Omicron revolt shows Tories haven’t learnt how to live with Covid

There are two verbs in the much-cited observation that “we must learn to live with Covid”. But for many Conservatives only one of them is active. They have focused on the living rather than the learning.

For five months before Omicron, Boris Johnson’s government effectively carried out a real-time experiment to see how far it could socialise the nation to an acceptable level of deaths and hospitalisations. We now know the country will tolerate well over 100 deaths a day. The Grenfell Tower fire led to public outrage and demands for action. Recent numbers are the equivalent of 11 Grenfell Towers each week.

There was nothing furtive about this. Johnson argued that the vaccine success allowed the UK to downplay case numbers as long as levels of hospitalisations were manageable. Recent figures showing that half of excess deaths were not down to Covid and so might be due to missed medical treatment gave weight to the focus on the social and economic cost of lockdowns. Cabinet changes saw the balance shift away from health hawks. Fears about public finances even saw Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, warning cabinet colleagues last week of the costs of speeding up the booster programme.

Yet far too many ministers and MPs have failed to recognise that learning to live with something also means knowing when to react. Learning to live with a heart condition does not mean behaving as you did before diagnosis. It requires a change of diet, medication and sometimes surgical intervention. The goal is to retain as much normality as possible, not pretend everything is still the same as it was.

The shift in focus on to the costs of lockdown was not wrong nor is the wish to restore individual responsibility. But Johnson sold the country a vision in which living with the virus meant returning to life before. A visitor to any recent Tory event can attest to the open contempt for precautions.

This also led to complacency and false economies, as shown by the initial slow progress of boosters and the failure to foresee a rocketing demand for lateral flow tests. More absurd was the cancellation of a $1.6bn vaccine contract with Valneva, a move which jeopardises its manufacturing plant and was described as “inexplicable” by Kate Bingham, the former head of the vaccines task force. The future of the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre in Harwell is also unclear. Bingham has stressed the value of funding both manufacturing capacity and innovation to stay ahead of future variants. But living with Covid meant saving money on preparedness for the next wave.

Likewise, the failure to address the crisis in social care has put added pressure on hospitals unable to discharge patients. Social service chiefs say 1.5m hours of commissioned home care could not be provided between August and October as staff left for better paid jobs.

Tuesday night’s massive Conservative rebellion against Johnson’s fairly limited “Plan B” restrictions is proof of his own failure to accept and explain a changed reality. About 100 Tory MPs opposed vaccine or negative test certification for nightclubs and large events, leaving him reliant on opposition votes. Revolt was fuelled both by fury over the parties held by leading Tories during lockdown and the sense Johnson would be on the rebel side were he not premier. Votes against other measures, including masks in public places (a nuisance but hardly totalitarianism), were smaller but enough to wipe out his majority. This is a perilous position for any leader — and for the country — leaving the prime minister wary of bringing forward new measures even if things deteriorate.

To say this is not to endorse all the measures currently proposed. There are legitimate questions about the effectiveness of vaccine passes, which may offer a false sense of security. They are not required for pubs, limiting the impact. Countries which have used such passes are not seeing much better outcomes.

Less persuasive is the argument from MPs who depict a pass for nightclubs as creeping authoritarianism; meanwhile, they support legislation requiring citizens to produce photo-ID before they can vote.

What the purist civil libertarians fail to see is that living with Covid means sometimes responding rapidly to new strains and rowing back later. This approach is even more defensible as booster jabs may quell fears within weeks. Taking action is less removing freedoms than introducing measures to preserve as many as possible.

This is important. There may be real fights over freedom ahead. Omicron may be more mild and soon peak but it is not the last variant. The true lines in the sand are surely widespread compulsory vaccination, the return of school closures and full lockdowns. Instead of childishly kicking at every restraint, Johnson should have prepared the ground for this and future moments by arguing throughout that some temporary measures are about averting more drastic steps. Instead he relies on scarily implausible projections to bolster the case he failed to make.

Yet he has fostered the backlash, not only through the hypocrisy shown in breaching lockdown rules, but by pandering to the desire to pretend life would be unchanged. Leadership during a pandemic means responding to events and showing your own side that new eras require learning new behaviours. The public gets this. Only the ruling party seems to struggle with the concept.

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