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Tories left wondering when Boris Johnson will call time on back-of-a-beer-mat pub curfew

People on the streets of Soho, central London, after the pub and restaurant curfew on Saturday night - Yui Mok/PA
People on the streets of Soho, central London, after the pub and restaurant curfew on Saturday night - Yui Mok/PA
Coronavirus Article Bar with counter
Coronavirus Article Bar with counter

All it took to expose the lack of thought behind the Government's 10pm coronavirus curfew was a four-second video.

Posted by House of Commons worker Kirsty Lewis following a night out in central London, it showed crowds thronging around Oxford Circus on the night the time-limit came into force.

"10pm curfew just meant everyone rolling out onto the streets and onto the tubes at the same time and it was the busiest I've seen central London in months," she wrote alongside the footage, which has since been watched 3.5 million times.

Former minister Tobias Ellwood was among the first to pick up on the potential pitfall of turfing everyone out of pubs and restaurants at the same time in the middle of a global pandemic. "We need to rethink this," the Tory MP admitted as he retweeted the post.

Yet despite mounting criticism of the curfew – with scientists pointing out it is based on very little evidence – Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, continued to back it on Thursday.

Delivering an impassioned defence of his strategy for dealing with the recent rise in Covid infections, he insisted the measures were "collectively vital for the strategy we are pursuing".

It came after Philip Davies, the MP for Shipley, told the Commons the 10pm cut-off was doing untold damage to businesses and prompting "jobs to be lost, all just to see people congregating on the streets again".

He asked: "When will the Secretary of State act like a Conservative and stop this arbitrary nanny state socialist approach, which is serving no purpose at all apart from to further collapse the economy and erode our freedoms?"

Noting that Mr Davies had voted against renewing the Coronavirus Act on Wednesday, Mr Hancock fired back that "the hundreds of thousands of deaths that would follow is not price to pay" for his colleague's preferred option of "just letting it rip".

Such defensiveness is understandable, since it was Mr Hancock, along with his equally cautious Cabinet colleague Michael Gove, who came up with the controversial idea in the first place.

Having initially pushed for a two-week "circuit-breaker" lockdown – only to be opposed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak and virtually everyone else in the room (bar the ever-circumspect Sage scientists) – the 10pm curfew was settled upon as a compromise.

However, as one Government source put it: "Just because it's a compromise, doesn't mean it’s a good idea."

It later emerged that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) had not actually modelled the effect of the curfew, and the behavioural science sub-group had not been consulted on how people might react.

The economic consequences also appeared to have been completely overlooked, with business minister Paul Scully forced to admit earlier this week that "no [economic] assessment had been made" before implementing the policy. "But we will be working with the sector to understand the impact over the coming weeks," he added.

Summing up the mood among most Tories, the former Business Secretary Greg Clark said on Thursday: "It does seem strange to think that concentrating trade in a smaller number of hours, and making everyone leave a pub or restaurant at the same time rather than spacing them out over the course of an evening, should suppress rather than spread the virus."

Yet it isn't just the fuzzy thinking behind the policy that has united all parties in condemnation, with both Labour and the Liberal Democrats now calling for the curfew to be scrapped.

Even more problematically for Mr Hancock, the scientific basis upon which he initially argued for the time-limit is disintegrating almost as quickly as support for the measure itself.

The Health Secretary had stated that "elsewhere in the world they have introduced evening restrictions and then seen their case numbers fall". Yet while countries that did introduce a curfew, such as Belgium, did see an initial fall in infection rates, new Covid cases are now rising sharply.

Not all the boffins are onside either. "The 10pm curfew will likely have little or no impact," said Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, when it was first introduced on September 24.

"A far better approach would be to shut all pubs and restaurants and properly compensate businesses and employees for the loss of income. This would ensure that public health is prioritised, and that business and staff are in a stronger economic position when they are allowed to resume."

Dr David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter, agreed, saying: "Closing down restaurants and pubs earlier will do little to stave the spread for as long as multiple different households can interchangeably meet up."

Yet with such strong Tory opposition to a second lockdown on economic grounds that option appears an impossibility, despite Boris Johnson's insistence on Wednesday that more sacrifices might have to be made.

With Mr Hancock conceding on Thursday that he would be happy to look at "other imaginative ideas", yet another U-turn appeared to be in the offing. Conservatives are understandably wondering when the Prime Minister will call time on coronavirus policies that have the appearance of having been written on the back of a beer mat.