Would The Death Of ‘Whack-A-Mole’ Show Boris Johnson Is Learning Lessons After All?

“Now if there’s a smile on my face/It’s only there tryin’ to fool the public/But when it comes down to foolin’ you/Now honey that’s quite a different subject.” 

I’ve no idea if Boris Johnson is a fan of Smokey Robinson, and can’t quite picture him karaoke-ing those words to fiancee Carrie in the privacy of their Downing St flat. But as it emerged that he could dump his favoured regionalised tactics for dealing with the pandemic, he may be shedding the Tiers of a Clown, when there’s no one around.

The Daily Mail had the exclusive that Johnson and senior ministers are looking at ditching the tiering system that was first imposed last summer. It’s a system that has since proved woefully inadequate to cope with the second-then-third wave of Covid in the UK. That may be why No.10 notably refused to deny the Mail story today.

The tiering system was a key part of the PM’s relentless boosterism even during the first wave. As early as May 11 he said “we will be..doing whack-a-mole” to deal with localised outbreaks. Note however that even as he came up with the typically jovial Johnsonian metaphor (in a No.10 press conference), he added this caveat: ”It also makes sense to have a strong UK approach as well..”

The benefits of a strong national lockdown have been made painfully obvious in recent weeks. It’s only the imposition of really tough controls that has once more suppressed case numbers (today say another record fall in hospital admissions too). Half-measures simply don’t seem to work against this dreadful virus once it has ripped out of control.

In fact, although in many areas of public life a sense of proportionality seems eminently reasonable, one big lesson of 2020/21 is that Covid demands a disproportionate response. Going in early and hard is likely to be one of the public inquiry’s conclusions, but coming out of a lockdown slowly is also possibly another lesson. That may seem expensive at the time, but it’s nowhere near as expensive as unlocking only to lockdown again repeatedly.

And in a world where new, highly transmissible variants can spread like wildfire, a tiered or regional system already seems so last year. The Kent variant very quickly became the London variant and the midlands variant and the northern variant. The problem was that Johnson was sticking to his tiered idea (even rejigging them and adding a Tier 4) until the bitter end, before conceding a national approach was the only solution.

In fact, last autumn he was even thinking of going hyper-local, with borough by borough restrictions urged on him by some Tory MPs upset that their leafy villages were suffering because of curbs on nearby town hotspots or (perish the thought) because of what was happening up north. Under the new plan, some low-Covid areas would have to wait for high-Covid counterparts to catch up but that may be a small price overall.

If the PM does indeed return to a national approach on leaving lockdown, it will naturally slow the exit out of restrictions. Yet the advantages are plain. No more rows with Andy Burnham and others over localised measures and cash, a much simpler public health message that everyone can understand, and a vital sense of national solidarity that we are all ’in this together;. 

Of course, one key problem with Johnson’s whack-a-mole approach was that Test and Trace failures meant his mallet was broken. How could you crack down on local outbreaks when the service set up to isolate people was failing to trace large numbers of those involved, and whose test turnaround times were just too slow to make a difference? A hammer horror show, indeed.

As it happens, Test and Trace is now in a markedly better state. As I said yesterday, its test results have dramatically improved in the past fortnight (it now turns around more than 70% of tests within 24 hours, and an impressive 94% by ‘the next day’).

I understand a key reason for this is a remapping of its logistics to get test sites closer to labs and real-time tracking in transport of tests. Labs are also running at a higher utilisation rate, without the need to use “surge” capacity in commercial labs. Simple things like building in time “buffers” to ensure tests arrive on deadline, rather than three hours after most staff have gone home, mean delays from snow, traffic and road closures can be coped with.

There are still problems with isolation (not least financial compensation as I’ve written about all too often). But the impending launch of wide-scale lateral flow tests for schools and, crucially, workplaces could make a huge difference in picking up asymptomatic cases. Insiders expect rapid testing to become a regular part of daily life for millions of us through this year. Instead of relying on people coming forward for tests, they will take them at home or at work as a matter of course.

If the nation eases restrictions gradually in different sectors, but in all geographic areas at the same time, the hope in No.10 will be that this will be the last national lockdown. Lateral flow tests may then revive whack-a-mole once prevalences are low again. But for coming weeks, the idea of “levelling up” restrictions across the country would at least match the PM’s slogan to the health needs of the nation.