Alastair Campbell: My 10-point plan for coronavirus crisis and why government scores zero

On the BBC News Channel yesterday presenter Simon McCoy cut into my diatribe against the liars and charlatans in Downing Street and asked, ‘Come on then, what should they be doing?’

As it happened, I had been working on a speech, and had just been looking at an article I wrote at the start of this crisis, many weeks ago, a ten point guide to crisis communications. So I read it out.

Looking over those ten points today, what is terrifying is that the government scores zero out of ten. Zero. Let me set them out here, and see if you agree.

1. Devise, execute but also narrate clear strategy.

2. Show strong, clear, consistent leadership.

3. Have a strong centre.

4. Throw everything at it.

5. Use experts well.

6. Deploy strong team.

7. Make the big moments count.

8. Take the public with you.

9. Show genuine empathy for people affected by the crisis.

10. Give hope, but not false hope.

Zero out of ten. I don’t think that is an exaggeration.

Let’s go through them.

On strategy , I don’t really even know what it is. For a while ‘stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ seemed to be it, and to be fair, that was strongly communicated.

But it is falling apart, not least because the man who helped devise the message didn’t think it applied to him.

Leadership – OK, Boris Johnson was ill for a while (though my sympathy is limited by the fact he was so cavalier about the virus to boast of shaking hands with infected people) but both before and since his illness, he has been ridiculously low profile for a national leader in a global crisis.

He only showed himself on Monday to try to get the focus off Dominic Cummings.

Strong centre – the centre has been weakened by austerity, and by the constant undermining of the civil service, led by Cummings.

But also focus on a strong centre would have meant involving the devolved Administrations and regional Mayors from the word go.

Number 10 felt they were beneath them, pushed them away, and it is one of the reasons we no longer have a UK wide strategy at all.

Throw Everything At It – if they had done that, they would not still be talking day after day about ramping up, ramp up this, ramp up that.

The only occasion on which they have thrown everything at anything has been the campaign to save Cummings since the weekend.

Use experts well – they have used experts as political cover. The scientists were far too slow to realise the whole ‘led by the science’ mantra was part of that cover, and also a way of trying to shift blame when things went wrong.

And have you noticed how two parts of the messaging have gone in recent days? - Stay at home. Led by the science.

That is because the lockdown easing announced by Johnson was not led by the science at all but led by spin, trying to get Cummings off the front pages, and stop people focusing on the fact he didn’t stay home.

Deploy strong team – Rishi Sunak has had a good press, but mainly by not being quite as spectacularly second rate as the rest.

And he shot a massive hole in his credibility by joining the nodding dog cut and paste operation in which minister after minister put out tweets saying, effectively, ‘Dom’s a good Dad, did the right thing, move on.’

But the quality of ministers has been exposed as awful. Raab. Hancock. Sharma. Patel. Williamson. Gove. Jenrick. Eustice.

Has there ever been a lower quality Cabinet in our history?

Make the big moments count – Well, Cummings gave us a big moment. Johnson gave us a couple too, in his big TV addresses to the nation.

Both created confusion because of amateurish mixed messaging.

Take the public with you – take a look at the latest polls on that one. This relates to point 1, about narrating strategy.

It requires you to take the public genuinely into your confidence about the decisions you are taking. They have never done that. They seem incapable of moving beyond homilies and slogans.

Show genuine empathy – that involves a lot more than trotting out the cliché that ‘our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the dead’.

It is about telling and honouring their stories, and above all ensuring they have what they need. They have failed palpably on both.

Give hope but not false hope – even as Ireland had zero deaths on Monday for the first time, Leo Varadkar focused on the challenge ahead.

When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern became the first leader to ease the lockdown, with just 21 people dead, she did the same.

 Johnson prefers the ‘squash the sombrero’ approach, the boasts of ‘apparent success’ as we overtake Spain and Italy in the death league tables, the promise that the economy will ‘come roaring back’ as businesses collapse and unemployment rises.

Zero out of ten. We have the worst government of our lives at a time we face one of the biggest crisis of our lives.