On the day the prime minister was legally obliged to review the government’s lockdown regulations, you might have thought that Boris Johnson would want to appear in person to say nothing was changing. Though it might do on Sunday. And there again it might not. It all depended on the scientific advice, almost all of which ministers had so far failed to understand. Still, they could always hope an extra few days might make all the difference. But faced with a genuine crisis, Boris has morphed from someone who would do anything to appear on TV into a virtual recluse. Reality and Boris have only ever been on nodding terms at best. So it was left to Dominic Raab to take the hit at the daily Downing Street press conference. The foreign secretary’s instructions had been clear. Make it plain that your prime function is to say you haven’t a clue what’s going to happen on Sunday – and even if you did, you couldn’t tell – and take as long as you like to say as little of any interest as possible. Dom had eagerly accepted. After all, not knowing very much was his specialist subject.
At first it had all gone pretty much like clockwork. Before taking the podium, Raab had shot himself up with a magic cocktail of Mogadon and beta blockers so there was barely a hint of the usual Psycho Dom as he put himself and his audience to sleep. Yes, the death rate did appear to be a lot higher in the UK than elsewhere in Europe, but perhaps it was time for people to stop being so negative. Rather than concentrating on the gloomy stuff, why not celebrate the fact that so many of us were still alive. In fact, at 8pm that night, when people went out into the street to applaud NHS staff and care workers, maybe they should give themselves an extra clap for having managed not to die. Dom quickly glossed over the fact that the government had now missed its 100,000 daily tests target five days in a row – it was the media’s fault for being dumb enough to imagine the target had ever been expected to be met – before going into a long explanation about why he didn’t have anything more to say. The R rate was now somewhere between 0.5 and 0.9, so whatever changes to the lockdown Boris might make on Sunday would probably be largely cosmetic at best. All he could guarantee, though, was that the prime minister would provide a roadmap to recovery. Though sadly, from the first draft he had been shown, all routes out ended in a cul-de-sac. It was when the questions started that the press conference began to rather fall apart. Understandably, most people wanted to know why Boris had appeared to be far more optimistic about the possibility of easing restrictions at prime minister’s questions the day before, when the key message Raab had delivered was that bugger all was going to change. Boris had promised a world of infinite possibilities of picnics and sunbathing – even if they were inconveniently timed to coincide with the end of the bank holiday weekend. The foreign secretary had promised next to nothing.
Dom’s drug-glazed eyes betrayed a flicker of panic. He longed to say that Boris was becoming ever more detached from reality by the day and was now borderline delusional. So no one should ever believe a word he says. But he loved his job too much for that. Dom is nothing if not a masochist. So instead he went into denial: the prime minister had never promised anything and all the treats that had been briefed to large sections of the government-friendly newspapers by No 10 the night before were basically figments of the media’s imagination. He had no idea how so many journalists could have got the same story so wrong. That, though, was merely the beginning of Dom’s nightmare. Because while he had been medicating himself into a state of mindlessness ahead of the press conference, other journalists had been listening to the science select committee where John Edmunds, a key member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, had said that the R rate had actually gone up to between 0.75 and 1.0, largely because of increased transmission in hospitals and care homes. Something, Ian Diamond, head of the Office for National Statistics, was only too happy to confirm. The days when the scientists acted as government stooges are long over. Everyone knows there’s a public inquiry coming down the track as soon as the pandemic is over, and no one is willing to be hung out to dry as the fall guy. “Um, we’ve always been guided by the science,” Raab garbled, defaulting to the standard script of any minister who knows he’s been landed in the shit. So the science had told the government to completely ignore the results of Exercise Cygnus in 2016 by failing to adequately prepare care homes for a possible pandemic. So the science had also told Johnson to basically do nothing for 10 days in February while he sorted out his personal life. So the science had led the government to be desperately short of PPE and testing equipment. So the science had pointed the UK towards the highest death rate in Europe.
Dom could feel a tightness in his chest as his heart started racing. Time to end the press conference as soon as indecently possible. It had been a car crash, but then he’d secretly never expected any other outcome. Because it wasn’t just him that was clueless, it was the entire cabinet. Still, he’d done his bit. And in three days time, Boris would have to come out of hiding and explain that he didn’t know what he was doing either. There was no roadmap. Just a picture of a donkey with pins nowhere near its tail. The plan was just hit and hope. Which was only marginally better than no plan at all. • This article was amended on 11 May 2020. The head of the Office for National Statistics is Ian Diamond, not Neil Diamond as stated in an earlier version.