In a recent interview with Matt Hancock on the Today programme, we were struck by a heated exchange between the BBC’s Nick Robinson and the health secretary, after the latter had been asked a number of questions (including whether journalists should stop asking awkward questions):
HANCOCK (mildly exasperated): The thing is this, Nick — and this is a really really important point. How we communicate as a government, as ministers, has a direct impact on the amount of cases that we have and therefore the amount of people who die. Because the clarity of messaging . . . has a direct impact on how many people follow the guidelines. That has a direct —
(ROBINSON interrupts)
HANCOCK (suddenly really quite angry and shouty): Let me please, let me finish the answer!
HANCOCK (a little calmer but still cross): That has a direct impact on the amount of people who have social interactions. That has an impact on the spread of the virus. The communications are part of the policy, and that is why we will not be distracted into confusing that messaging. The scientists can say what they like; the commentators can say what they like; frankly the interviewers can say what they like. But we will do what is best, by dealing with this virus.
ROBINSON (somewhat placatory): Understood. Final brief sentence though: what I was trying to do is interrupt you to get some clarity on this. I think what you’re saying is that you think if you were to talk about what you’re considering behind the scenes, that would send the wrong message to people? You just want them to focus on staying at home until you’ve really got a package to unveil. Is that what you’re saying?
HANCOCK (relieved that Robinson seems to get it and also that the interview is over): That is exactly the reasoning behind why we frustrate you and others who want to know exactly what the next stage will be. We talk about what is needed now, and then when we want to change that, we will.
There’s quite a lot to unpack here.
To start with, the idea that government will “do what is best” in dealing with the virus, and that therefore we should just put our trust blindly in it, is all very well and good. But there’s an issue: we keep being told they are “following the science”, but the science is not at all clear. And then there’s also the massive social, economic, psychological and even indirect medical problems that come with the pandemic, and those need to be dealt with urgently too. Science can’t provide all the answers.
Clearly, in the midst of a global pandemic for which there is no cure or vaccine, with the only real interventions available requiring behavioural change from the whole population, it’s vital that messages about the difficult changes we are being asked to make are delivered in a comprehensible and consistent fashion.
But how simple should that messaging be? What happens if the government decides to change its strategy — should it tell us it’s doing so and why? Should it admit when it might have got something wrong, or should it try to maintain that it’s done everything right all along? Do people need to feel the government knows exactly what it is doing all the time in order to stick to instructions, or can they be trusted to hear more nuanced explanations?
Surely we don’t need to be told that 100,000 tests are being carried out every day when that isn’t entirely is the case, just because the government set itself that as a target (which may in itself, we should say, have been useful in ramping up production). Why not just tell the public that testing has been massively increased, but that the 100,000 level hasn’t quite been reached yet? It can boast of its achievement -- which compares to 15,000 tests a day in South Korea, though case numbers are lower there -- without being dishonest about it.
This kind of playing around with numbers feels unnecessary, and makes it feel like we have a government that’s still in campaign mode. But there is also an argument to be made that the government should not be causing undue panic, and needs to be able to deliver straightforward messages that everyone can get on board with.
Can we handle the truth?
You can’t handle the truth!
That’s the line Jack Nicholson’s character Colonel Nathan R. Jessup fires back at Tom Cruise’s Lt. Daniel Kaffee in the 1992 film A Few Good Men, in response to being told “I want the truth!” about some of the unpalatable military tactics that Jessup had deployed.
Hancock implies, in his exchange with Robinson, that the British public can’t handle it either — or not the whole truth anyway — and therefore it would be withheld (which felt to us, somewhat ironically, like an unusually honest admission from a senior government minister).
We can see why a government might want to keep “on message” at a time like this. For, as Hancock says, communications in this context can literally mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people. This is very much the philsophy of the “Behavioural Insights Team” — or “Nudge Unit” — set up by David Cameron, whose head, it was revealed on Monday, is a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE).
And so far, the messaging has worked in terms of getting people to stay at home. But if the public starts to feel that they have not been given the whole truth, it seems likely the government’s messaging will start to lose its potency, and that might in turn lead to lower levels of compliance. Are we getting a short-term gain for an erosion of trust that could lead to larger complications in the long run?
Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin-doctor (and a man not always associated with truth-telling), reckons so. He told us:
Because this lockdown is going to go on, people are going to get fed up, the economic consequences are going to be grim, and I think there’ll be less understanding and tolerance of (the government) if there's less honesty. Thus far their tendency has been to try to pretend everything's under control when it's not. I just think that's bad communication . . .
