Tis the season for furtive exchanges of carrier bags in car parks. Well, it is in this family anyway. Last week brought a seven-hour round trip by car for a socially distanced Christmas yomp through the Peak District mud with my elderly parents, followed by a faintly melancholy swapping of sacks of presents from car boot to car boot.
It wasn’t really the Christmas get-together of anyone’s dreams. But the normal clan gathering over turkey no longer seems worth the risk; not with one octogenarian, four grandchildren at schools that have all had Covid-19 cases, and assorted working adults with varying degrees of possible exposure to the virus.
If that makes the decision sound easy, it wasn’t. We all crave happy endings to a horrible year, and anyone with ageing parents knows the worry that each Christmas might be the last. But these are the choices that must be faced now that government Covid guidance has descended into Vicky Pollard territory: yeah but no but yeah but come to think of it, maybe just use your common sense.
The Barnard Castle days of “do as we say, not as Dominic Cummings does” were confusing enough, but now we’re plumbing previously uncharted depths of “actually, don’t do what we said, either”.
Boris Johnson has found himself torn this week between the combined weight of the medical establishment arguing we were headed for disaster on one hand, and some mutinous Tory backbenchers on the other. So naturally he has settled for what could politely be described as an innately Conservative solution focused on individual choice and responsibility – more accurately described as a mess.
First he reassured his MPs that the four nations of the UK had reached a “unanimous agreement that we should proceed in principle with the existing regulations”, although Wales and Scotland have now given their own tougher guidance. Then he held a press conference begging families to consider scrapping the plans he himself had told them only three weeks ago it was safe to make. (Boris Johnson preaching the virtues of personal restraint; truly 2020 is spoiling us.)
Priti Patel, the home secretary, cleared things up in a radio interview on Thursday morning by explaining that the British people were sensible enough to know what to do, presumably regardless of how badly they’re advised. Why, she inquired, would anyone travel from a high tier to a low one for Christmas? Well, one answer is that your government said they could.
Had the position been from the start that it’s impossible to set hard and fast rules covering every family, and so people should exercise their own judgment, this might make sense. But to admit only at the 11th hour that just because Johnson said it would be fine to meet doesn’t mean you should actually have believed him? That’s some statement for a prime minister to make about himself.
Chris Whitty, England’s increasingly pained-looking chief medical officer, reached for a motoring analogy to explain why the law would remain the law, but that didn’t mean you should stick to it. Just because you could legally do 70mph on an icy road, he pointed out, didn’t mean you should. True, but he’ll have driven on enough icy roads to know how that pans out. Some people crawl along at walking pace, only to get stuck on the first hill. Some hammer it regardless, and end up in the hedge. Some get it absolutely right, but still wake up in A&E because some idiot came too fast round a corner.
Now imagine being on that icy road, full of drivers anxious to get home for Christmas, but someone has raised the speed limit to 100mph – albeit with a warning to drive appropriately for the conditions. How many overly cocky drivers would imagine they could get away with it, only to find out the hard way they couldn’t?
And if a pile-up ensued, would grieving families really attach no blame to the man who changed the speed limit? This would be a fascinating sociological experiment exploring the limits of personal freedom and responsibility – if only we weren’t all compelled to live in it.
For what it’s worth, my hunch is that many families will stick to the slow lane this December for fear of tragedy in January. The thing is, Patel is absolutely right; most people are innately pretty sensible, and more cautious about the virus than an aggressive minority on social media suggests. Even before this latest hasty backtracking, YouGov found that three-quarters of us plan to stay at home on Christmas Day. For every rule-breaking Rita Ora, there are older people afraid to leave the house: several of my friends with school-age children report invitations being spurned by wary grandparents. Why chance it, when a vaccine is so close that they’re waiting by the phone for the GP’s call?
But there will inevitably be a few still going to the limit of the law and beyond, plus others who just couldn’t face the crushing disappointment of cancelling, and the fear must be that some will pay a terrible price for that. We are already at the levels of reported Covid cases seen in mid to late October, which led within weeks to a national lockdown. Yet this time all we have is a regulatory dog’s breakfast plus exhortations to use your common sense, a superpower beloved of those who believe the people instinctively know better than the experts.
Well, fair enough: if common sense is just a name for lessons drawn from bitter experience, then the common sense conclusions of 2020 are that Boris Johnson is generally two steps behind the virus, and that experts usually turn out to have been right. Put like that, maybe we do all know exactly what to do, after all.