For Boris Johnson, a rare respite from bad news

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has always been a riverboat gambler, and as Britain emerges, blinking into the light, from a three-month lockdown, he is making one of the biggest bets of his career: that he can safely reopen a country that has been hit harder by the pandemic than any in Europe.

Johnson finally caught a few breaks this week. British scientists reported success with a decades-old drug that was found to help patients with severe COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. The hugely popular Premier League restarted televised soccer games, though playing in empty stadiums. And the government’s scientific advisers are sounding more amenable to reopening pubs and restaurants July 4 and perhaps to relaxing social distancing rules, which would go a long way to restoring normalcy in British society.

The prime minister even managed Wednesday to turn the tables on the Labour Party’s leader, Keir Starmer, in Parliament, where he has endured a painful weekly grilling on his haphazard response to the virus. Johnson threw Starmer off balance after challenging him to declare schools safe to reopen — something the Labour Party has refused to do, its critics say, because of pressure from angry teachers’ unions.

“A great ox has stood upon his tongue,” Johnson bellowed as the usually confident Starmer groused that it was the prime minister’s job to take questions, not throw them back at the opposition.

It was a rare vindication for a prime minister who has absorbed a string of shocks since Britain left the European Union in January. But his sense of victory may have been fleeting: As Johnson’s motorcade left Parliament to return to 10 Downing St., a protester ran in front of his car, causing it to brake suddenly and be rear-ended by a security vehicle.

Nobody was hurt, but the symbolism abounded.

Johnson faces deeper problems than can be cured by a good session in the House of Commons, however. Britain’s emergence from lockdown has been chaotic, with a botched school reopening plan and many parents refusing to send children back to those classes that have resumed. The 14-day quarantine on those entering the country, including Britons returning home, has outraged the travel industry, raising questions about why Britain imposed it just as other European countries were lifting their restrictions. And the government’s contact-tracing operation — vital to arresting the virus’s spread and reopening the economy — is off to a bumpy start.

Britain’s death toll of 42,153 from the virus is the highest in Europe, while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that the British economy could shrink by up to 14% in 2020, putting it alongside Italy and France as the worst-hit economies in Europe.

Johnson has been forced to reverse course repeatedly on decisions, most recently on his government’s refusal to keep giving free school lunch vouchers to children of poor families during the summer.

After Marcus Rashford, a star soccer player for Manchester United, led a public campaign to pressure the government, Johnson backed down in the face of a potential rebellion among members of his own Conservative Party. He raised eyebrows further by claiming he had never heard about Rashford’s campaign, even though it had received extensive media coverage.

Critics of Johnson say his decision-making reflects a politician with no fixed ideology and little in the way of convictions.

“When it comes to making decisions, he’s actually quite indecisive because he doesn’t really care one way or the other,” said Jonathan Powell, a former chief of staff to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. “Because he has no convictions, he doesn’t make decisions until the last minute, when he’s forced into it.”

In short order, Johnson will have to make several difficult calls. A key one is whether to change the government’s guidelines on social distancing so that people can congregate within 1 meter (about 3 feet) of each other rather than 2 meters. That is critical to the successful reopening of pubs and restaurants, since many owners have said their businesses would not be viable with greater distances.

On Tuesday, Johnson told journalists to “watch this space” when he was asked about a possible reduction in social distancing space. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, hinted he might be receptive to a reduction, saying that the 2-meter rule was “not an absolute” but a “risk assessment.”

To mollify the travel industry, Johnson wants to negotiate special corridors, or “air bridges,” to allow people to travel to and from low-risk destinations free of restrictions. That issue could come up during a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France, who is to visit London on Thursday.

Johnson has grappled with a paradox: He held off imposing a lockdown in early March because he worried that people would not go along with the stay-at-home restrictions. But they turned out to be remarkably compliant, and now the government is struggling to get them to return to normal life.

It is a paradox of his own making, according to Peter Kellner, a polling expert. Britons are more cautious than people in other countries about reopening the economy, not because they are unwilling to leave their homes, he said, but because they lack confidence in the government’s handling of the pandemic.

From a political standpoint, Kellner said, the government should not be deterred from lifting the lockdown if it can be done without a significant spike in new cases and fatalities — a major caveat, to be sure. That could prevent a big rise in unemployment in the fall as a government program to protect jobs is phased out.

“If they can get the health and economic calculation right over the next few weeks,” Kellner said, “they have a chance of clawing things back, in terms of their public reputation.”

© 2020 New York Times News Service