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Boris Johnson was facing a growing conservative riot over the new Covid-19 restrictions last night when irate Conservative MPs accused the government of exaggerating capacity problems on the NHS in a bid to win their support.
Ahead of a crucial Commons vote on the new three-tier system on Tuesday, an extraordinary dispute broke out over claims by Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove that the NHS, including newly built Nightingale hospitals, might be “physically overwhelmed”.
Writing yesterday in the Times, Gove revealed that the earlier decision to impose a second national lockdown was made after government ministers were presented with a grim picture of the increase in Covid-19 cases and Nightingale hospitals at capacity. “Every bed, every room occupied,” Gove wrote. Trying to force the rebel conservatives to line up, he told elected members that they had to “take responsibility for difficult decisions” in the national interest.
But when Tory MPs objected to his tone, the argument was further fueled when other Tories revealed to the Observer that Health Minister Nadine Dorries had told a group of them last week that Nightingale hospitals were largely empty because people considered them “dark and dingy” and that it was proving difficult to find staff to run them. Sources close to Dorries denied that he had used the precise words recalled by the deputies.
NHS sources confirmed that the majority of the limited number of Nightingale beds that are occupied are occupied by non-Covid cases. An NHS spokesperson confirmed that only two in seven Nightingales, Manchester and Exeter, had started admitting patients.
A senior conservative said: “Ministers like Gove cannot at the same time say that we are on the verge of being overwhelmed unless we take much harsher action, while at the same time admitting that they are using no more than a small amount of emergency capacity beds that we have that are unstaffed anyway. If it’s as bad as it says, what have you been up to since March?
Tobias Ellwood, one of the Conservative MPs who threatened to vote against the government on Tuesday, said Gove had been “completely untrue because every one of our nightingales is underused. They are largely inactive. ” On Twitter, Ellwood added: “Let’s not place areas at higher levels, due to local pressure from the bed when other beds are empty.”
Johnson announced Thursday that 99% of England’s population will enter the top two tiers, two and three, with strict restrictions on bars and restaurants and a ban on homes mixing indoors. Only Cornwall, the Isle of Wight and the Isles of Scilly will be at the lowest level.
Many Conservative MPs say the new system imposes excessively strict restrictions on areas with fewer cases that border regions with higher numbers of cases. They ask the ministers to present more evidence of their decisions and also to publish an analysis of the economic cost of imposing the new regime. They also want limits to be drawn at a more local level.
Charles Walker, vice chairman of the 1922 Conservative deputies committee, said he would vote against the government on Tuesday and believed Gove’s approach had failed. He said: “Michael Gove’s intervention has not helped the government’s case. I, like most MPs, I get maybe one or two emails a week from people saying “tighten the rules,” but scores from people running businesses asking how they can survive. Parliamentarians who are deeply concerned about the latest round of restrictions are acting in good faith by representing those who elected them. They are doing what they were chosen to do. “
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, which will be located at level 3, accused the government of repeating scare tactics used by ministers during their recent disputes with Westminster.
“Michael Gove and the government have a way about this,” Burnham said. “They used the exact same scare tactics against Greater Manchester when they tried to intimidate us into accepting their original flawed Level 3 proposals. It didn’t work then and people should be very skeptical about it now. “He said all MPs in Level 3 areas should” think twice “before voting for a system that would not give their councils additional support for business. than Level 1 or Level 2. “It will decimate your towns and cities and it’s a deliberate act of leveling down,” he said.
Manchester Nightingale Hospital’s occupancy rate, he said, was low, while locally the number of intensive care patients with Covid-19 had fallen to its lowest level since early November.
At least 10 Conservative MPs are expected to vote against the government on Tuesday, and some two dozen or more are said to be deeply uneasy and waiting to see if the government makes concessions. Former Cabinet Minister Damian Green, MP for Ashford in Kent, said: “Unless I see compelling new evidence, I will vote against.” Seven Conservative MPs from Kent are meeting Monday with Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock.
Labor has yet to decide how to vote and are pushing for more financial support for the worst affected areas and businesses.
Conservative MP Dr Ben Spencer said: “As a physician, with all my body and soul we cannot allow our NHS to be overwhelmed and I agree with Michael Gove that MPs must take responsibility for difficult decisions. That is why to make these decisions, parliamentarians need harm / benefit analysis and the anticipated impact of these restrictions on the capacity of the NHS for their local areas ”.
However, the scientists insisted that the proposed new tier system should not be provided. “The current emergency lockdown was imposed because the previous level system was not working. It was not strict enough and cases were increasing exponentially, ”said epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. “Now we are recovering the numbers of cases. However, we cannot go back to the previous flexible system. Levels 1 and 2 just don’t work. Only level 3 is effective. That should be our standard. “
This point was supported by Bharat Pankhania, Senior Clinical Professor at the University of Exeter School of Medicine, who warned that the risks to people were being ignored by those seeking level relaxation: “It’s great to talk numbers and infection rates, but what about the person? Who gets infected and ends up with permanently damaged lungs? They are made for life. These are the factors we need to focus on. “
Coronavirus expert David Matthews of the University of Bristol added that the government needs to be much clearer about its motives for imposing new tough measures. “It is imposing them because we do not want the cases to start increasing again,” he said. “If left unchecked, that would mean that people would be left to die, without treatment, in their own homes because there would be no hospital beds for them because there were so many other sick people. If a person becomes seriously ill with Covid, they should have the right to receive emergency treatment, dexamethasone and oxygen in the emergency care units. Therefore, it is essential to keep the number of cases low. “
Meanwhile, hospitals have been told to prepare to launch a coronavirus vaccine in just 10 days, and NHS workers are expected to be at the front of the line. NHS chiefs said hospitals in England could expect to receive their first deliveries of a vaccine produced by Pfizer / BioNTech as early as Monday, December 7, with regulatory approval anticipated in a few days.
