If asked a month ago how the nation would celebrate the easing of the lockdown, I would never have imagined it would be with a trip to the council tip.
Yet it’s a measure of how dramatically our horizons have shrunk that the heady prospect of dumping some rubbish, plus the chance of a socially distanced trip to the garden centre, can now be held out by ministers as a reward for six weeks of self-sacrifice. Nobody falls asleep at night dreaming of a chance to offload six weeks’ worth of grass clippings. Yet after a month or more inside, some of us have learned to take our thrills where we can: a cup of tea in the sunshine, a phone call, a friendly word with the neighbours when putting out the bins. The happiest people in lockdown are those most capable of finding solace in small things, and it’s this dramatic lowering of expectations under pressure that might help explain the baffling paradox in politics right now.
More than 21,000 people have died just in hospitals, millions are losing or likely to lose their jobs, coronavirus is ripping through care homes whose residents have frighteningly little chance of escaping it and frontline staff are shamefully having to risk their lives without in some cases the most basic protective equipment. New evidence emerges daily, most recently in Monday night’s Panorama, of shortcomings in planning for an epidemic, and Britain’s potentially catastrophic delay in imposing a lockdown means we lag painfully behind other European countries in emerging from it. Yet, somehow, blame slides off our prime minister – 60% of Britons think that a government led by the man who missed five Cobra meetings about coronavirus has handled the epidemic well, according to YouGov, raising interesting questions about what might convince them things were going badly. Why?
The obvious answer is that the left has always underestimated Johnson’s natural rapport with voters, even after he won a Brexit referendum followed by a landslide general election, and is still doing so now. Not everyone is thinking what you’re thinking, to put it simply: millions of Britons either still actively like Johnson, or are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Those who put him in Downing Street last December are particularly inclined not to judge him harshly, since that would be admitting they themselves made a terrible mistake; Conservative voters and leavers are significantly more likely than non-Conservatives and remain voters to approve of his handling of coronavirus. But that doesn’t explain why a third of Labour voters, half of Liberal Democrat voters and 49% of remainers agree.
One possible explanation is that Johnson’s own near-death experience has been redemptive, encouraging those worried that he wasn’t taking Covid-19 seriously enough to believe that he has changed. Government briefings have certainly done little to discourage the idea that intensive care turned him from a libertarian hawk into a more cautious dove.
But another is that when asked to judge the government’s strategy, people think first about their everyday experience of lockdown. Some are indeed suffering wretchedly, from the victims of domestic violence trapped with their abusers and families squashed into tiny flats, to the sacked, the evicted and the bereaved. But that still leaves a large silent mass of Britons, as yet untouched by the economic meltdown and so far coping better than expected.
Whatever rightwing columnists say, the predicted great revolt hasn’t materialised: a study by Kings College London classed fewer than one in 10 Britons as “resisters”, actively fighting against it. Another 44% were classed as sufferers, people distressed by lockdown even if they felt it was necessary. But the biggest category were the “accepters”, people who were adapting surprisingly well and not losing sleep over it.
Accepters are disproportionately middle-aged, so perhaps more likely to have accumulated the comforts that make lockdown more bearable – a garden, savings, a secure job that can be done from home – or simply more fearful that the virus might kill them if they went out. But I suspect many are also natural conformists, inclined to adapt rather than rage against their fate. How else to explain YouGov’s extraordinary findings, when tracking changes in the public mood, that happiness is rising again after plummeting at the start of lockdown, while stress and fear are declining after an early spike? Logically, the situation hasn’t got any less frightening. Yet after the initial shock wears off, it seems some are adapting as humans have adapted throughout history to existential threat: by hunkering down, focusing on small pleasures, and resolutely blocking out the worst of it.
Accepters, the King’s College study found, spent significantly less time than others thinking about the virus. They’re the people taking things one day at a time instead of worrying about tomorrow, keeping busy by clearing out the loft or weeding the garden, turning off the news because it’s depressing – or if they do listen, getting annoyed with journalists who ask upsetting questions about doctors dying. Their positivity helps them cope, but also makes them slow to question authority. They’ll be dangerously open to the defence Johnson is now apparently trying to build ahead of any public inquiry, that is that this was an unprecedented global crisis in which everyone made mistakes but he nonetheless did his best. (Monday’s comeback speech focused on the fact that the NHS has thankfully not been overwhelmed – as if that was the sole measure of success. It felt like a taste of arguments to come.)
Whether that defence succeeds in the long term depends on whether accepters stay accepting, or are tipped by what may be a brutal coming recession into becoming sufferers. But no opposition to Johnson will succeed unless it first understands why, whatever happens, so many people want so badly to believe in him.