Trump is handling coronavirus so badly, he almost makes Johnson look good3 May 2020 16:12
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This government should be on the rack. The evidence that it botched crucial decisions at crucial moments is piling up. The litany is now so familiar it barely needs repeating, from the failure to secure personal protective equipment for frontline workers in health and social care to the 11 lost days of delay before imposing a lockdown that has proved essential for saving lives.
You can focus on specific judgments: why did ministers allow mass gatherings, from racing at Cheltenham to a Stereophonics gig in Cardiff, ignoring the warnings that such events would be a virus-fest? Why did it initially tell people to stay away from pubs and restaurants, but simultaneously allow those places to stay open? Why did the government call a halt in March to testing and tracing? If the answer is a lack of capacity, then why did it not immediately set about recruiting the “army of contact tracers” that will be required if we are ever to emerge from our homes? Why the focus on mega-labs, rather than seizing on the offer of small laboratories to do testing for their local hospitals, which, as Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, has argued, could have made those hospitals “safe places”? Why the rules initially limiting tests to those NHS employees with symptoms, which, as Nurse puts it, allowed staff to be on wards “infecting people”?
Or you can look at decisions going back a decade, pointing a finger at Tory austerity that starved public services to the bone, leaving them underequipped and eroding our resilience. Either way, the country now faces a death toll approaching 30,000.
And yet, far from being on the rack, the government continues to bask in public support. True, approval for the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen from the dizzying 61% it reached a month ago to 51% at last count. But 51% is still the kind of approval rating most politicians long for.
What accounts for this disconnect between the government’s record and the public’s high regard for those responsible? Put another way, why isn’t Boris Johnson in more trouble?
Any answer must begin with what pollsters call the “rally-around-the-flag” effect, the tendency for voters to back their leaders in a time of crisis. Data from around the world, in this era and in others, suggests that when citizens are scared, they want to believe those in charge have the wisdom and strength to protect them. Think of electorates as passengers on a plummeting plane: in that moment of peril, they need to trust the pilot.
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