Boris’s broadcast was historic, but it is we who will decide how our history will unfold

Boris Johnson’s broadcast to the nation, delivered at 8.30 on Monday evening, made history. It marked the moment when the full gravity of the coronavirus pandemic should finally have dawned on every man, woman and child in the land. And it was the moment when the man-child Boris finally came of age. Millions who did not vote for him will, for the first time, have felt that he was the right man for the job. Henceforth, this new, statesmanlike Boris must live up to the standard he set himself in that statement. The Prime Minister must be prime ministerial. There can be no going back. Boris Johnson has, to use a classical allusion of which he is so fond, crossed the Rubicon.

What of the broadcast itself? At its heart was a profound shift in both tone and content. Where hitherto the Prime Minister had respectfully asked the country to heed his words, even imploring us to do the right thing, now he moved from exhortation to command. “From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction — you must stay at home.”

What St John Henry Newman called “the grammar of consent” lies at the heart of the British conception of democracy. Our leaders are there on sufferance; we obey only as free-born English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish citizens, endowed with reason and discretion, always reserving the right to withhold our consent to a Government that defied common decency and coerced conscience. But our allegiance as subjects of the Queen also implies obligations, to the community and the country. We must, in the final resort, obey the law. Only in the rarest of circumstances do British governments threaten to use force, at moments of maximum danger to the public. This is one of those moments.

“No Prime Minister wants to enact measures like this,” he told us — and he meant it. If a soothsayer had informed us, when this Government was elected by a landslide what seems like an aeon ago, that the jovial jester whose election video spoofed Love, Actually would within three months be banning weddings, nobody would have believed it.

 “The way ahead is hard,” Johnson told us last night, echoing but not parodying Churchill. “And it is still true that many lives will sadly be lost.” The injunction to stay at home as part of “a huge national effort to halt the growth of this virus” means that the life functions of civil society have been reduced to the bare minimum. 

The police now have the authority to stop anyone, anywhere and ask them where they are going. If they cannot give a satisfactory reason, they may be detained, fined or dispersed. Does this mean Britain is now a police state? Of course not. Emergency powers are, as the word implies, temporary, to deal with an emerging threat to life and limb. The characteristic of a dictatorship is that emergency measures are made permanent. You would have to be literally mad to believe that Boris Johnson, of all people, is so “sinister” as to see his destiny as depriving people of their liberties. This has not stopped some commentators ranting about martial law, “RIP Britain” or “putting the nation under house arrest”. That they still have the right to spout such nonsense demonstrates that we do not live under a dictatorship, but the most liberal and law-abiding democracy on earth. The great principle of Magna Carta, that the Government is under the law no less than the people, still applies. Boris Johnson will have to answer for his actions and he knows it.

Already some are demanding inquiries into the handling of coronavirus, notably Alastair Campbell here on TheArticle, with the focus on the role of the Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings. Again, to call for such investigations is legitimate; no doubt mistakes have been made. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and social media gives onlookers the illusion of power without responsibility — which as Stanley Baldwin said of the press barons of his time, is the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. At present, talk of a public inquiry is entirely beside the point. Sir Lawrence Freedman, who as a member of the Iraq Inquiry knows as much as anyone alive about this, wisely observes in a long Twitter thread, this “would be an enormous distraction for those trying to cope with this situation”. He also points out that the official documents already published tell us a great deal about the advice on which Government policy is based. He identifies a key document that shows how scientists three weeks ago underestimated the rapidity of the spread of the virus. “My question for an inquiry would not be about herd immunity but whether there was a delay in appreciating that the curve would be steeper than first supposed.” Was there “a delay in HMG’s response”? 

Sir Lawrence, the Professor Emeritus of War Studies at KCL and an eminent military historian, emphasises that he is merely posing questions, not accusations. This is not the time for recriminations. Churchill became Prime Minister in the aftermath of the Norway campaign, a disaster for which he was directly responsible. Nobody suggested an inquiry, for the simple reason that the Wehrmacht was invading France and the British Expeditionary Force was about to be trapped at Dunkirk. When so much is happening in the present and the future is so uncertain, the past can wait for the historians.

Indeed, the drama has unfolded so fast that the public has struggled to keep up with official advice and policy. Last night’s “instruction” from the Prime Minister came just a week after his first daily press conference. It is doubtful whether so many radical changes have ever before been telescoped into such a short period. In this way, too, Boris Johnson’s broadcast was historic. But it is not the politicians, still less the boffins and mandarins, who really make history. It is we, the people, who decide. We will determine, by our individual actions, whether this pandemic will wipes out entire cohorts, or be subdued by the collective determination of the country.