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Sage advised the government that Covid infections could double over Christmas, if households were permitted to mix. Why was the government so determined to push ahead with Christmas at all costs? Prof Stephen Reicher of the University of St Andrews is a member of Independent Sage, a collective of scientists working to provide independent advice to the government, and the Sage behavioural science subgroup SPI-B. He believes the government thought that people would mix over Christmas regardless of the rules. “The assumption was that, if they put into place restrictions, people wouldn’t abide by them,” Reicher says. “The government had to bend, otherwise people would break.”
Hayward thinks the government was determined to find a way to reward people for their sacrifices: “There was this sense that we’d had a hard year and deserved to get together for Christmas.” By locking down in November, the government thought it could “pay” in advance for relaxing the rules at Christmas. “It seems a strange form of accounting,” Hayward says.
On 25 November, families bereaved in the first wave of the pandemic spoke to the Guardian, warning against mixing on Christmas Day. “There was a real sense of fear in our group,” says Jo Goodman of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice. “Our thoughts immediately went to the families that would be bereaved. We recognised that morale in the country was low and people needed something to look forward to. But presenting Christmas mixing as safe when clearly it wasn’t made us all feel really concerned.”
On 11 December, Independent Sage urged the government to cancel plans to allow households to mix indoors, stating that celebrations should be held outdoors, where the risk of transmission is far lower. As Reicher puts it: “If you wanted to give a Christmas present to the virus, you would get people to mix around dinner tables indoors – which would be crowded, so social distancing wouldn’t happen – in rooms that won’t be well ventilated, because it’s winter. People will have their heating on and the windows closed.”
On 13 December, Prof Devi Sridhar, a global public health expert at the University of Edinburgh, tweeted: “Christmas mixing in the UK is a terrible idea. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” She did so because she believed it was her job to speak truth to power. “As scientists, we don’t need to be popular with the electorate,” Sridhar says. “Anyone could see from the numbers that we were in a fragile position. It would have been better to be straightforward with people.”
Covid cases ticked upwards. On 15 December, the British Medical Journal and Health Service Journal (HSJ) published a rare joint editorial, urging the government to “reverse its rash decision to allow household mixing” over Christmas. The HSJ’s editor, Alastair McLellan, had been watching in horror as the numbers crept up in December. He knew that the NHS struggled every January just to cope with the numbers hospitalised with winter flu. “No one wanted to be the person who cancelled Christmas,” McLellan says. “But I thought to myself: ‘I can’t let this happen.’”
The editorial got the attention McLellan had hoped for. Later that day, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, urged the government to review the guidance on Christmas mixing. “I understand that people want to spend time with their families after this awful year, but the situation has clearly taken a turn for the worse,” Starmer said. But that evening Johnson insisted that Christmas would be continuing as planned, arguing that it would be “inhuman” to cancel it.
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