Boris either gets to grips with being Prime Minister or he’ll be done for

On 8 May 1945, as Churchill was about to leave Number 10 to head to Buckingham Palace for the King’s Victory in Europe celebration drinks reception, the Prime Minister saw his cook, Georgina Landemare, who had come up from the kitchens to see the celebrations.

Andrew Roberts, in his peerless life of Churchill, Walking with Destiny, recounts how the Prime Minister went to her. “He broke away from his entourage milling around him, went over and shook her hand and thanked her for having looked after him so well through these years.”

The idea of a connection between and across the classes, of a unified national effort and joy at the shared victory, is a dominant and affecting theme in several of the best accounts of the celebrations that took place that day in London, 75 years ago today. Churchill addressed the nation on the radio and repeated the speech to MPs later that day. He then made three speeches from the balconies and windows of government departments, in which to the vast crowds below he hymned the resilience of the British in the fight against Nazism.

Two months later the voters kicked him out of office in the general election.

Today, we remember the sacrifice and give thanks on VE Day, although you won’t have to go very far this weekend to find commentary from representatives of the British cultural elite suggesting that it is time to forget or to scale back such commemorations because it is distorting our view of the past and encouraging a naughty British exceptionalist obsession. That is usually, let’s face it, code for actively disliking Britain and wanting it to fail, a peculiar fetish of self-loathing that Orwell identified in relation to the English. England is perhaps the only great country, he wrote, whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. That observation still applies.

Boris Johnson, also a biographer of Winston Churchill, will be well aware of the historical echoes this weekend, and the scope for unflattering comparisons between his own position and that of his hero. Although this is not a war, Boris has invoked the martial spirit of Churchill during the Coronavirus crisis in an effort to rally the nation.

Boris will know that for all Churchill’s flaws, the great truth at the heart of the Churchill myth is that he got the major calls right in the Second World War. Although he made individual mistake after mistake, on the biggest judgements (appeasement, fighting on, wooing America, allying with Stalin) he was vindicated. Coronavirus is Johnson’s equivalent wrestle with history. Does anyone think he has got the big calls right since the damn virus appeared?

So far, Boris has public opinion on his side. According to the polling, many voters are in a forgiving mood. There  is a widespread assumption – among floating voters – that the scale of this dreadful disaster could not have been anticipated and those in positions of authority were and are doing their best. This is not the time, runs the theory, for a holding to account.

For Brexit voters there is probably something else going on. The bond between Boris and that part of the electorate, accounting for 40% of the population or more, is extremely strong. They will not forget that until Johnson won the Tory leadership it looked as though the People’s Vote crowd, those who wanted to overrule the 2016 referendum, might just get away with their unbelievable heist. Boris saved Brexit, discombobulated his opponents last Autumn and drove ultra-Remainers so mad with incoherent rage that they gave him what he wanted, a general election. In that contest he smashed their hopes to bits with a baseball bat. They still haven’t forgiven him and regard him as an illegitimate figure. Pro-Brexit voters, in contrast, absolutely loved most of what he did and are forgiving of his failings, up to a point, because he got Brexit over the line and they can see what some of the most prominent anti-Brexit figures are up to trying to use Coronavirus to refight the war they lost.

The problem for Boris and the Tories is that on any objective measure he has not made a good job of handling the Coronavirus crisis. No amount of deranged attacks on the free press by the government can get round the awkward reality, and I say that as someone who in early March was reassured by the notion of following the science. I liked the Prime Minister’s liberal attitude and reluctance to lock us all up. Like many, I woke in dread early on the morning after he went into intensive care and felt euphoria when the radio news headlines revealed he had not succumbed to the disease.

But this government is on the basis of several key performance indicators “an absolute shower” – to borrow the terminology of the Terry Thomas character in I’m Alright Jack, the 1959 classic film about labour relations that showed how sour the unified spirit of 1945 went in the decades that followed victory.

