Johnson will need to balance lives in the short term against the deep damage to the fabric of the nation on lockdown

John Rentoul, The Independent

Boris Johnson is back in Downing Street and keen to convey a message of progress. “We are coming now to the end of the first phase,” he said outside No 10 this morning. “Preparations are under way, and have been for weeks, to win phase two.”

He has been out of the centre for three weeks, during which the country has held its breath, waiting for evidence that the epidemic is receding.

Waiting is not something politics is good at. It has begun to feel like drift. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, is thought by his colleagues to have done a good job of standing in for the prime minister. This is not necessarily a good thing for the country, because he has been careful to avoid upsetting other ministers: moving slowly and trying not to break things, to reverse the old Mark Zuckerberg slogan.

That has allowed Matt Hancock, the health secretary, to dominate the government and to set the terms for the big decision facing Johnson. The prime minister now has to take a big political decision – “guided by the science”, as Hancock says – on when and how to start easing the lockdown.

But the health secretary has already pre-empted the PM by insisting that he will not allow anything which is “unsafe”. In other words, saving lives comes before reviving the economy. So the decision is already tilted in favour of a longer, more severe lockdown.

Johnson is likely to resist the pressure, therefore, from the economy-first wing of his own party, led by Rishi Sunak, the chancellor. (Remember when he was a mere creature of the No 10 spin operation?)

The Daily Telegraph has already amended the headline on its print edition this morning. “Johnson to ease lockdown this week” has become, online, “Boris Johnson plots route out of lockdown.” At this rate we will be lucky if the garden centres can open on 7 May, when the lockdown is next up for review – and garden centres are one kind of shop where social distancing is easy to maintain and which help to keep people happy at home away from contact with other households.

What Johnson will do, though, is speak to the nation. In his absence, punctuated by one striking video address from Chequers when he was discharged from hospital, the nation has been addressed by an insipid rota of politicians reading out words drafted for them by officials. Only Hancock has tried to explain the government’s strategy as it evolves from avoiding the NHS being overwhelmed to trying to suppress the virus altogether.

One of the most important jobs of a prime minister is to act as the nation’s guide. Especially in times of crisis, a prime minister has to speak for the nation, to explain what is happening and why the government is doing what it is doing. It is a measure of the vacuum of the past two weeks that Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon have both urged the government not to treat the people like children – but the only person who can hold an adult conversation with the people is a leader who can make decisions.

Johnson tried to step up to that role today. Starting with a self-deprecating apology for being “away from my desk for much longer than I would have liked”, he deployed his own illness to bolster his authority: “If this virus were an unexpected and invisible mugger – which I can tell you from personal experience it is – then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor.”

He said: “We are now beginning to turn the tide”, but that “this is also the moment of maximum risk”. And he tried to prepare the ground for difficult decisions ahead, promising that he would take the nation into his confidence as he sought to first suppress the virus and then, “one by one, to fire up the engines of this vast UK economy”.

A huge challenge confronts him – which is to balance lives in the short term against the deep damage to the fabric of the nation of a long lockdown. But at last we have the prime decision-maker at the pulpit in Downing Street to explain what he thinks he is doing.