As some of you may have noticed, my column didn’t appear in the last issue. I had hoped to use the week’s leave to indulge in seasonal partying. But the hosts of most of the festivities in my diary cancelled, citing Omicron. Having had the booster vaccine last month, I was up for socialising. Not so the majority of my intended hosts, who perhaps felt more responsibility in that role.
But the main point, in terms of politics, is that these cancellations predated the government’s advice to be — in the words of Boris Johnson — “cautious” in the face of a new Covid variant of extraordinary transmissibility, against which the first two vaccine jabs would be much less protective.
As in the period just before the government announced a lockdown in March last year, the public to a great extent decided, autonomously, to restrict their social engagements: then, too, restaurants and theatres endured devastating mass cancellations well before they were closed by government decree.
This time — rightly, in my view — Johnson has not imposed any mandatory restrictions, instead counting on a mixture of self-restraint, pre-existing immunity and an accelerated booster programme to keep Covid hospital admissions at a level the NHS can handle. He has abandoned the idea of requiring those who have come into contact with someone with the Omicron variant to isolate themselves — they just need to test, so no pingdemic. The only significant new regulation the government has proposed is that certain places where people congregate, such as nightclubs, should require attendees to produce evidence either of vaccination or of a negative lateral flow test (free from chemists).
Yet approximately half of the Conservative backbenchers voted against the measure last week, which got through with the support of Labour. Some of the remarks made by the “Tory rebels”, as they are routinely called, were dumbfounding. David Davis, a former cabinet minister, said: “The one thing you would think you have control of in a civilised society is your own body and any medical actions taken to it.” But we are not following Austria, which has authorised fines for those refusing the jab. And even in that case — the most anti-antivaxer policy in Europe — no one is losing control of their own body. Nor are we following Singapore, where vaccine-refusers have to contribute to the cost of their treatment in hospital should they be admitted with Covid.
But Davis seemed sensible next to some of his colleagues. Sir Desmond Swayne told the Commons that the government had been “letting loose the dogs of war” and that the renaming of Public Health England as the “Health Protection Agency” (actually not its real new name) was the product of “Stalinist minds”. Swayne went on to declaim: “We decide what our risk appetite is and what we are or are not prepared to encounter. Notwithstanding the carnage on our roads, which is certainly killing more people than Covid at the moment, some of us will still decide to drive.”
In the most recent annual figures 1,390 people were killed on our roads; the typical daily toll is about four. The peak daily Covid death toll — out of a total so far of nearly 150,000 — was 1,820. These are facts instantly available from the staff at the excellent House of Commons library, should Sir Desmond find researching via Google too tedious.
As for limitations on our freedom of choice, are we to take it that Swayne is opposed to the regulation that we are not allowed to drive a car if we have imbibed much more than a glass of wine? Does he consider that to be a grotesque infringement on our personal “risk appetite”?
Then there was his colleague Marcus Fysh MP, who in his opposition to the measures told Radio 5 Live: “We are not a ‘Papers, please’ society. This is not Nazi Germany.” Strangely, Fysh does not seem to oppose the government’s plans to make citizens produce some sort of photographic identification before they can vote. Regarding his idiotic insinuation of Nazi tendencies on the part of ministers, it’s worth pointing out that the actual Nazis relaxed vaccine mandates (in such matters the Führer had more in common with the health cranks than what we now term “conventional medicine”).
As for our present-day chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, he was devastating last week when answering a Conservative MP who raised the question of whether the government, advised by him, had been “prioritising Covid over cancer”. He replied: “This is sometimes said by people who have no understanding of health at all ... and when they say it, it is usually because they want to make a political point. You ask any doctor in any part of the system, and what they will tell you is that what is threatening our ability to treat cancer is that so much of the NHS is treating Covid.” For saying such things Whitty has been traduced by some Tory MPs as a sort of socialist ideologue who actively enjoys recommending social restrictions.
One cabinet minister, who had been making Whitty’s point to the “rebels”, told me they typically responded: “You are no longer a Conservative.” Yet Conservatism has always been opposed to ideological purity outweighing the dictates of common sense: it is why it has been such a successful political party. For the great majority of British people it is Whitty who represents common sense, not Sir Desmond Swayne. To denigrate the chief medical officer (a man who has spent many weekends treating Covid patients in hospital, on top of his advisory day job) is, on political grounds alone, unfathomably stupid.
The lesson to be drawn from the Conservative debacle in the North Shropshire by-election is obviously that the voters were disgusted by the revelations of partying in Downing Street last winter, when the nation was being told by the PM to do no such thing.
But please also observe that the Reclaim Party, co-founded by the actor Laurence Fox specifically to defend the right of people to ignore any and all Covid restrictions, polled abysmally. Its candidate, the former MEP Martin Daubney, who vigorously campaigned against the lockdowns (as he had every right to do), got just 375 votes.
The Tory MPs who voted against the government in the Commons last week might log that figure, or indeed the letters from readers in Conservative-supporting newspapers after that vote saying things like, “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d congratulate the Labour Party,” and, “I hate to admit it, but we are fortunate to have an opposition that is prepared to put people’s safety above party politics.”
Above all it is absurd, since the government has adopted an advisory rather than compulsory approach this time round, that its “rebels” have proved themselves unable to take yes for an answer.
