Why Downing Street virus ‘blame game’ will be contagious – Matthew Flinders

The first is that there is going to be a baby boom around a year from now.

The second is that the baby boom is likely to be matched by a similarly spectacular increase in divorces (some couples will not have enjoyed spending so much time together).

The final confident prediction is that the ‘Covid crisis’ will lead to an outbreak of divisive and disruptive political blame games as politicians, policy-makers, advisers and experts all seek to avoid carrying the can for those decisions – or opinions – that inevitably turned out to be wrong.

Forget about herd immunity, social distancing and flattening curves, the likelihood is that fighting the crisis is likely to be matched by a parallel strategy that revolves around political immunity, blame-distancing and flattening out the public’s (and media’s) demand for a scalp when crisis-fatigue sets in. Social solidarity will turn into scapegoating, respect into recriminations and fear into frustration.

Cracks that will eventually grow into political chasms (into which some politicians will fall, others will be pushed and others will avoid only to continue their careers in the shadow of the crisis) are already beginning to show – such as briefings against Matt Hancock, the Health and Social Care Secretary, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson was being admitted to hospital with coronavirus.

To some extent this is inevitable. As the country heads towards what are likely to be the most intense and devastating weeks of the crisis, the pressure within Whitehall and Westminster is building up to levels that today’s generation of politicians and officials have simply never experienced.

The fact that several key players have gone down with symptoms of the virus has simply added to the pressure as working from home adds yet another level of complexity.

Internal discord is festering with regard to who should take responsibility for the flip-flopping strategy that took the country from a rather Cameroonian ‘chillax’ approach to sudden ‘lockdown’.

The existence of competing political agendas is beginning to grate and grind as territorial tensions become more obvious. Added to this are increasingly nervous questions about whether the time has come for even more restrictive measures.

Even now – at the very epicentre of the crisis – ministers and their special advisers, officials and their experts are thinking about who is going to ‘carry the can’ when the dust settles, the masks come off and the accountability industry kicks in. And kick in it will for the simple reason that in a low-trust high-blame adversarial polity like the UK’s, the nature of post-event scrutiny is rarely to undertake a level-headed, rational and constructive review of the evidence, but will instead focus on apportioning blame, heaping fault, finding scapegoats, pointing fingers and (ultimately) recommending resignations. In short, accountability is very much of the ‘Gotcha!’ variety.

The politics of pandemics tends to be associated with policy failure. This is a critical point. No matter what steps a government might take – or how quickly measures are put in place – the fact that, by its very existence, a pandemic brings with it crisis, and chaos intermixed with death and suffering ensures that any governmental response will be seen in generally critical terms.

And this brings me to my final point – a plea to those who will, at some point, review and report on the Government’s handling of the Covid crisis.

It’s very easy to blame and heckle from the sidelines when the war is won or the pandemic is passing; far harder to be the ‘man [or woman] in the arena’ charged with actually taking decisions and coping with complexity – as it were – ‘in the moment’.

It really isn’t the critic who counts. Building new hospitals, launching new policies, seeking new powers, liaising with other governments, co-ordinating a vast network of organisations, calming the public, reshaping the economy…and all on the basis of immediate need, divided expert opinion, the law of unintended consequences and in the knowledge that these are matters of life and death. Under-react, over-react; you are dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t, but it’s inevitable that things will go wrong.

But who will remember this, in the future, when the coronavirus blame games begin?

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is also Vice President of the Political Studies Association.

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