Can you sense it? The way things are changing? The little groups of friends that are starting to meet up in public again. The people getting in their cars and going who knows where. The families heading for the great holiday resorts such as Motherwell. There is the sound of creaking and straining in the air. There are cracks in the hull of lockdown.

I’ve certainly seen the trend where I live and you may have seen it where you are too. Data from various organisations including Google shows the number of people leaving their local neighbourhood is increasing and that the trend is most prevalent in Scotland. Why that might be I’m not sure. Is it that we tend to be more spread out in large parts of Scotland? Or are we just more likely to break the rules? Whatever the reason, it’s happening.

But it’s the political consequences that interest me because if we’re seeing the beginnings of mass disobedience and I think we could be (the police certainly think they’re fighting a losing battle) then it poses a problem for the politicians at their podiums. Do they seek to follow, at least to some extent, the public mood, or do they stay firm even as people head out to the parks and beaches?

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It would appear that the leaders of the UK governments are starting to diverge on the question, with the UK Government moving from “stay at home” to “stay alert”, while the Scottish Government sticks to a strict lockdown. One of the problems this causes in Scotland is economic – for example, garden centres are re-opening in England and Wales but are being forced to stay shut in Scotland and one nursery, McLaren’s, told me at the weekend what that means for them: they’ve lost half a million pounds and the staff are suffering mentally and financially.

But there are also political problems with sticking to the lockdown too and the SNP’s Joanna Cherry put her finger on it in an opinion article the other day. Ms Cherry compared the First Minister to Winston Churchill who lost the 1945 election despite leading the UK through the Second World War. “We are at the peak of a crisis led by a leader who is widely respected and trusted,” said Ms Cherry. “However, when the peak of the crisis is over … that won’t be enough. After the Second World War… voters chose not the leader who won the war but Clement Attlee, who had a radical plan for the peace.”

Now, everyone will be able to see what Ms Cherry is trying to do here – she is clearly meant to be the Attlee figure in this scenario – but I agree that a strong performance by Ms Sturgeon in the war against coronavirus will not necessarily translate into strong support after it. Ms Cherry’s emphasis is on a radical plan (ie radical independence), but actually the problem for Churchill was that, having so perfectly judged public opinion during the war, he fell behind it after the war. I spoke to veterans ahead of the VE Day anniversary and they told me how tough it was in ‘45. They were tired. It was hard to find work and to make money. They wanted change.

Coronavirus is a different kind of problem obviously, but there are similar dangers for Ms Sturgeon in falling behind public opinion. Of course, policy should be led by scientific opinion, but people are starting to flout the lockdown, usually younger people who’ve judged that it’s relatively safe to see other younger people. The opinion polls may still show support for the lockdown in principle, but we’re starting to make our own judgments on risk versus quality of life and it doesn’t matter what the Government says. In other words, the public mood is changing.

The judgment for the First Minister is how to respond to this, which is where the danger lies. In pointing to the example of Churchill, Ms Cherry seems to suggest that the Scottish Government could lose support because of the lack of a radical plan (and Ms Cherry is surely hinting that she is the woman to deliver it), but it’s being out of tune with public opinion that really does the damage. Nicola Sturgeon has judged her briefings extremely well, but if she starts to say things that people aren’t thinking, or doing, she could be in trouble. And it’s unpleasant: the discordancy of a politician who’s out of tune.

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Obviously, there are dangers at the other extreme and trying to loosen the lockdown too quickly – a second spike in deaths, for instance, would be disastrous politically. But just as in our private lives, people would understand if we moved from “stay at home” to talking about balancing the harm that the virus is doing against other harms – the fact that levels of cancer testing have slumped for example. The public would also understand if we focused on shielding certain groups or focused the testing on virus hotspots once “track, trace and test” is up and running. Boris Johnson is clearly up for moving towards that kind of approach now; Nicola Sturgeon less so.

But here’s the interesting thing: the warning signs in Churchill’s story aren’t just for Nicola Sturgeon – Boris Johnson should be paying attention too. The thing about Churchill was that, at the height of the crisis of the Second World War, he started to lose the support of many of his senior colleagues because he rarely read briefings and preferred to listen to the advice of a small number of cronies rather than ministers who had all the facts. Clement Attlee wrote a letter to Churchill to this effect early in 1945.

We know that Boris Johnson hero-worships Churchill. He also wrote a (not great) book about the great man. But I doubt if the PM would acknowledge the echoes of history. They are there though. Mr Johnson does not like to read long briefings. He likes to listen to the advice of a small number of cronies, and one crony in particular, Dominic Cummings. It was behaviour along those lines that led to Churchill making mistakes and losing support in his party and his country. Coronavirus isn’t over yet, but the same could happen to Boris Johnson.

All columnists are free to express their opinions. They don’t necessarily represent the view of The Herald.