I'm not saying they should go around saying ‘we don't know what we're doing’. But what they could say is ‘we're the government, you're the public, we're going to treat you as grown ups, so we will actually explain what we're trying to do in a way that isn't just slogans and homilies’.
But Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told us he has some sympathy for the way the government is handling the crisis:
I think there is an extent to which they are genuinely worried that levelling with people may panic people, on the one hand, or dilute what has actually been a pretty successful campaign to get people to comply with lockdown.
It is possible that going into too much detail or even being too honest with people could muddy the waters and could worry people unduly.
However Bale also said the idea that the government had to decide between, on the one hand, dishonesty and effectiveness and, on the other, honesty and confusion, was a false dichotomy:
Given those two choices we’d want the government to be effective rather than honest in the current crisis, but I think there is a third possibility, which is by making the government more honest, it might end up being more effective.
Many, such as Campbell, say Boris Johnson should be following in the footsteps of other European leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel or France’s Emmanuel Macron, who Campbell says have been more honest about what we still don’t know (which, as it turns out, is a lot) and better at communicating the strategy (though it should be pointed out that Germany’s reproduction number, or R, so famously explained by Merkel, appears in recent days to have risen back above 1).
Keep calm and focus on the slogans
But what if Britons actually want a bit of a morale boost? Is it important (and perhaps distinctly British) for the national spirit to have simple slogans, like Keep Calm and Carry On, and Stay Home > Protect the NHS > Save Lives, and to have a government hailing the public’s response as a stonking success? Or is this just too condescending?
When Boris Johnson returned to the podium on Thursday for the daily Downing Street press conference, many were struck by the contrast between his upbeat tone and the reality of what had happened in Britain since he had taken leave after contracting Covid-19. A chart displayed after he finished speaking, which showed the UK had the second-highest death toll in the world, seemed at odds with his musings that we have come through some “huge Alpine tunnel”, and his assurances that Britain’s response to the crisis had been a success.
Piers Morgan — who, in one of the more bizarre developments of this crisis has become a darling of the left-leaning pro-lockdowners (the Guardian recently called him “the voice of the nation”) — went on a rant in the Daily Mail the next day, chastising Johnson for his failure to “tell the real shameful story” (a rant that Campbell went as far as to “recommend”; these are indeed strange times).
But what would have been achieved had Johnson delivered a more pessimistic message? The Daily Mail told readers on its front page the next day that “BORIS GIVES US SOME HOPE”, while the Sun simply went with his message that we are past the peak (the first one anyway). Given the toll that we can already see the crisis is having on mental health, isn’t it OK for the prime minister to be positive sometimes?
Arguably, Johnson did try be honest with the public earlier in the crisis; from a press briefing on March 12th:
I must level with you, the British public. Many more families are going to lose their loved ones before their time.
But that didn’t go down particularly well, with Johnson berated as callous and bereft of empathy (partly because this was accompanied by the idea of herd immunity, which we will return to shortly).
To discuss this further we called up Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who, having spent his career working on emerging infectious diseases and then network theory and misinformation, seemed pretty well-placed to talk about the current crisis.
Bergstrom told us he felt it was important that the public be trusted to handle the whole truth:
We’ve got to find ways to treat the population as adult enough to handle the truth through and through. You can do that well and you can do it poorly. But I don’t think paternalistic journalism or politics is a positive thing during a time like this.
Bergstrom says that governments start off with a “reservoir of trust” that is then drawn upon to ask the public to do difficult things, but that if you are not totally candid from the start, that reservoir will start to leak:
The reason (trust) is so damn important in a public health crisis is because that is the reservoir of fuel that you have to act against the virus. It’s the ability to get people to be willing to take these self-sacrificing actions in order to work collectively to flatten the curve and then suppress the spread of the virus . . .
One of the worst things that you can possibly do is go in and start lying about things and haemorrhaging that trust right off the bat.
It should be pointed out that in the US, the picture is much bleaker. President Trump and his administration have repeatedly lied about the virus in a much more obvious and concerning way than in Britain. But a recent poll found that even in the UK, public trust in government has fallen sharply in recent weeks.
If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention
The issue, it seems to us, is not so much the positive spin — we can see reasons for why a government might want to do that — but the fact that we are being told an inconsistent narrative.
