The past few weeks have been like nothing any of us could have ever imagined. When reports began to come out of China in January of a new virus that had apparently jumped species from animals to humans and was spreading rapidly through the population of Wuhan, few people in the West took more than a passing interest. For those of us of a certain age, this is the fourth potential pandemic to emerge from China in the past twenty years – SARS, Swine Flu and Avian Flu were all suppose to be about to bring the UK to its knees but the most serious impact that I can recall is having to place our small backyard poultry flock under lockdown for a few months when Avian Flu threatened. This meant that, although being no stranger to the pandemic planning process stood me in good stead when it came to formulating a response to Covid-19 in both my personal and professional lives, there was undoubtedly a part of me that did not take the threat entirely seriously. After all, we hadn’t we been here before: much ado about nothing for a while and then back to normal?

That misplaced optimism soon evaporated as, along with the rest of the country, I watched, transfixed with a mixture of horror and disbelief, as the virus spread across the globe, aided and abetted by the highly connected world in which we live today. This global connectivity and the ability of the virus to cross continents within a matter of hours, hitching a ride with its human hosts via long-haul air travel, is one of many reasons why the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 is potentially several orders of magnitude more deadly than the oft-quoted comparator of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed more lives than the industrial-scale slaughter of the Great War.

The first documented case of Covid-19 infection was recorded in the UK on 31st January and exactly four weeks later on 28th February the first case not involving a patient who had travelled to an infected area overseas was recorded. By 1st March, cases had been confirmed in all four constituent parts of the United Kingdom. The UK Government announced a four-pronged strategy to tackle the outbreak: contain, delay, research and mitigate, which was explained to the public by the man who became an unexpected public figure, and one who inspired more public confidence than the politicians as people turned to the experts for reassurance, Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Witty. Unfortunately, the ruling Conservative Party’s instinctive support for the liberty of the individual and congenital distrust of state intervention in people’s lives led to the Government’s clinging to the now-discredited strategy of allowing the virus to spread to encourage ‘herd immunity’ just at the time when the window when the “Contain” element of their response was briefly open and an early adoption of a policy of enforced social distancing might have been succesful in more or less stopping the incipient pandemic in its tracks. As it was, by the time the Government eventually announced the closure of schools on 18th March, it was effectively playing catch-up with what many institutions were already doing off their own bats. It was not until 20th March that all pubs, clubs, restaurants and indoor leisure facilities were ordered to close and tighter, legally enforceable measures to encourage social distancing were not introduced until 23rd March, a full week after the Government first began encouraging people to take these steps voluntarily. If, as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics, it is an eternity in a pandemic and we will probably never know how many lives have been lost as a result of that week when political ideology was yet again allowed to triumph over expert advice.

However, proving that principle in politics is an infinitely flexible concept, new Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £12 billion package of measures in his Budget of 12th March to mitigate the damage caused to the economy by the Covid-19 outbreak. This was followed on 17th March by an announcement of loans and grants to support businesses, on 20th March by the potentially uncapped Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and on 26th March by support for the self-employed, taking the total value of support measures to nearly 3% of GDP. This is dwarfed by the £330 billion of loan guarantes underwritten by the government as part of its support to business. This represents the very type of Keynesian state intervention in the economy that the Conservatives and their allies in the right-wing press greeted with howls of derision when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party proposed them in their 2019 General Election manifesto and which were subsequently roundly rejected by the electorate. Had a Labour Chancellor introduced these measures, and a Labour Government sought to curtail people’s liberty in the way that we are currently seeing in Lockdown Britain, the Conservative opposition and the press would have been shouting about socialism and whipping up public unrest and civil disobedience to thwart the Government’s “Soviet” intentions. As it is, a Conservative Chancellor and a Conservative Government have been able to introduce these measures to almost universal support from all sides of the House of Commons and the media. Politics in the UK has truly passed through the looking glass in recent weeks and it seems at times that we are living in a bizarre alternative reality where all the old certainties have been turned on their heads.