Lots of things about modern politics would surprise William Gladstone if the 19th-century Liberal prime minister was unexpectedly reincarnated into the Britain of 2020. Things like press conferences, video links and female MPs would all catch him out. Gladstone would, though, be reassured by one thing. He would easily be able to find his way around Westminster. That’s because the corridors of power in which politics, parliament and government are conducted in 2020 are remarkably unchanged since he died in 1898. The warren of staircases and rooms in 10 Downing Street and the cramped Commons chamber, with MPs jostling through the division lobbies, would all be familiar to him.
Whether Britain benefits or suffers from its traditionalised habits and settings of politics is a recurrent question. But the Covid-19 pandemic poses it in a new way. Parliament went on sitting through world wars and financial crises. Gladstone himself sat through the Great Stink of the summer of 1858, when the Thames became a sewer. But a modern pandemic that has made human proximity unsafe has meant that parliament cannot sit at all, and that MPs cannot do their fundamental job. Business in the chamber became a ghostly charade. Voting by crowding into the aye and no lobbies was deemed too dangerous to attempt. At the height of a national crisis, therefore, many of the checks and balances on government, and parliamentary democracy itself, have effectively collapsed. These issues must be addressed before parliament returns on 21 April.
Now the Covid-19 virus has penetrated to the heart of government too. Last Friday, the three most important people leading the fight against the pandemic all went into self-isolation. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, and the chief medical officer for England, Chris Whitty, have all been put out of action. So has the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack. We wish them all well and a full recovery. But the disruption at the top of government is huge. The virus has done what the Luftwaffe and the IRA could not. It has made the work of leading the nation in an emergency significantly harder than it was already. When a government has just taken extraordinary powers to impose its rule, this is a particularly bad time to suffer that sort of hit.
None of this is to imply that all would be well if only Britain’s government and parliament conducted their business in airy modern buildings with wider corridors, state-of-the-art health and safety provisions, and better designed workspaces. Berlin has spacious, modern government buildings of this kind, but Angela Merkel is having to self-isolate nevertheless. Prime ministers have also been stricken in past emergencies. In the first world war, David Lloyd George spent nine days with influenza in a temporary hospital inside Manchester town hall during the 1918 epidemic. In the second, Winston Churchill had a heart attack in late 1941 and serious pneumonia 15 months later. The reality is that the world cannot be designed, or politics conducted, without risk.
Nevertheless, there are lessons to consider and apply. Politics, like the health service, needs the best possible circumstances for it to do its job. The buildings should be more suitable. New ways, like electronic voting, must be prioritised. Before the pandemic, there was already widespread discussion about the adequacy of the institutions of British government and democracy, including their centralisation in London. Spurning a more imaginative modern approach, plans are under way to move parliament into a recreation of the existing chamber while the crumbling Palace of Westminster is refurbished at a cost of at least £4bn, starting in 2025. The Covid-19 pandemic poses questions about that strategy which have to be examined. Many other aspects of public policy will have to be reconsidered when this crisis is over. The ways – and the places – in which we do politics must be part of that rethink too.
