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Nearly a year ago, as he launched the Tory manifesto that paved the way for his general election triumph, Boris Johnson was on typically alliterative form. Condemning parliament’s inability to sort Brexit, he launched a withering attack on its record of “prevarication, procrastination, dither and delay”.
Fast forward to today and yet another whopping U-turn, this time on extending furlough, and it’s Johnson and Rishi Sunak who seem exposed as the master prevaricators. Despite being warned through the late summer of the need for action, it took until November 5 for the PM and his chancellor to light a bonfire of the vanities entailed in that “dither and delay” jibe.
While their defenders will say “better late than never”, their critics will say it’s all “too little, too late”. There is no shame of course in executing U-turns (the public quite like them, if handled well and speedily), there is plenty of political damage in doing them only at the very, very last minute. Johnson’s lockdown looks like it was forced by a tsunami of new Covid hospitalisations, while Sunak’s extended furlough looks like a sudden panic about mass winter unemployment.
The best U-turns have a blink-and-you-miss-it quality, a swift admission you got it wrong and the caravan moves on. The worst policy reverses are dragged out of a government, leaving it and its MPs to endure all the pain of not budging, only to shift so late that scarring is inevitable. It may be hard to quantify, but that damage for this administration will come in the form of extra deaths and redundancies that could have been avoided.
For Johnson, some of this seems hardwired into his political persona. His fear of being disliked, a self-intoxicating optimism (you could call it light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-vision) plus an innate love of “winging it”, make for a lethal cocktail. David Cameron was famously called an “essay crisis prime minister”, but at least the essay was delivered on deadline. With Johnson, the delays (never forget that “girly swot” jab at his predecessor) have more of a dog-ate-my-homework justification.
The PM said in July that he “won’t hesitate” to reverse relaxations of lockdown measures, but hesitate is exactly what he did for months. Now, it seems that he’s decided that one of the chief drivers of that unlockdown, his own chancellor, should carry the can as much as himself. Perhaps that’s why Sunak was given the job of eating the humiliation of his own U-turn in the Commons, without any of the glory of the upside in a No.10 press conference.
Dishy Rishi became rattled Rishi as he faced repeated accusations of incompetence and last-minute switches to match the PM’s uncomical chaos. The charge stung all the more because while prime ministers are given licence to be flighty, the Treasury is supposed to be a model of calm if boring reassurance. Sunak sounded the most defensive and most irritable he’s been since taking over the job.
On the one hand, the TUC and CBI and many others (including the hard hit theatre industry) gave a huge welcome to the extension of furlough to March. But on the other, Sunak has shredded his own ‘Winter Economic Plan’ quicker than any of his opponents could have done. Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds (in her best performance to date) was merciless as she charted the zig-zagging clown car pathway that is the Treasury’s record in recent weeks.
First furlough was on Saturday extended for a month, just five hours before it was due to end. Two days later, there was a last-minute change to the self-employment scheme that seemed to have been forgotten. Today, we had the fourth change in six weeks on the whole package. “The Chancellor can change his mind at the last minute, but businesses cannot,” was Dodds’ most damaging line.
And for many people laid off over the past week, that will ring true. Although some firms will get state cash to reverse redundancies, many may think their restructuring is done and dusted and the hassle of going back is not worth it.
Sunak’s defence was that being “agile” was a strength not a weakness. But so many shifts in policy leave the impression of chaos rather than competence, of panic rather than prudence. The IFS was scathing about the fact that the well-known holes in the furlough scheme had not been fixed over the past few months and it was simply being rehashed with no lessons learned on waste or targeting.
More importantly, Sunak’s always arbitrary date for ending furlough by November now seems just that, driven more by his own “live without fear” lockdown scepticism and desire to curb spending. He even appeared to try to shift the blame in the Commons, saying his “belief was that we would be able to stay ahead of the virus” was based on increased capacity in the NHS and test and trace.
That dodging of responsibility sounded positively Johnsonian. But for a chancellor whose shine has really worn thin, maybe it was yet another last-minute.dot.conservative change in strategy too.