Boris Johnson’s dalliance with the science has ended, like most of his relationships, in acrimony. When he backed Dominic Cummings instead of the lockdown rules, Johnson abandoned any claim to rigour in his pandemic response. At the same time, he also squandered a precious moment of rapprochement between politics and facts.
A national emergency usually has a sobering effect on debate, but the threat from a microscopic virus achieved something more profound. It twisted the lens to focus on a level of empirical reality that had been invisible in the preceding years of hyper-partisan frenzy, when any notion of established truth seemed lost in a fog of culture war. A virus cannot be campaigned against or sidelined by intrigue. It resists all the techniques that brought Johnson to power and he seemed, for a while, genuinely chastened by it. Maybe the shock of a scientific challenge—the revenge of hard facts—will have some more durable corrective effect on wider politics, if not him.
The contrast with Brexit, the dominant issue before the pandemic, is profound. Many Remainers believed they were holding a line for reality against a barrage of fake news. They deployed experts—economists, diplomats, trade specialists. Leavers dismissed them as agents of a foreign plot against sovereignty. As the ultimate victor in that battle, Johnson was reviled by the vanquished side as a populist, a monstrous creature of the new “post-truth” era, Britain’s Trump.
The pandemic is a different type of crisis. Arguments over Brexit came down to rival concepts of Britain’s future. They could never be settled by scientific measurement. There is no “R” number for the spread of identity politics, but a virus has quantifiable risks. It also has no campaign advocates. It gets help from complacency and from conspiracy, but dangerous ideas about 5G signals causing sickness are not endorsed by mainstream British parties. UK government advisers have been spared the indignity inflicted on US counterparts, watching Trump advocate bleach ingestion as a possible remedy.
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Read more: The epidemiology of misinformation: how the web is weaving weird connections to spread lies about Covid-19 ____________________________________________________________________________________ There are disputes about policy—how far, or not, to lock down—fuelled by culture warrior prejudices. But there is consensus on the metrics. We do not yet know enough about transmission or immunity. That leaves ambiguities that allow some to insist the data favours lighter-touch quarantine while others see grounds for caution in the same numbers. There is attention-seeking and paranoia on the fringes, but the two Westminster camps are mostly trading in the same scientific currency, focused on common aspiration to get to the truth. In that sense, Covid politics uses facts in an old-fashioned sense of the word—demonstrable and universally accepted. Left and right biases have not been banished, but there are people on both sides drilling towards the same verifiable core of evidence.
Does that represent a durable shift in political culture? Much will depend on the American presidential election in November. The US exerts a powerful gravitational pull on the UK. There will be very different trajectories for Johnson depending on whether they see the inauguration of Joe Biden or a second term of Trump. The latter will offer sinister lessons in what is available to an incumbent prepared to incinerate democratic norms and set himself in flagrant defiance of the truth. No one doubts that Cummings is capable of applying that lesson in the UK, and few expect Johnson to rein him in.
In the pandemic response, Downing Street still notionally defers to science, although the medical advisers themselves have been humiliated by shambolic messaging. Johnson has made it clear, by implication, that evidence is subordinate to Cummings, who is subordinate to no one. But it turns out the British public still holds truth in high esteem. Cummings’s slippery excuses provoked outcry that took the Tory party aback. Perhaps there will be a lingering cultural legacy from the promotion of science to the frontline, even if it was then demoted. Something appeared to change in the debate during the truce between Johnson and the experts, when the chief medical officer was more prominent than cabinet ministers, and epidemiological models made front-page news. Johnson’s usual shtick of frivolity and play-acting was suspended.
Is it naive to hope that a residue of seriousness—the quality we might call factfulness—remains when the pandemic recedes? Post-truth politics is marked by the separation of information into discrete camps. Rival tribes do battle with arsenals of customised “fact.” The more explosive the claim, the truer it seems to its partisans.
Pandemic politics demands a different approach. When research undertaken in a spirit of open-minded curiosity confirms a new fact, the equation changes, as it always should have done. But more than that, responding to the virus requires politics to renew its accommodation with uncertainty: the choices involved are trade-offs. There is, for example, a tension between the need for a functioning economy and the need to prevent transmission. There is a wider lesson here we would do well to relearn—and we just might. Democratic politics is rarely a matter of locating the easy win-win solution. It is usually an exercise in finding the reasonable balance of risk and collective reward. That is another truth that might be a little better understood in the context of Covid-19.
We have an opportunity to move beyond relativism towards politics that recognises truth as something that takes time and care to assemble from evidence, and to recognise, too, the truth that most policy solutions will always be imperfect compromises. As a society we can internalise these lessons, or recoil from them because false certainty is more comforting. Such is the choice that coronavirus lays bare for us. The stakes are high, when one path could lead to a rehabilitation of liberal democracy and the other to its ruin
