Opinion

Claire Simpson: Stay at home, and ignore Boris

Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressing the nation about coronavirus (COVID-19) from 10 Downing Street in London. Picture by PA Video, Downing Street Pool, PA Wire
Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressing the nation about coronavirus (COVID-19) from 10 Downing Street in London. Picture by PA Video, Downing Street Pool, PA Wire Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressing the nation about coronavirus (COVID-19) from 10 Downing Street in London. Picture by PA Video, Downing Street Pool, PA Wire

How’s lockdown treating you? Have you found yourself doing odd things, including making your own yoghurt? Are the clothes you wear around the house increasingly looking less like outfits and more inarticulate cries for help? Is your hair now so long you look like an unsuccessful cult leader who’d love to mark the end times but can’t attract enough followers?

If so, you can at least comfort yourself with the knowledge that you’re coping with the coronavirus pandemic better than the British government.

Nightly media conferences, particularly those featuring health secretary Matt Hancock, have felt like part endurance exercise, part GCSE French listening test. Several times, I’ve had to rewind the live conference to make quite sure I heard correctly (a technique which obviously wouldn’t be allowed in a proper exam setting).

Mr Hancock suffers from ramble-itis, often continuing to talk long after he’s answered a question, an unusual technique which usually ends up with him confusing, rather than clarifying matters.

In one press conference, the government’s initial clear message of 'stay at home, protect the NHS, and save lives’ - a slogan which was helpfully printed on Mr Hancock’s lectern - somehow got lost when he answered a question about a new contact tracing app being trialled on the Isle of Wight.

Coming across like the regional manager of a chain of phone shops who’s got his slides muddled up in an important presentation, Mr Hancock appeared to be making up government policy in real time.

“Stay at home, save lives and protect the NHS, unless you’re in the Isle of Wight,” he said. “But even on the Isle of Wight you should still stay at home to protect the NHS and save lives but you should also install the app.” Clearly this was the sort of plain-speaking the public was crying out for.

So it’s no wonder that, just a week later, the government decided its messaging was so transparent that it really needed to confuse things. Rather than stay at home, people in England were told that the real watchwords were 'stay alert, control the virus, and save lives’.

It does seem difficult to stay alert for a virus which has spread rapidly like a… well… virus. Unfortunately the infection has so far failed to develop its own warning system like a Dalek shouting ‘exterminate’ so staying alert is a meaningless slogan. Also, most people enjoy sleeping at least once a week so cannot be expected to stay alert at all times.

‘Control the virus’ is another vague message which sounds similar to the Brexiteers’ ‘take back control’, except the onus is on individuals, not the government, to make sure they’re not infecting their granny and overwhelming the health service.

So unclear was the message that the leaders of the devolved administrations in the north, Scotland and Wales all immediately rejected it and opted to stick with the old one.

Boris Johnson managed to further complicate matters, if that were possible, by unveiling a new Covid Alert System, categorising the threat level of the pandemic on a scale of one to five, based on assessments by a new “joint biosecurity centre”.

His description of the system, accompanied by a spectacularly confusing graphic, felt about as convincing as his claim that he likes to craft model buses from old wine boxes.

In fact, the government’s messaging during this entire pandemic has felt eerily similar to a storyline in Channel 4 comedy The IT Crowd in which the emergency number is changed from 999 to the memorable 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.

Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of human behaviour knows that, in order to see change, the government should have repeated the same slogan, clearly and concisely, until lockdown could be lifted.

Catchy campaign messages are the basis of all advertising. How different L’Oreal’s fortunes might have been had they opted for ‘you possibly deserve this but perhaps not’ rather than ‘because you’re worth it’ or if Kit Kat had told people to ‘rest if you like and maybe have some kind of snack’ other than ‘have a break, have a Kit Kat’.

It might be nice to have a break from conflicting messages but that hope seems strangely out of reach at the moment. All we really can do is stay at home and ignore Boris.