The government is right to be cautious about the end of lockdown

If Boris Johnson hadn’t been prime minister, he probably would have spent the past year writing lockdown-sceptic columns.

These are where his basic instincts lie, and though he regularly claims, entirely wrongly, to be some kind of metropolitan liberal, the hard-right wing of the Conservative Party is also where he draws his authority.

His landslide election victory in 2019 also served to remove a number of MPs at the core of the Tories’ moderate centre – Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke and so on – which for at least a decade had been the party’s soul.

That, in government, Mr Johnson has rejected (though not comprehensively) the anti-lockdown voices in his party should have been enough to persuade them of the total wrong-headed nature of their position. Daniel Hannan, for what it’s worth, did briefly acknowledge that Mr Johnson was one of their own, and were he not in Downing Street, he would be making the same anti-lockdown arguments, which should at least give them pause for thought, but it did not.

Though Mr Johnson belatedly and partially rejected lockdown scepticism, keeping this wing of his party onside has been a delicate balancing act that has caused problems. For most of 2020, governing became a battle of locking down to save lives while at the same time trying to find ways to live with coronavirus. It was, in short, many strategies at once, none of them wise.

But now there appears to be a meaningful route out of lockdown, principally via vaccines – with 15 million people having received at least one dose – it is clear Mr Johnson is now more willing to dictate terms to his lockdown sceptics, who already want to move too far, too fast.

Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, told the BBC on Sunday that the government would not be naming a date for the end of lockdown, as the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Tory MPs has demanded.

Mr Raab insisted you “can’t get ahead of the evidence”, and that lockdown restrictions would be eased slowly and when there was clear scientific evidence that it was the right thing to do.

This is commendable, but it is also revealing. As soon as there is actual, real cause for hope, the government has become sensible, and slightly more cautious. It makes it all the clearer to see that its year of over-promising and under-delivering, and taking not even risks but straightforwardly disastrous decisions, was a consequence of a complete lack of other ideas.

The amount of evidence, which is to say human suffering, that was required to persuade this government that containing the virus was the only viable policy is as damning as it is depressing, but it cannot be remedied now.

It is also clear that Mr Johnson appears capable of standing up to those in the CRG and their ilk, only now it is easy to do so, when the correct strategy is clear – not when it was harder but more urgent to do so, last spring.

But it is still the correct decision, and such things have been vanishingly rare to see in the awful year now passed. We must hope the government sticks to this plan in the months ahead.