Boris Johnson has failed to acknowledge the role he’s played in growing ‘fatigue’ with pandemic rules

Well-sourced reports over the weekend indicate that Boris Johnson has become an absentee prime minister and that the Conservative Party, along with the government itself, is moving on without him.

The prime minister’s appearance on The Andrew Marr Show will have done nothing to disabuse anyone of that notion.

The challenge facing Mr Johnson is extremely difficult, but it is at least now clearly understood. It is how to walk the Covid-19 tightrope between damage to public health and damage to the economy. Each move in the direction of one or the other will be characterised as a lurch, that control has been lost, but there is no obvious alternative style in which to travel upon a tightrope.

His latest slogan, that we must all live “fearlessly but with common sense” was instantly the subject of great ridicule. “We are led by oxymorons,” said the author Robert Harris.

But it is arguably a sensible strategy, and a wise soundbite. We must not cower in our houses, afraid to go to the shops, or to the local restaurant, or for grandparents to visit their grandchildren. But when we do these things we must follow the rules.

The problem Mr Johnson faces is that all he appears able to do is keep repeating the message, even though the measures are not working.

Asked by Andrew Marr why he thought the new national restrictions, like the “rule of 6”, would have any success in suppressing the virus, when it is not being suppressed in local areas where restrictions are much tougher, he could only respond that it is “too early to say”.

It doesn’t seem too early to say. Oldham and parts of Manchester have been under draconian lockdown restrictions for six weeks. It may be that they have not been as diligently followed as would be desirable, but it is clear whether or not they have been effective. It takes time, of course, before the success of the new measures can be judged, but it does not take as long as six weeks. The evidence is clear. And so too is it clear that Mr Johnson does not have real, practical answers to the very tough questions he faces.

Asked whether or not he was up to the job, he could only reply that it would not be appropriate for him to be himself. That thousands of people have died, and so it was not a time for “the sort of buoyancy and elan and the qualities I usually bring”.

But that absolutely wasn’t the question. The question was not one of tone, it was one of competence, and the growing evidence that this government doesn’t have sufficient reserves of it to do the job.

His only vaguely credible defence was that, for all the criticism, “No one has come up with any better proposals that I’m aware of.”  

That, arguably, may be so, but as he readily acknowledges, the problem may not be with the restrictions themselves, but a “growing fatigue” with them, and a general failure to adhere to them.

If that is the problem, then he has little choice but to concede that he is part of it. It is he, after all, who boasted of shaking hands with coronavirus patients, who declined to sack his chief of staff when he was found, if not clearly in breach of coronavirus restrictions, then certainly unable to provide a credible defence of his actions.

And it is also he who, at the despatch box of the House of Commons, recently launched a bizarre defence of the “freedom-loving” British people and as such their right to break the rules he himself is trying to enforce.

The prime minister may be right that his critics have no better suggestions. But he has failed on his own terms as well as theirs, and his party, which is currently in as ruthless a mood as it has ever been, appears to have worked that out.