The government’s greatest consolation is not that England believes it is handling the fight against Covid-19 well, but that the country doesn’t believe that anyone else would be doing any better. Boris Johnson’s inner circle makes extensive use of polling and focus groups, and this is the clear message: people think the government’s approach to the crisis has been a mess, yet they don’t think anyone else would have made a better job of it.
No 10’s existential problem, of course, is that Scottish voters do largely think that Nicola Sturgeon would have managed the pandemic more effectively as the head of an independent nation. But while Sturgeon can wreck the government’s agenda, the next general election, like all the others, will be settled in England.
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