Joe Biden has dropped ‘vaccine passports’. Will Boris?

‘The government would love to put issues such as these beyond the bounds of debate by creating an air of national emergency.’ So this magazine declared on 27 November 2004 in response to Tony Blair’s proposal for national identity cards, which had just been announced in the Queen’s speech. Our editor then, Boris Johnson, argued that their very existence would threaten the character and liberty of the country. If you buckle in an emergency, he argued, the principle will be lost for ever. He urged Tory MPs to rebel and crush identity cards which, he later said, he’d abolish if he ever ended up in government.

History now repeats itself. Blair is back, advocating identity cards in the form of vaccine passports or ‘Covid status certificates’. But it’s bizarre, this time, to think of Johnson as the enabler of this scheme rather than its chief critic. The arguments he made then apply now.