Boris Johnson’s boomerang of blame has flown straight back and hit him square in the face

Imagine the naivety: the prime minister answered a question. Will he never learn? He was somewhere in the north of England – Goole, to be precise – with a hi-vis bib over his suit and a digger and some machinery in the background, to drive home the message that he was going to build, build, build his way out of the lockdown recession.

And a journalist asked him about the comments made by Simon Stevens, boss of NHS England, who had said that coronavirus had shone a “very harsh spotlight” on the “resilience” of the care system. Instead of saying, “I have no comment about that; I’m here to talk about making trains,” the prime minister said: “One of the things the crisis has shown is we need to think about how we organise our social care package better and how we make sure we look after people better who are in social care.”

Then he added a single explosive sentence: “We discovered too many care homes didn’t really follow the procedures in the way that they could have but we’re learning lessons the whole time.”

We can speculate that this – “we discovered…” – reflects discussions he had had in Downing Street about what went wrong. I doubt that such conversations would have referred explicitly to the prospect of an inquiry into the government’s handling of coronavirus, but that elephant must be lumbering constantly through every room in the building.

It is possible that Johnson knows of ways in which care homes failed to follow guidance to the detriment of residents and staff, but they are not obvious to the rest of us, and certainly not to the representatives of care home companies, who responded to the prime minister’s “cowardly” comments with fury.

Indeed, the impression I get is that care homes which ignored early government advice that the risks were low tended to do better than the rest; they locked down early. It was the government that failed to warn against agency staff moving between care homes; and it was the government that prioritised NHS hospitals for protective equipment.

The worst thing about Johnson’s comment from his own point of view is that it feeds an unhealthy public mood of hunting out someone to blame. By trying to shift the blame from himself and his government, the prime minister has only lit the torches of the pitchfork-wielding crowd besieging No 10.

Johnson has so far tried to shield the scientific advisers from blame, when even they – John Edmunds and Neil Ferguson in particular – accept that, in hindsight, they were too slow to advise radical steps to suppress social mixing. The government’s best defence, if there is an inquiry, is that it followed the advice of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. But the prime minister puts all that at risk if he starts to try to spread the blame to others.

The most significant indicator of public opinion last week was a Deltapoll survey for the Mail on Sunday that suggested people are equally divided on the question of whether Johnson has handled the coronavirus well or badly. By a narrow margin of 49 per cent to 47 per cent, people think he has done “well”, which is not the impression you would get from most of the media.

By blurting out what he really thinks on TV, the prime minister puts that fund of goodwill at risk. It is not as if care homes were highly thought of before coronavirus: if people thought about them at all, they thought the sector was plagued by low pay, low standards and profiteering private companies. None of that was fair, particularly the idea that companies made excessive profits. But the coronavirus crisis has done more to ensure parity of esteem between care workers and NHS staff than adding “and social care” to the name of the Department of Health ever did.

Which means Johnson looks bad for trying to shuffle responsibility on to low-paid and hard-working care staff and their hard-pressed managers.