At precisely 3.46pm on Thursday the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole tweeted out an explosive and exclusive story that Steve Baker, the co-convenor of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, had warned that Boris Johnson’s party leadership would soon be under threat.
“It’s inevitable the Prime Minister’s leadership will be on the table…People are telling me they are losing faith in our Conservative Party leadership,” Baker had said, reported Cole. And the key point at issue was Baker’s demand for “a clear plan for when our full freedoms will be restored”.
Less than 100 minutes later, at 5.24pm, Baker put out his own tweet as follows: “What this country needs is the complete success of @BorisJohnson…I am clear Boris is the only person to lead us out of these difficulties and I support him in that endeavour.”
In short, Baker had overplayed his hand to an embarrassing extent – much to the delight of those parliamentary colleagues who regard him as insufferable. In the current circumstances of mass vaccination being carried out against a backdrop of a surging new Covid variant, the vast majority of Conservative MPs are content to put lockdown angst to one side.
But while Baker chose the wrong moment to mount an attack, his fundamental point stands. Once the hospitals are less full, grisly reported deaths of 1,000+ a day are a thing of the past and the large bulk of those at high risk of being killed by Covid have been immunised against it, the pressure for a timetable out of lockdown away from strict distancing measures will grow very rapidly indeed.
The Prime Minister has so far resisted being tied to any firm undertaking about exactly when lockdowns will end, though he has said he hopes the long Easter weekend – April 2nd to 5th – will be a significant “inflection point”.
In fact there are at least two dates before then which are already suggesting themselves to Tory MPs as natural moments for starting to unchain businesses and de-handcuff the British public.
The first and punchiest of these is Wednesday March 3, Budget Day. With the Government now on course to have vaccinated all 15 million over-70s, health and care home workers and extremely clinically vulnerable people by mid-February, the vast majority of those people that Covid could kill will have developed resistance to severe disease by then. The Department of Health’s own vaccine delivery plan puts the proportion at 88 per cent.
So what better moment for the focus to be switched from the public health emergency to the economic emergency created in its slipstream? Even though the over-70s make up only a little over half of recent Covid hospital admissions and around a third of intensive care patients, the argument runs that the NHS capacity crisis will nonetheless by then be securely in the past.
In which case, why not allow Sunak the luxury of starting his economic repair job free from the constraints imposed by hospitality sector closures, travel-to-work restrictions and the rest? The great British take-off begins today, Sunak could declare.
If such a deadline – six-and-a-bit weeks away – is too bullish for Johnson then another key date looming will be Tuesday March 23, the anniversary of the first national lockdown.
By then the vast majority of risk groups 5 to 9 (50-70-year-olds and younger clinically vulnerable people) should have received their jabs and be developing resistance day by day, pushing the percentage of potential future Covid fatalities now protected towards 99 per cent.
Even the Cabinet’s resident lockdown hawk Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, recently told the Spectator that such a situation would mark the moment when the Government should “cry freedom” rather than fretting about the debilitating impact of so-called “Long Covid” on some younger people.
So a speech from the Prime Minister to the British people in which he could say that exactly a year ago he had been forced to withdraw their liberties, but now he was able to restore them in full would go down a storm with his own backbenchers.
What Baker and many more MPs besides are most concerned about is that Johnson and Hancock may make all the right noises in advance about how they are champing at the bit to allow a great unchaining but in practice will yet again defer to ultra-cautious health experts. That really would spell big trouble for the PM. Chris Whitty’s recent aside that some lockdown measures may need to come back again next winter was received with abject horror by some.
This week Mr Baker got his timing all wrong. The Prime Minister should resolve to make sure the same thing does not happen to him on a far grander scale.
This article was published originally in the Spectator on 15th January 2021, see: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-will-regret-not-lifting-post-vaccine-restrictions-quickly