Boris Johnson’s snappy phrases should end

Alastair Campbell, The Independent

This is a plea to any grown-ups in Downing Street: you have one goal between now and 7pm on Sunday — to get Boris Johnson to behave like a grown-up and to treat the people of the UK as grown-ups when he speaks.

It will require a significant change to his usual modus operandi — a cocktail of charm, wit, ruffled hair, energy, optimism, Churchillian rhetoric, British exceptionalism and a short snappy slogan, oven-ready for the news bulletins and the next day’s front pages.

This cocktail has been, to a large extent, responsible for the monumental cock-up that the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has become. In virtually every major country, the UK is being reported as a disaster zone, with one of the worst outcomes and the worst handlings in the world. Only in the UK itself, the very place where the damage is being done, are large parts of the media continuing to buy the No 10 line that both PM and government are on top of the crisis.

One of the most important things grown-ups in Downing Street can do is steer Johnson away from his belief that the snappy phrase is what really counts. Strategy and detail are what count.

This crisis has been littered with slogans that have got the government through a couple of news cycles but achieved little else: squash the sombrero, send the virus packing, wash your hands, operation last gasp, whatever it takes, right decisions at the right time, put our arms around you (that one didn’t even last half a news cycle, thankfully so, given it hardly fitted with the social distancing message).

Then we had the lines that were designed to lead us to believe Johnson and the UK had some kind of special quality that meant we didn’t need to worry, even as the reasons to fret mounted. So “I’m still shaking hands in hospitals” — this on what we now know was the day the scientists were telling ministers they should advise people against shaking hands with anyone, let alone Covid-19 patients.

We had his Superman phase, when he volunteered the UK to be “the country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing”. Well, that has gone well.

We had his U-turn phase, where on different days close together he could say with equal conviction that it was better to keep schools open, and then announce their closure; where he could happily send people off to Cheltenham races and Liverpool FC against Atletico “Locked-Down-Already” Madrid, and then say all large gatherings should be banned — once the sports authorities had decided to do it for him.

“Led by the science” has perhaps been the most egregious and misleading slogan of all. Science itself is not an exact science. It can inform decision-making, but it cannot instruct. Ministers have to make decisions based upon often conflicting advice. There is another three-word Johnson lifetime philosophy at the heart of this “led by science” mantra — “cover my arse”. If ministers can build the narrative that there was widespread public support for a science-led approach, they hope they can evade or at least spread the blame when the country wakes up to the scale of the national catastrophe unfolding.

The one message that has been effectively communicated is “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”. To those who portray Johnson as some kind of master communicator, it is worth recalling that at the time this message was being cemented in the public mind, he was off being treated for the illness.

We saw at PMQs on Wednesday that he simply does not have the discipline to stick to a coherent and consistent comms strategy unless it is little more than a slogan — “take back control”, “get Brexit done”, “oven-ready deal”, “levelling up”.

Feeling distinctly uncomfortable at Labour leader Keir Starmer’s skewering, and with speaker Lindsay Hoyle expressing disapproval of Johnson making a major policy statement on TV rather than in the Commons, he could not help himself. He gave some convoluted reason why he had to do it on Sunday, and then said there would be changes in the lockdown on Monday.

The pro-Johnson papers needed no encouragement to go into overdrive, and the families of the tens of thousands of dead were treated to headlines about “Happy Monday”. Serious leaders of the devolved administrations were furious, so were the scientists, as they envisaged millions thinking we could ease up on lockdown over the bank holiday weekend. The government comms machine had to go into reverse gear. Yet another communications fiasco made by Johnson failing to control what came out of his mouth.

Often, what the government says and how the media reports it does not matter that much. Right now, it can be the difference between life and death, and between economic success and economic disaster. That is how serious this is and why Johnson should start to get serious now.

The last thing the country needs is another of his snappy phrases. We need a proper explanation for why care homes are now at the centre of the crisis, and a proper plan to address it. We need a detailed plan for release from the lockdown. We need it to be set out, sector by sector, area by area, step by step, as other governments have already done. We need it to be accompanied by the caveat, which the public will understand, that there is no certainty to every aspect of the plan, and that if the infection rate rises, we may need to revisit varying degrees of lockdown.

We need a reset both of strategy, and of communications, and he can only do that effectively if he admits there have been missteps along the way so far. The public will respect and trust the government more for such an approach, and listen to subsequent advice more too. If we get more of the same homilies and platitudes, more of the same claims of our “apparent success”, more of the same bombast and bluster, then I really fear for the future.

After taking part in the VE Day celebrations, and paying tribute to that generation, Johnson would do well to reflect that his words, actions and ill-advised inactions have contributed to many of them dying. That alone should inspire the seriousness and the humility that should be weighed in every word he utters on Sunday.