What can former prime ministers teach us about the coronavirus crisis?

As well as my work for The Independent, I help teach a class in contemporary history at King’s College London. On Monday, just before the country shut down, Tony Blair came to talk to our students about his time in government.

The first question from a student was what he would advise Boris Johnson to do about the coronavirus outbreak. “Move everything on to a war footing,” he said. “Government works in traditional ways with traditional processes; businesses operate according to traditional regulations. You’ve just got to put all that to one side. The whole sweep of government has just got to go on to dealing with one issue, because this is an issue which will have the most profound economic consequences as well as health consequences.”

Within moments, he was no longer saying what he would advise the current government to do; he was telling the class what he would do “if I was back in government”. He said: “You’ve got to reckon on the worst-case scenario. You’ve got to build enormous capacity at speed. And you have to communicate to the public in a way that they understand, and gives them confidence. Since always the worst thing about a crisis is people feeling that the leadership is not really quite in control or knowing what it’s doing.”

So far, I think Johnson is just about managing to do that, although it is interesting that Blair and Gordon Brown (Brown was on the Today programme a few days ago; I don’t think John Major has offered his advice yet) seem better able to express the government’s objectives than the current prime minister.

What I think is so valuable about the course that Michelle Clement, Jon Davis and I teach at King’s is that it helps the civil service to preserve institutional memory. Nick Macpherson, one of our visiting professors, recalls that when he was permanent secretary at the Treasury and greeted Alistair Darling as the new chancellor in 2007, no one at the Treasury had any experience of a recession.

We hope that our courses help to provide lessons for today’s politicians and officials from previous crises. Of course, there has never been anything like the current pandemic, but many of the principles of crisis management apply in any situation that requires what Blair calls a “war footing”.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator