James Forsyth

David Frost briefed the Cabinet yesterday on the state of the Brexit negotiations and he has now issued a very downbeat statement. Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator says that the third round of negotiations ‘made very little progress’. The problem is that (as always in these talks) the UK and the EU have very different interpretations of what is reasonable. The UK thinks that because it ‘just’ wants a free trade agreement it shouldn’t be expected to follow EU rules in a host of areas and should be offered a deal similar to what Canada, South Korea or Japan have. The UK has even accepted that this deal might see some tariffs imposed.

One of the constants of Boris Johnson’s political career has been his opposition to ‘nanny state’ interventions in people’s lives. In 2006, he overshadowed David Cameron’s first conference as Tory leader by supporting mothers who were pushing pies through school railings in protest at attempts to make their children eat Jamie Oliver inspired healthy school dinners. As recently as last year’s Tory leadership contest, he was attacking the so-called sugar tax for being ineffective and hitting the poor hardest. But, as I say in the Times this morning, in a discussion with some of his senior ministers and advisers last week, Boris Johnson told them, ‘I’ve changed my mind on this. We need to be much more interventionist’ on obesity.

Britain has long flattered itself that it leads the world in administration. But, as I write in the magazine this week, Covid-19 has highlighted just how far from being true that now is. It’s hard to argue that the UK has done much better than France, Spain and Italy, and we have clearly done worse than Germany. We are miles behind South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. This crisis has exposed the limitations of the UK’s government machine. One Whitehall veteran says that the ten days leading up to 23 March were ‘the nearest the wiring of the state has come to collapse. It wasn’t just blowing a fuse: the motherboard was beginning to melt down.’ Ministers need to be given more direct control over arms-length bodies such as Public Health England.

‘Covid-19 has been perhaps the biggest test of governments worldwide since the 1940s,’ declares the government’s command paper on the virus. The fact that the following paragraph proposes ‘a rapid re-engineering of government’s structures and institutions’ is telling. It is an implicit admission that the British government machine is, in several important areas, failing this test. The argument about whether the UK has the worst death toll in Europe risks descending into statistical absurdity. Until excess mortality figures are known, it won’t be possible to come to a verdict. But it’s hard to argue that the UK has done much better than France, Spain and Italy.

‘The normal grease of politics is not there,’ bemoans one sociable cabinet minister. Certainly, the whispered conversations in corridors that make up so much of Westminster life are in abeyance during this period of social distancing. The fact that the backbenches and the cabinet have deep reservations about the government’s approach matters far less than it would in normal times. In the Zoom parliament, there is no such thing as the mood of the House. One Tory grandee pushing for a significant easing of the lockdown complains that the current arrangements ‘make it easier for No. 10 to ignore parliament and cabinet’. But contrary to appearances, politics has actually sped up, rather than stopped, during the pandemic.

Keir Starmer got his first chance to take on Boris Johnson at PMQs today. There was no moment that will lead the evening news, but the new Labour leader did make Boris Johnson uncomfortable at times. When Starmer asked why the UK had moved away from contract tracing and testing in mid-March, Boris Johnson gave a long, rather rambling answer. But it is increasingly clear that this happened because the UK simply did not have the capacity to do this at the required level. Given that this is the case, the government would do well to be explicit about it In a further sign of how lacking the UK’s testing capacity was before this crisis hit, Boris Johnson announced a new target of 200,000 tests a day by the end of the month.