commonplace criticism of political parties is that they have drifted “into their comfort zone”, which mostly means that Labour talks a lot about raising spending, while the Conservatives talk about cutting taxes. But politicians have comfort zones that are operational as well as ideological: ways of working that they find more attractive than others. In late 2014, one ambitious young shadow cabinet minister asked his aides to draw up a 14-point plan to help him become leader of the Labour party. Step two involved an itemised list of Labour MPs, each of whom, he was told, he needed to wine and dine if he was to have any hope of making a successful bid at the job. The frontbencher in question contemplated evening after evening spent in conversation with his colleagues versus time spent with his wife and children. Surely, he reasoned, he could achieve the same end by writing thoughtful columns in the newspapers and delivering wide-ranging speeches? His leadership bid never recovered. The government has, similarly, fallen back into its comfort zone in the fight against coronavirus. There are few problems in life that Whitehall doesn’t seek to solve through swallowing up our personal details: if the second coming were to take place in modern Britain, the authorities would doubtless immediately want Jesus to fill in 2,000 years of backdated tax returns. Officialdom’s addiction to hoovering up information has numerous benefits: it has allowed the Office for National Statistics to establish a link between ethnicity and the risk of dying of Covid-19, because it was able to eliminate other explanations – income level, household type, occupation and so on – through the use of the vast reams of information that the state collects. But the downside of the government’s appetite for surveillance can be found in the NHSX contact tracing app that is a vital plank of any attempt to keep new infections down and isolate outbreaks once lockdown ends. Although the app asks only for a postcode, storing the information centrally will allow the government, armed with the huge amounts of data it already holds, to identify other facts and secrets about the app’s users. That horrifies privacy campaigners, but the biggest problem in practice will be the efficiency of the app. As designed, it is a battery hog that saps the life from users’ phones – probably a far bigger barrier to people downloading it than its implications for surveillance. A second app is now in development – one that will be free of the government’s tendency to collect as much information as it can about citizens. The endless desire to know our secrets is present in essentially every British government, regardless of its political hue. But this government has also reverted to a comfort zone that is distinct to itself: treating the battle against the virus as if it were a battle against a rival political party, one to be defeated by a savvy media strategy and careful leaks to preferred outlets. Genuine transparency should be kept to a minimum, with real news confined to setpiece events featuring the government’s biggest gun, the prime minister. As a method to dispatch Labour in 2019, it worked like a charm. As an approach to defeating Covid-19 it lacks a certain something. Leaks beget leaks – cabinet ministers see that leaks are emerging from “Downing Street” and grumble to journalists; civil servants surmise that their bosses are spreading stories too, and also complain to the press. The process has also led to a muddled understanding of what exactly is being eased and when. The reality is that the changes to how we live – people to be able to go out for exercise twice a day, garden centres to be reopened – are minor and sensible. The disease spreads less effectively in the open air, provided people observe physical distancing. It’s easy to observe social distancing in garden centres, which will, in any case, probably fold if they cannot reopen over the coming months, which are as important to them as Christmas is to the high street. But the drip-drip of headlines suggesting an “end” to lockdown has made some voters think the government is taking unnecessary risks, and encouraged others to take unnecessary risks of their own, safe in the apparent certainty that the lockdown will soon be ended. The comfort zone strategy has real long-term downsides, too. MPs generally agree that Keir Starmer has had a good week: the Labour leader’s call for the government to publish its lockdown exit plan has been validated twice over, once by the unhelpful culture of leaks and hints about what is to come, and once because, when all is said and done, the government will have actually produced and published an exit strategy. The fear among Labour MPs, however, is that the government will try to bind Starmer to any unpopular measures he signs up to. One Conservative gleefully told me that they would make Starmer “a collaborator” in any politically painful decisions. Hardly anyone believes that the global increase in the popularity of incumbent governments will last all the way to the next general election, but many think it will be harder for Starmer to criticise the government’s unpopular decisions – of which, it’s assumed, there will be many, due to the economic consequences of the lockdown – if he has been brought into the fold. Boris Johnson has had regular conversations with the opposition parties, but he has thus far failed to establish any crucial moments at which Starmer’s hands are also at the tiller. The leaks have also allowed the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, neither of which have been without fault during the crisis, to assert their distinctiveness from Westminster simply by clearly communicating a near-identical approach openly and transparently, rather than through the pages of favoured papers. But the comfort zone approach has obscured an issue that ought to be a real source of political pain for Johnson and Starmer. The way out of lockdown isn’t a mystery: governments must first reduce the rate of new transmissions to as close to zero as possible, and then have the necessary infrastructure to test at scale, track the movements of possible carriers, and isolate the infected as and when new outbreaks emerge. There are two barriers in the UK’s path to that destination. The first is logistical: Britain doesn’t yet have the capacity to implement a system of testing, tracking and isolating infections. That is a painful area for the Conservatives, as it means discussing whether they have fallen short in procurement, or if the spending decisions taken since 2010 have left the state ill prepared for crisis. But the second barrier is painful for both parties: a functioning system of testing, tracing and isolating new cases would require a major reduction in our liberties and a prolonged period of increased surveillance. It’s far from clear that there is a majority in parliament for that approach, and it’s not a natural political position for Johnson or Starmer. Both are commonly said to be “instinctive liberals”, though their records at the big organisations they ran, whether as mayor of London or director of public prosecutions, are muddier than that. What matters more is that most British people are not liberals, instinctive or otherwise. It’s easy to forget that while New Labour’s ID cards scheme was unpopular within the party and in parliament, it enjoyed majority support in the country as a whole. The great British public has enthusiastically embraced CCTV, and no successful political party in the democratic era has been without a generous bung to the police. Whether the SNP in 2007, Johnson in 2019 or even Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, the way to win votes and influence people in British politics has long run on an authoritarian axis. So what will happen if British politics is dominated by two men, neither of whom are instinctively minded to point to the clearest and safest way out of lockdown? The lesson of Johnson’s recent electoral success, in which he tapped into a political demand that has long existed – for a party that is tough on migrants and criminals but spends lavishly on the NHS and schools – but has been unavailable to voters since 2005, is that eventually the voters get what the voters want. If neither Johnson nor Starmer is willing to leave their comfort zone, they may find that someone else will.