It always seems to be too soon. It was too soon for the UK to lock down in early March, when other European countries had already done so. It was too soon for Boris Johnson to reimpose national restrictions in September, when scientific advisers privately called for them.
Now the UK prime minister’s allies tell us it is too soon to judge his government’s performance. They may be right. We don’t know how the pandemic will end — and other countries, including France, Italy, Spain and Scotland, which manages its own health service, have suffered similar peaks and troughs to England. If the UK government has erred, others have too, in different ways.
Yet it is not too early to judge the performance of Mr Johnson himself because we have already seen the pattern. His missteps over coronavirus have closely followed those he made over Brexit. In both cases, he insisted on seeing what he wanted to see. He saw a world where the British economy would blossom by shunning its largest trading partner, and where a virus would disappear while he shook hands with its victims. That world did not exist.