when they will have to — perhaps in front of an independent judge in a public inquiry — to explain decisions taken and errors made when COVID-19 swept through the UK.
In public, Johnson said he welcomes the different approaches devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales were taking, and insisted that the four nations of the UK do want to “move forward” together. His officials also said that the engagement they have had with opposition party leaders has generally been constructive and furthermore rejected the idea that ministers are at loggerheads with each other.
Yet, privately, the tensions with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has never been a Johnson ally, have returned.
One Downing Street official expressed frustration at the way she had revealed joint decisions to the public before Johnson could speak for the whole UK. They said that she had little right to complain about not always being well informed of key details in advance.
For Sturgeon and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, Johnson’s decision to go ahead and abandon the “stay home” message became the moment to finally pull away.
Starmer was elected to lead his party at the height of the emergency on April 4. At the time, there was talk of him potentially joining a government of kingdom-wide unity. Later that day, he spoke to a clearly unwell Johnson, who himself had been diagnosed with COVID-19 during the week before.
The next day, Johnson was taken to hospital where his condition worsened and where he spent three nights in intensive care.
With Johnson dangerously ill, and the kingdom gravely affected by the virus, politics as normal was put aside. The public waited anxiously for news from St Thomas’ Hospital, and Starmer and his counterparts in other parties sent messages of support to Johnson and his fiancee, who was pregnant and also infected by the virus.
It was a month before the prime minister on Wednesday last week returned to the House of Commons to face Starmer’s questioning for the first time. The goodwill for the newly recovered Johnson, who had just become a father again, had not yet waned. Still, Starmer was forensic in his polite interrogation, in a way that his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, never had been.
Johnson then gave the signal which the kingdom had been waiting for. Starting on Monday last week, he said, some of the lockdown measures would be gradually adapted as the UK would begin to pursue a path back to work.
The next day’s newspapers jumped on the hint to declare that “Lockdown Freedom Beckons” and told readers to look forward to “Happy Monday.”
Johnson’s officials were aghast, fearing the message of cautious steps toward easing the strictest social distancing rules would be interpreted beyond their intended meaning.
Members of Johnson’s Cabinet were angry at the way the media had taken the prime minister’s announcement. Yet one government adviser privately conceded that the administration’s own public messaging was confusing and unclear.
It was a view the same opposition party leaders put back to Johnson in a Zoom video call on Thursday last week, warning that those newspaper headlines were putting public health at risk.
In Edinburgh, Sturgeon was briefing reporters that Scotland would chart its own course out of the lockdown and that might not be in lockstep with the rest of the UK anymore. She warned that changing the message could be a “catastrophic mistake.”
Before Johnson’s address to the public on Sunday, the party leaders returned to the theme. Some were not happy that the proposed new slogan of “stay alert” would replace the clearer message of “stay home,” which had been the lockdown mantra.
“I have absolutely no idea what ‘stay alert’ means,” Colum Eastwood, leader of Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party, told the prime minister on the call. “The virus isn’t a burglar. I don’t think I can hide from it even if I tried.”
For opposition leaders, the calculation is also delicate. How far should they criticize, and how far should they support the government’s effort?
With the UK now past the worst, Johnson is finding out that the room for political attacks is growing.
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