This lockdown is better late than never, but it would have been even better in September

Boris Johnson took a great risk in September, when the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) urged him to consider greater restrictions, including a temporary lockdown. The prime minister decided against it, which was a difficult decision, taken for the best of reasons. He and the chancellor wanted to protect jobs as much as possible, and thought it was more important to keep the economy going. 

It turns out that this was a mistake, which has left the country not exactly with the worst of both worlds, but certainly with a bad public health outcome as well as a bad outcome for jobs. Not least because the lockdown will now last longer than it could have done if it had been introduced earlier. 

The prime minister compounded his error by decrying Sir Keir Starmer as an opportunist when the Labour leader took up the idea of a short circuit-breaker lockdown, after the Sage minutes were published a month later. Mr Johnson has now handed Sir Keir nothing short of total moral victory. No more “Captain Hindsight”.   

Mr Johnson said just 10 days ago that another national lockdown would be “disastrous”, and there is no better measure of the failure of his policy than that the disastrous now appears to be preferable to the alternative. 

No wonder the prime minister cut a sorry figure at his disorganised and delayed news conference last night. “Our hope was that by strong local action, strong local leadership, we could get the rates of infection down,” he said, “but we’ve got to be humble in the face of nature.” He was reduced to repeating his message from March, “You must stay at home,” while insisting that it would be different this time. 

One of the differences is that schools will remain open, which is the right decision, but the prime minister’s attempt, yet again, to put an optimistic gloss on the prospects for the future just over the visible horizon is mocked by all his optimistic predictions of the past. Of course, if the “rapid turnaround” tests that can produce results in 10 to 15 minutes do work, and if they can be scaled up to mass testing quickly, that is promising. But we can surely see now, looking back, that the government staked too much on test and trace working to suppress the virus. 

The charts shown by the government’s scientific and medical advisers last night revealed the relentless rise of infections, hospitalisations and deaths, with neither test and trace nor local measures having any decisive effect. The consensus projection of deaths rising to 800 a day by 8 December if no action is taken makes the strongest case for the measures Mr Johnson announced. He was right to say that “no responsible prime minister could ignore the message of these figures”. 

Despite helpful comments from Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, and Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, about the difficult balance that has to be struck between controlling the virus and other social harms – Professor Whitty said “the idea that there is a perfect time to act is a misapprehension” – it feels very much that Mr Johnson missed the opportunity to act earlier and avoid some of the escalating costs now. Those costs include the extension of the furlough scheme for another month, at the 80 per cent income replacement level, which is again the right decision but which appeared to have been almost an afterthought. 

As Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, said yesterday, we would rather have a prime minister who changes his mind when the facts change than one who “risks lives by sticking his head in the sand”. But even better would have been a prime minister who responded to the changing situation immediately. If Mr Johnson had acted on the clear advice of Sage in September, we might be in a much better position now.