MANAGING public expectations is a political art.
Governments of all hues often seek to under-promise and over-deliver.
The fact that Matt Hancock, the UK Health Secretary, under pressure on coronavirus testing, a few weeks ago set a target of reaching 100,000 tests a day always seemed a hostage to fortune. It went against the normal approach of under-promising and over-delivering. But, of course, these are not normal times.
Perhaps, as some suspect, it was a distraction manoeuvre; given the UK Government was getting it in the neck daily over PPE shortages, what better way to focus the public attention on the right hand and not the left.
As Boris Johnson returned to the media frontline yesterday following his virus illness and the birth of child number six, there was at one point an admission that people’s expectations had indeed not been met.
“I’m not going to minimise the logistical problems we have faced in getting the right protective gear to the right people at the right time, both in the NHS and in care homes. Or the frustrations that we have experienced in expanding the numbers of tests,” declared the Prime Minister.
Perhaps, Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock are banking on the public, by and large, giving them the benefit of the doubt; that setting such a bold target was a noble effort and, in any case, they will probably hit it in a few days’ time. Yesterday, the number was just under 82,000; close but no cigar.
It is probably less hopeful that Nicola Sturgeon will get the benefit of the doubt on this issue. She adopted the rule-of-thumb proportionate measure for Scotland of setting a target of 10 per cent of the UK one. But Herald analysis shows the First Minister has been even more off the mark than her counterparts in London with only around 1,400 tests being done daily. Hitting the 10,000 target from there seems a much taller order.
Yet Ms Sturgeon was on much safer ground yesterday when she suggested it "may very well be too early, even this time next week, in any meaningful way to safely lift any of the current restrictions".
For weeks, the experts have been using a variety of doleful phrases to manage our expectations, making crystal clear that life in the corona age means the old ways will not be coming back any time soon and we will now have to live with the “new normal” of social distancing and other restrictions for “really quite a long period of time”.
Indeed, Professor Chris Whitty, the UK Government’s Chief Medical Officer, declared a week ago that the chances of the social restrictions being lifted in the “next calendar year are incredibly small”. Later, No 10 kindly clarified that what the boffin actually meant was this calendar year. Yet still that means for the next eight months at least.
And yet after the FM lowered expectations, they were raised by the PM at the No 10 press briefing when he promised a “comprehensive plan” to explain how the Government can “get our economy moving, our children back to school and into childcare, and thirdly how we can travel to work and make life in the workplace safer”.
The PM optimistically pointed to a road map to recovery; a menu of options with dates and times of each individual measure driven by where we are in the epidemiological journey.
He even, after the idea was knocked back by Government experts in London, suggested Ms Sturgeon’s idea on face masks – now endorsed by those same experts - was bang on.
“As part of coming out of the lockdown, face coverings will be useful both for epidemiological reasons but also for giving people confidence they can go back to work,” declared Mr Johnson.
In normal times setting out an overly bleak scenario can be advantageous to politicians when, later on, things do not turn out nearly as badly as forecast. But, not here.
When lives and livelihoods are at stake maximum transparency is and should be the order of the day. The usual smoke and mirrors deployed by politicians would only backfire and rightly so.
Earlier this week, Mr Johnson stated Cicero’s dictum that the welfare of the people was the supreme law, although he did so in his own idiosyncratic way; in Latin: “Salus populi suprema lex esto.”
Of course, the great Roman orator and philosopher came to a gruesome end; Mark Anthony ordered his head and hands to be lopped off and pinned to the rostra in Rome’s forum just to underline the point. Thankfully, we treat our politicians a little more humanely these days.
Cicero did not have a high opinion of politicians even though he was one himself; he crudely noted they were not born but excreted.
Yet he did have a tinge of sympathy for the hard choices politicians face as they seek to manage expectations, noting that “not every mistake made is a foolish one”.
Which could be taken to mean that people should show some understanding as good intentions can sometimes, unintentionally, lead to bad consequences.
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