All that, though, has to be set against a record that does not inspire confidence, but saps it. It consists of a series of decisions that, for now, the British public has been prepared to forgive, granting its leaders the benefit of the doubt, but which it may eventually find indefensible. Their combined effect can be seen in a single image, a graph with the power to terrify. It shows that the UK death toll is currently higher than Italy’s at the same stage, reinforced by another showing that by this stage of the outbreak Italy had begun to flatten its curve while in Britain the line keeps rising, the number of deaths doubling every three days.
Start with Johnson’s initial reaction to this menace. Recall the smirking insouciance with which he boasted that he continued to shake hands, even when he met people he knew to be infected with the virus. If Britain emerges from this crisis with a higher death rate than comparable countries, that is a Johnson moment that will come to haunt him.
That complacency was formalised in the government’s flirtation with the notion of herd immunity, an approach that some ministers still try to deny was ever policy but which was spelled out explicitly by the chief scientific adviser as recently as 13 March. To be sure, Johnson U-turned on that, ditching mitigation for all-out suppression when he announced the national lockdown 10 days later, prompted in part by seeing Italy engulfed by the virus. But Britons might not wait for the inevitable public inquiry to wonder at the time lost chasing what proved to be a fantasy and to ask how those precious days might have been used instead to prepare for what was coming.
For that time could have been devoted to testing, the failing on which this government is likely to be judged most harshly. On Thursday, health secretary Matt Hancock sought to offer an explanation for why Britain so conspicuously lags behind the likes of Germany in this area: Britain does not have the diagnostic industry the Germans have built up over 70 years, he said. But that cannot excuse what has been a litany of mixed messages, crossed wires and broken promises.
