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. Currently, all the signs point to the latter. ‘We’re emphatic that we’re not interested in the status quo ante,’ says one cabinet minister.

David Frost, Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, after holding talks with the First Secretary of State Dominic Raab and other senior ministers, has confirmed that the UK will not seek an extension to the Brexit transition period. The thinking is that a delay would not solve the fundamental policy challenges and that a Brexit deal is either possible or not. Another factor is that the government worries about the cost of any extension. There is concern that extending could drag the UK into the arguments about who pays for the various EU schemes designed to protect the European economy and preserve the eurozone.