Is this a deliberate ploy? We’re not sure. Cult BBC documentary-maker Adam Curtis (and friend of Alphaville) talked about the phenomenon of inconsistent messaging in his 2015 film Bitter Lake, exploring the way in which our leaders tell us stories that don’t make sense anymore. As he said in the film:
Politicians used to have the confidence to tell us stories that made sense of the chaos of world events. But now there are no big stories and politicians react randomly to every new crisis, leaving us bewildered and disorientated. And journalism - that used to tell a grand, unfurling narrative - now also just relays disjointed and often wildly contradictory fragments of information.
We keep on hearing the country was locked down at the right time, and the fact that the NHS wasn’t overwhelmed is apparently proof of that. But we are also being told that now is not the time to reopen because there are still too many cases and we need to wait for R to fall to “manageable levels”. How can these two assurances be consistent?
It doesn’t follow that now — when R is estimated to be around 0.7 per cent or lower and when we have thousands of empty ICU beds — it is too early to ease the lockdown, if it’s also to be believed that, when R was above 1 and some hospitals were running out of capacity, it was not yet the right time to lock down.
It’s important to point out here that we are not trying to say that locking down the country as soon as possible would have been the right strategy — those that did so might fare worse in subsequent waves. We believe it is too early to judge which country has mounted the best response to the virus on the basis of their strategy (quite apart from the fact that different demographics lead to very different outcomes across countries, and the fact different ways of counting deaths means the data are not reliable enough to compare).
Whether or not the government was following the scientific advice — an excellent recent Reuters report suggested it was — it would be helpful if it could at least acknowledge that the spread of the virus could have been slowed faster by an earlier lockdown, as many scientists argue. And if the government doesn’t believe that to be the case, they need to explain why not.
Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, who sits on SAGE, explained to us in a phone call last month the delay had been mainly about the “enormous economic costs involved”. Yet that doesn’t really seem to explain the inconsistency, given that we are already in our seventh week of lockdown, and the delay we are talking about is not more than about two weeks.
The same inconsistency can be seen in the government’s utterances on herd immunity — during Saturday’s Any Questions on Radio 4 the justice secretary Robert Buckland repeated Hancock’s line that it was “never part of our plan”, despite the fact that the chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance spoke openly about the strategy in mid-March.
All of this is utterly confusing. But part of the reason for this, we believe, is that the government is itself utterly confused, and perhaps also divided.
Indeed Campbell told us that, from what he could pick up from his conversations, the government’s sheer ineptitude was being underestimated:
I talked to some of the people who are in there, and they sort of say, you know, ‘you and Piers (Morgan) — people like you are all kind of saying there are these terrible eugenicists who are doing all this’, and they say ‘don't underestimate just how they (the government) are just not very good at this stuff’.
As a brilliant long read in The Atlantic pointed out last week, part of this confusion is quite normal. This is a new disease and it has not yet been fully understood, by the scientists or anyone else. As Bergstrom told us:
With any emerging infectious disease, where it's a completely novel infectious disease, there are just so many enormous uncertainties. Some of the uncertainty was because of the quality of the data coming out of China early on, but most of the uncertainty was just fundamental scientific uncertainty. It doesn't matter how good the data are, these are statistical issues.
But the government needs to figure out a way of being open about the unpredictability of the current situation. Part of the dishonesty we’re witnessing seems to be a covering-up of the fact that nobody in government actually knows what the best way is to handle this pandemic — pretty understandable given that there are no very obvious answers yet and that even the scientists don’t fully know what’s going on.
We can understand why leaders might feel admitting their own confusion is destabilising, and why they might want to boost morale and deliver straightforward messages. An indisputable tension lies between a government being open and candid about the fact that it is not sure what it is doing, and maintaining authority. But we think it would probably be better for the long-term health of society, rather than just the current crisis, if they could at least acknowledge some of the trade-offs they are grappling with, and let us into their thinking a little.
The public’s strong lockdown response so far should surely bestow it with its own “reservoir of trust”, allowing it to be treated as mature enough to cope with a certain degree of nuance; it has earned the right to be levelled with. After all, that cosy feeling that the grown-ups are in charge might start to fade once everyone finds out the grown-ups can’t rationalise their own contradictions.
Related links:
Why are we really in lockdown? - FT Alphaville
Imperial’s Neil Ferguson: “We don’t have a clear exit strategy” - FT Alphaville
Let’s flatten the coronavirus confusion curve - FT Alphaville
Why the coronavirus is so confusing - The Atlantic
Johnson listened to his scientists about coronavirus - but they were slow to sound the alarm - Reuters
"like this" - Google News
May 05, 2020 at 12:54PM
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Is it acceptable for government to be dishonest at a time like this? - Financial Times
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