By ending self-isolation, Boris Johnson is gambling with all our lives

The prime minister has scrapped the remaining Covid restrictions, a shrewd calculation that is entirely political, not scientific or epidemiological

He seems to regard Covid as just another inconvenient but inevitable fact of life, like a messy divorce, a hangover or being questioned under caution by the Metropolitan police (PA Wire)

Contemplating the worrying news that the Queen has got Covid, and the even more worrying news that she and many other vulnerable people are to have their last community protections against Covid abolished on Thursday, I remembered something Dominic Cummings once said about the prime minister’s attitude towards his sovereign lady, and everyone else of a certain age.

In his BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg last year, Cummings told her about how Johnson displayed a cavalier attitude (if that’s the apt expression) towards the Queen’s wellbeing.

Looking back at the early stages of the pandemic, pre-vaccine and with much uncertainty about this asymptomatic disease, Cummings described how he had to almost physically restrain Johnson from going to see the Queen for his weekly audience. It was a moment when, as he might put it now, he was casting caution to the winds.

On 18 March 2020, the prime minister declared to his startled aide: “I’m going to see the Queen... That’s what I do every Wednesday. Sod this. I’m going to go and see her”. Cummings pleaded with him, presumably also preparing his own defence in any future regicide case:  “There’s people in this office who are isolating. You might have coronavirus. I might have coronavirus. You can’t go and see the Queen. What if you go and see her and give the Queen coronavirus? You obviously can’t go."

He told Kuenssberg: “I just said, ‘if you... give her coronavirus and she dies, what are you gonna do, you can’t do that, you can’t risk that, that’s completely insane’. And he said, he basically just hadn’t thought it through, he said, ‘yeah, holy s***, I can’t go’.”

Johnson’s current expressions of sympathy towards her majesty have to be placed in that context. After Cummings spoke out, Downing Street issued a routinely worthless denial that the conversation ever took place, but it chimes with what we know about Johnson.

We know he initially thought (as admittedly, many of us did) that the coronavirus was just another scare story like bird flu, which you’d only catch if you managed to snog a duck. We know that he didn’t buy “all this NHS overwhelmed stuff”. We know he thought the disease mostly killed the economically inactive over-80s, so wasn’t worth closing the economy down for. (Memo: Queen Elizabeth II was 93 at the beginning of the pandemic). We know he said words to the effect that he would rather let the bodies pile high than shut the economy down again, before he was forced to do so.

Judge them not by their words, but by their deeds. We also know that he and his team in Downing It Street didn’t even take their own Covid laws seriously, because if Johnson and the Cool Gang thought they really might die of the disease, they wouldn’t have behaved in the way they did. The defining experience Johnson had during the pandemic wasn’t getting Covid and almost dying from it – but that he actually survived it. He seems to regard Covid as just another inconvenient but inevitable fact of life, like a messy divorce, a hangover or being investigated by the Metropolitan Police. You can survive them all.

It’s staggering to think that the prime minister might well have blithely given the Queen a fatal dose of the coronavirus at the beginning of the pandemic. But that’s the kind of bloke I believe he is: selfish, impetuous, reckless. Thank goodness for Cummings, you have to say. After he left, there were even fewer restraints on Johnson.

In any case, Johnson hadn’t, as he admitted to Cummings, thought it through. I doubt he’s thought through getting rid of the Covid restrictions early. He announced the abolition in Prime Minister’s Questions as a distraction technique – no word from Sage who’d not even discussed it.

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Common sense, that great Tory virtue, tells us that Omicron can still kill, and increasing social contact at work will increase infections, illness and hospitalisations, and indeed, more lives will be lost. It will mean we may not discover new more dangerous variants quickly enough. It will leave the pressure on the NHS. It will increase the risk of the virus circulating and mutating. All of those disastrous consequences may not befall us until the autumn, by which time he can blame the new vaccine-resistant variant on foreigners.

The shrewd calculation Johnson has made is political, not scientific or epidemiological. It will buy him enough popularity in his own party to save his leadership. The snide remark he made in his interview with Sophie Raworth – “let’s get back to work” – was slipped in to appease the Tory papers who think working from home (ie what the Queen is doing) is actually skiving. He is giving his critics what they want, not what is good for the nation’s health.

His gamble may pay off for some months, until the summer and the Jubilee celebrations take everyone’s minds off that awful pandemic and the silly rows about cake and parties. But “living with Covid” shouldn’t mean pretending it doesn’t exist. It will be endemic, not a pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it’s just like the flu. It’s potentially more deadly. It is not "mild" and it hasn’t disappeared, so living with it can’t mean resetting to 2019.

It should mean minimising its continuing impact with modest, relatively low-cost measures that prevent localised outbreaks in workplaces and the like (such as Windsor Castle) – masks, self-isolation, free testing and constant large-scale surveillance of the virus’ evolving DNA.

We need to keep pressing down on Covid, to save lives and indeed save the economy from another lockdown. Ending the remaining Covid community protections will make full lockdowns more likely in future. Or we can let Johnson gamble with other people’s lives.