The Breakfast Briefing: Why ministers can’t just blame the press for unforced errors on lockdown messaging
3 min read
Your morning guide to what’s moving in Westminster from the PoliticsHome team
Yesterday was not a good day for the Government. A morning that began with warnings of the deepest recession for 300 years soon morphed into an afternoon spent frantically hosing down excitable newspaper front pages about the easing of lockdown measures.
By lunchtime, Number 10 was pushing the message that Boris Johnson wanted to “advance with maximum caution” - before Dominic Raab got up to the podium at the daily press conference and (even then only under questioning from the BBC’s Laura Kuennesberg) confirmed that there had been “no change” in the Government’s guidance on social distancing.
“Whatever’s been reported in the newspapers is not a reliable guide to either evidence we’re getting or the policy decision we’ll be taking,” he said. “I think it’s safe to say that any changes in the short-term will be modest, small, incremental, and very carefully monitored. And, as of now, there is no changes.”
Number 10 can be angry at newspapers for their front pages all it likes - but experienced political editors will not be making this stuff up. Instead, the mixed messaging reflects the very real differences around the Cabinet table about how to proceed.
Whichever way ministers turn they face decisions that will weigh heavily
As The Times’ political team reports this morning, the Government is caught between the “datists” - who want the PM to put concrete dates in his upcoming lockdown “roadmap” to try to shore up confidence - and those who feel such a move would be premature and self-defeating while the R rate hovers periously close to 1.
But the instinctively-dovish Johnson did not help himself this week when he told MPs, unprompted, that ministers will want to “get going with some of these measures on Monday” - wording that was bound to prompt speculation about an easing of the curbs.
Raab’s press conference also sowed real confusion about the latest data on the rate at which the virus can spread. Just minutes after Sage member Professor John Edmunds said that crucial R number had risen in the past fortnight amid a surge in care home cases, the Foreign Secretary told reporters “overall the R level is down”. National statistician Sir Ian Diamond, stood next to Raab, said: “Professor Edmunds I think is right that R has probably gone up just a little bit from his last estimates and that is driven by the epidemic in care homes, he would say, and I would not demur from that.” Got that?
The coronavirus crisis presents no easy answers for the Government. Whichever way ministers turn they face decisions that will weigh heavily and which no politician will ever have wanted to face. But what they can do is avoid unforced errors in informing the public about the most unsettling time most of us have ever lived through.
If losing control of the messaging is a problem for a government at the best of times, during a pandemic, it’s potentially lethal.
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