he years running up to the present crisis will be remembered as a period of complacency, although it felt tumultuous enough at the time. A pandemic and the steps taken to contain it force a dizzying adjustment of perspective. With one twist of the lens, events that once loomed large are made remote – dots on the horizon in a bygone era. In the parallel universe where there is no Covid-19, British politics is gearing up for local and mayoral elections; a second round of Brexit trade negotiations began this week, and Labour leadership contenders are out on the stump. Yet instead we are in a place where elections are suspended along with nearly every other outdoor expression of political freedom. Democracy is confined to quarters, as is necessary to prevent transmission of the virus. We know that lockdown can save lives. We do not yet know which muscles of civil society will atrophy from lack of exercise. The coronavirus bill, rushed through parliament this week, is a totalitarian beast on a constitutional leash, held by MPs whose grip is unproven. The government had sought extreme powers for a year but acquiesced to cross-party demands for a six-month expiry date, with an option to renew. Meanwhile, ministers can shut businesses, disperse crowds, detain citizens. Police can treat the nation as if it were under house arrest. Those are the headline cuts in liberty but the law’s finer print tells a chilling story of cultural changes yet to be imposed by Covid-19. The bill gives local authorities power to requisition facilities for storing and disposing of dead bodies. It eases rules designed to prevent wrongful detention on grounds of mental ill health. Such measures can be justified for the greater good, as efficient marshalling of limited resources. But every compromise on due process scatters seeds of negligence in shaded corners of the state, where cruelties and injustice can grow. The gravity of the moment was not lost on the depleted ranks of MPs who debated the bill. None of them had confronted an equivalent challenge: to suppress public activity without wanton violence to democracy. The respectful tone of debate would be unfamiliar to anyone who only tunes into parliament for its rowdiest fixtures. Even the participants found the mood unusual, prefacing speeches with generosity for old enemies – Scottish nationalists praising former Tory cabinet ministers who praised Labour front benchers. The comparison is naturally made with wartime solidarity, although the likeness is inexact. A military foe does not hijack banal social relations as insidiously as viral transmission. And there is not much collective memory of what it really means for individuals to submerge selfish needs in an enterprise of collective duty. Too many people became accomplices to the virus by ignoring government advice. Voluntary submission was not working. Andrew Bowie, Tory party vice chair, said over the weekend: “This is not a game.” It should not have needed saying, except it did because games are what politics has seemed to be all about in recent years. People can be forgiven if they were slow to take a threat seriously when Westminster culture has so often projected frivolity. The prime minister has built a career from raffish disobedience, seeing diligence as the mark of a “girly swot”. Boris Johnson was not elected to be the nation’s head prefect, and has struggled to adapt to the role. Only in his address to the nation on Monday night, declaring mass lockdown, did he find the right pitch – assertive simplicity. He stripped away the rhetorical ornamentation that usually laces his phrases with playful insincerity. He finally achieved gravitas without it sounding like a pastiche of statesmanship. He wisely eschewed any references to the Blitz spirit or other pseudo-Churchillian vibes, perhaps recognising that he has devalued that currency with over-use in less deserving circumstances. The prime minister’s supporters say he has been reluctant to impose social controls that grate against his liberal instinct. There is some truth in that defence, although it flatters the man to prop up his wobbly indecision with a sturdy-sounding philosophy. Johnson likes freedom, but above all for himself. His creed that is now said to be anti-authoritarian is just the stuff of old Daily Telegraph polemics against pettifogging bureaucracy. Its ethical core is hardly more developed than the loathing for ’elf-and-safety that tickled many a Tory conference fringe meeting. There is a continuum between the Johnson who once described the obligation to put children in car booster seats for their own safety as “utterly demented”, and the man who resisted closing pubs in a public health emergencybut it is not a connection that casts the prime minister in the best light. Johnson likes to be liked, so he tells people what they want to hear. He is a master of politics that makes no moral demands of citizens. He offers freedoms unburdened with responsibility. He brilliantly swept away doubts about Brexit, belittling the hazard as a figment of timid imaginations. He has sauntered through a charmed life believing that risks are mitigated by declaring them exaggerated. Coronavirus does not respond to that treatment. It might be the first adversary Johnson has met that cannot be outmanoeuvred with political chicanery. It is revealing how a politician who has always talked his way out of trouble took so long to find his voice in this crisis. He is used to people rallying to his charisma, but the precedent was misleading. His method has been to offer treats without naming a price. A different political quality is needed to persuade people to make sacrifices. The gap between official advice on social distancing and its being followed had to be bridged with moral authority, which was hard to summon for a prime minister who has always invited his audience to be complicit in his complacency. Thousands of lives were put at risk because Downing Street was slow to grasp the magnitude of the threat and hesitant with remedies. The most generous account of the delay suggests that Britain was blessed with a prime minister who did not itch to grab dictatorial powers. There is some reassurance there, although we cannot yet say what the effect of those powers might be on ministers who get into the habit of wielding them. We must entrust our civil rights to parliament but also to some supposedly liberal substance coursing through the prime minister’s veins. That would be easier if he did not come to the job with a record of recklessness and indifference to the cost his gambles force on other people. Only when confronted with a crisis that cannot be played for laughs has Johnson understood that politics is not a game. And he was persuaded by nothing nobler than the feeling that his old way wasn’t winning any more.