In February this year, the Prime Minister was distracted and not engaged to the extent he should have been. There are several potential reasons why this could have been so, but whatever happened he was not there as he should have been.

The government’s scientists had prepared – but for the wrong disease. Policy advanced on the basis that this was like a flu pandemic, when it was something novel and worse. To his credit, Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s adviser, does seem to have realised they were on the wrong course, but that is not enough. A leader has to intuit and act. The service a Thatcher, or a Brown or a Cameron would have done to the nation in February would have been to haul everyone into the cabinet room and cross-examine the scientists and the officials in the most intense manner. That might have usefully established, early on, that there was a conceptual failure at the heart of the official response that required rapid reorientation and stockpiling.

Briefly, testing was adopted, before being set aside quickly and dismissed as not useful. Now it turns out to be essential. We have capacity at last (well done) but Britain is not using it all for reasons that are still not adequately explained. Early on, the NHS leadership seems to have blundered on not asking the private sector to help expand testing capacity.

Bafflingly, for several months the government continued to allow millions of travellers to fly in to the country.

In the middle of all this, Boris became ill.

He has returned, far too early by the looks of his exhausted demeanour, after a period in which, thanks to a constitutional cock-up, no-one was left in charge with full Prime Ministerial authority.

Now, behind the scenes a handful of senior cabinet ministers are doing their best to provide some semblance of organised government. Their efforts are complicated by a communications effort that has – after an earlier successful spell – descended into farce, providing confusing briefings of what the relaxation of lockdown will or will not mean.

Blame for the recent disintegration of the “comms” effort rests ultimately in the hands of Cummings, who seems to have hypnotised Boris, and with Lee Cain, the press adviser who is dubbed “Chicken Guy” by some ministers because as a Mirror reporter he wore a chicken suit to chase around David Cameron on the campaign trail. Cain is no Bernard Ingham.

Unfortunately for Boris, just as the operational situation worsens he finds that he no longer has the comfort of facing a useless opposition. Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour leader, took the Prime Minister apart at PMQs this week. This required no great, dramatic flourish. Six simple forensic questions did it. In reply a knackered Boris just bumbled.

On the VE Day anniversary today, the Daily Telegraph underlined how fast the politics of pandemic are moving by splashing a piece by Starmer about VE Day. Remember, Boris is the Telegraph mascot, a former prize columnist and the embodiment of the paper’s tribal aesthetic. Yet his own paper got the new Labour leader to write on VE Day. And they splashed it, even though Starmer offered nothing beyond platitudes.

There are other indications in the Tory tribe that suggest Boris had better look out. Tory MPs are often unhappy about something or other. Now plenty of them are properly fizzing, about the handling of lockdown and the lack of a policy on economic revival.

The complaint I hear most frequently is that he, Boris, doesn’t seem capable of exercising any grip. No-one asks what he wants or what he thinks. It is almost as though he isn’t there. He’s a figurehead, drifting.

Some of this is not his fault. Not only has he been seriously ill, he inherited a British machine of state that has been revealed in recent years during the Brexit farce to be of suboptimal design and prone to malfunction.

But this is what it means to be Prime Minister, to be the individual in history. The job he sought all his life comes with the chance to write himself into history, but if he cannot do it, if he cannot become operationally effective in Number 10, then someone else will be found eventually. Especially when Tory MPs know he is now up against Starmer, a technocrat who will claim to offer competence while cross-examining Boris relentlessly.

The prospect of Johnson’s leadership not enduring until the next election may sound absurd right now, when there is a Tory majority of 80 and the polling suggests 50% of the voters would – at the moment – vote Conservative. But the politics of all this is much more fragile than it seems. Britain has suffered the health trauma but not yet properly felt the economic catastrophe of  widespread unemployment with social dislocation. The second half of this year will be extremely tough for millions of Britons, and the Westminster atmosphere will be toxic and thick with recrimination.

The best course of action for Boris in such circumstances would be to apply himself and get the hang of being Prime Minister. It’s not going to end well if he carries on as is.