Even Boris Johnson didn’t believe relaxing the lockdown rules could go so well

The “pingdemic” may have caused havoc for industry and a headache for ministers, but government advisers think that it played an important role in encouraging a more cautious approach to social contact, especially when people were hoping to get away on summer holidays.

Data from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) has shown that people’s daily contacts are at a quarter of pre-pandemic levels, and still lower even than last summer, when ministers encouraged a return to normality with Eat Out to Help Out and a back-to-work drive.

“The overwhelming majority of people are still risk-averse, they’re still wearing facemasks and social distancing, which is playing into the government’s strategy,” one minister said. “While you still get these gasps of irritation from the right of the party, the vast majority of the country wants to go slowly.”

Even scientific advisers are now confident that the rest of the summer will be far less risky than feared.

Professor John Edmunds, a Sage adviser, told The Times that he does not expect any more restrictions in September because of the “amazing” effect of the vaccines.

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, said that autumn was “going to be fine”, adding: “We’re past the . . . need for lockdowns because of the vaccine.”

Cabinet ministers are increasingly allowing themselves to think of a world after the pandemic. “We’re almost living with it now, we’re getting back to business as usual,” one said. “I don’t think it’s all over bar the shouting, but it’s going well. We should be confident.”

A Whitehall source said: “People are pretty optimistic, but nobody wants to declare victory. Nobody wants a George Bush ‘mission accomplished’ moment. Some of us have seen this movie before. It’s uncannily like last summer.”

The concern in Downing Street is that although the data is good, the pandemic is far from over. The return of schools in September is being viewed with trepidation for its effects on both the virus and the running of society for working parents. “People are managing their behaviour now so they can go to events and go on holiday,” a government aide said. “The difficulty could come if and when people’s behaviour does change. That’s the concern.”

Most scientists expect a rise in September, although there is growing optimism that it will be manageable.

However, one cautioned that there is still much to be understood about the virus and said that the failure to predict what has happened over the past four weeks did not bode well for the future. “The disease came with a pretty big wave in July and then disappeared in a week in the beginning of August — I didn’t hear any of those clever modellers predicting that,” they said. “It just shows you we don’t have any clue what we’re doing.”

It is not only coronavirus that the government has to contend with. Although the economy is performing better than expected, autumn will be a fiscal and political crunch point with the end of furlough, the end of the £20 Universal Credit uplift, huge rises in energy bills, and the spectre of inflation looming.

Johnson is expected to increase national insurance to pay for social care. It is, one government figure said, a moment of political risk, but the prime minister is “quite phlegmatic”.

“This is when you do the tough stuff,” they said, “with a view to righting the ship before the election.”

There is also the challenge of the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. The government has promised that it will set out plans for hitting net zero emissions by 2050 before the conference in November.

Some in government are urging the Treasury to use a budget, pencilled in for October 27, to rein in the prime minister. “The worry is that if he waits until March, Johnson will go on a spending spree and make lots of unfunded pledges ahead of Cop26,” a source said. “A budget would lock him in. It would provide the guardrails.”

Johnson’s standing in and outside the Conservative Party is likely to be tested as he tries to straddle the differing priorities of his broad electoral coalition. During a visit to Scotland on Thursday to promote Cop26, he could not resist a contentious throwaway line.

“Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country, we had a big early start and we’re now moving rapidly away from coal altogether,” he said. Laughing, he told journalists: “I thought that would get you going.” The reaction from “red wall” Tory MPs was fury. One said that it demonstrated an “astounding level of ignorance”.

The concern for those MPs, who won seats at the last election that had been held by Labour for generations, is that Johnson does not understand their voters. “Boris’s success is that people think he’s one of them,” one said. “This shows he’s not.”

Within the Conservative Party, there are signs that Johnson’s popularity is falling. A poll of Tory members by the Conservative Home website showed that his recent U-turn over self-isolating had cost him 36 points, putting him almost at the bottom of a Cabinet league table.

One Whitehall source said that privately Johnson would be concerned by the numbers. “He lives and breathes those things,” they said. “He’ll be looking at the heir apparent [Rishi Sunak, the chancellor] and worrying. You’ve got a weak Downing Street and a paranoid prime minister. There’s something of the Wizard of Oz to it all. People are looking behind the curtain and there’s nothing there.”

A government source rejected the criticism as “ridiculous”.

Publicly, the prime minister remains sanguine. Asked by The Times how it felt to be one of the least popular members of his government, he said this week: “Well thank you very much. I think I am blessed. I am blessed in the relative popularity of my colleagues and I rejoice in it.

“It’s not every prime minister who can say that he’s lucky enough to have a constellation of cabinet colleagues with such high reputations and I’m absolutely thrilled.”

Additional reporting: Kieran Andrews