How Covid-19 will change the Tory party

Politics is full of events that are meant to change everything but actually do little. Yet the coronavirus crisis will be one of those rare events that does have lasting political impact. This disease, and its aftermath, will change how the country works.

Covid-19 has already directly affected every household, business and institution in the country in a way that not even the 2008 financial crash did. Boris Johnson’s government will now be defined by how it handles both the crisis and its aftermath.

Before he went into isolation, Johnson remarked to Downing Street aides that he was keen to get back to the agenda on which he had been elected. This virus has so changed the landscape now, though, that there will be no easy return to the world before corona. One normally understated Downing Street figure predicts it will ‘change things for a generation’.

The question for the government is whether it wishes to attempt to return to what went before or to try to combine its various agendas — ‘levelling up’, Brexit and net zero — in its post-coronavirus reconstruction job.