In a crisis the British system only works with a great leader paying full attention

“This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain”, tweeted Boris Johnson on January 2 2020. This was accompanied by a photo of the PM doing a big thumbs up to camera. The photo and the message attached have now become a popular meme that occasionally does the rounds on Twitter (comparable to the David Cameron “chaos with Ed Miliband” tweet in the run-up to the General Election of 2015 that reappeared after he lost his Brexit bet on backing Remain).

Boris did not quite make himself such a hostage to fortune as Pitt the Younger when, in February 1792, he declared: “Unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment.” Cue the aftermath of the French Revolution, The Terror and an era of total war…

At roughly the same time as Boris’s ill-starred Tweet, alarm bells were going off across East Asia about a respiratory virus that had apparently originated in China. In early January, Taiwan had shut its borders to entrants from the Chinese mainland. And yet, three direct flights from Wuhan continued to run into London Heathrow every week. On 25 January, the UK opted not to test new arrivals from Wuhan for Coronavirus. Instead, according to the BBC, they would “be given a leaflet to encourage them to report if they are ill”, the BBC reported.

Dominic Cummings’s testimony in parliament this week confirmed what we had already known – that Britain’s early Covid response was characterised by inertia. According to the former adviser, in early January, Cummings raised the Covid-19 issue with the Prime Minister “because it was on the news”. SAGE, the government scientific advisory group for emergencies, met on January 22 for its first meeting on Covid. On January 25, Number 10 started exploring “pandemic planning” at the behest of Cummings. Very little of note seems to have happened in February on the Covid front. It was a month of Cabinet reshuffles, skiing holidays. Boris basically went AWOL. As late as March 5, SAGE recommended shielding the vulnerable and elderly. Infections peaked in London just a week later.

Why was the British Government so slow to act? After all, the last infectious disease that had been viewed as a serious threat, Ebola, was met with quite robust action. During the 2013-16 outbreak, travellers from high-risk areas were required by Public Health England to check their temperature twice a day and send in the results. They were also asked to stick to “local travel only”. All travellers from countries which had seen outbreaks were subjected to “enhanced screening” measures of one kind or another.

The Cummings analysis is compelling on the administrative failings at the heart of the British system. A lack of specific expertise, confused committee systems, an elite of scientists wedded to openness at all costs, unserious and occasionally mendacious politicians – everything came together in the early months of 2020 to produce “Plan A”. “Plan A” would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the total collapse of the health system. Eventually, the government switched to “Plan B”. We locked down.

One section of Cummings’ testimony raised eyebrows across the political spectrum. If Cummings had been PM, he claimed he would have placed “a kind of dictator in charge of this”. His choice would have been the Cambridge physicist Mark Warner. Cummings continued: “He has as close to kingly authority as the state has legally to do stuff… he is in charge of everybody.” The notion that had the right scientists had been in charge, everything would have turned out differently, is at best naïve, at worst an extraordinary misreading of the history of crisis and democratic politics.

In the 19th century there was a rich debate about the role of the Prime Minister and his obligations to the Commons and Cabinet in times of emergency. Liberal politician John Morley (1838-1923) wrote in his Life of Walpole of 1889: “The flexibility of the Cabinet system allows the Prime Minister in an emergency to take upon himself a power not inferior to that of a dictator, provided always that the House of Commons will stand by him.” The Prime Minister may be merely “the keystone of the Cabinet arch”, but he also occupies “a position which … is one of exceptional and peculiar authority.” It is a commonplace idea that the PM is primus inter pares. In war, the emphasis shifts to primus.

That notion was put to the test twice in the 20th century in the most extreme circumstances: two total wars which required the mobilisation of all the resources at the nation’s disposal.

The read-across from pandemic to wartime is not straightforward, but disease and human conflict do share certain difficulties in terms of planning, as Niall Ferguson argues in his new book: Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. In conversation with Mattias Hessérus on the Engelsberg Ideas podcast History Lessons, Fergusson said of wars and pandemics: “There are a great many small ones and very few big ones… I can’t give you a probability of the next really big earthquake… except that there will be one… Really big ones happen but they don’t happen at predictable intervals.”

As late as 1935, it was a surprisingly common view at the top of British politics that a conflict was only likely to emerge in 10 years’ time at the very earliest. A decade of diplomacy by conference had conditioned officialdom to think that, when it really came down to it, states would prefer “jaw-jaw” over “war-war”.

If the lead-up to the Second World War was characterised by a form of establishment “groupthink” not so dissimilar to the consensus that informed the first stages of the Covid crisis, then the First World War offers a powerful lesson in what happens to the British system when it isn’t given enough coordination, when, in a sense, the PM fails to behave with a “peculiar authority”.

The complexity of the war effort had stimulated the creation of a formidable array of committees staffed by top officials and Ministers – there were layers of sub-committees dealing with all manner of home defence, naval and military issues. They were complemented by a Committee of Imperial Defence and a War Council. The Cabinet, with its twenty-one members, sat at the top. The PM, then Herbert Asquith, oversaw it all.

From 1914 to 1916, the British war effort was characterised by a tragic lack of coordination. Although a special “Dardanelles Committee” was set up to manage the Gallipoli campaign, that didn’t prevent the disaster that ensued. Timings were all off. Forces were sent to the wrong places entirely. It was a calamity, and it brought about Asquith’s resignation.

During the crisis of 1916, the Cabinet Minister David Lloyd George proposed to Asquith that there should be a dedicated War Committee – under Lloyd George’s personal stewardship – which would take care of the day-to-day running of the war effort. Asquith rejected the scheme on the basis that the PM could never be “relegated to the position of an arbiter in the background”.

When Lloyd George became Prime Minister shortly afterwards, he put his plan into action. A special “War Cabinet” was convened on the model of a “Supreme Command”. It had five members including the Prime Minister. They were relieved of other ministerial duties – their sole purpose was to coordinate the war effort. Maurice Hankey, a former Royal Marine, who had chaired the Committee for Imperial Defence, acted as Secretary: his qualities made him absolutely vital to the good functioning of the system. According to the diplomat Lord Vansittart, “it was Maurice Hankey, who progressively became secretary of everything that mattered… He grew into a repository of secrets, a Chief Inspector of Mines of information. He had an incredible memory… [of] an official brand which could reproduce on call the date, file, substance of every paper that ever flew into a pigeon-hole. If St Peter is as well served there will be no errors on Judgement Day.”

The “Supreme Command” model had a kind of beauty about it – meetings in the morning, all minuted precisely by Hankey, were complemented by a rolling system of updates from Ministers about progress made and decisions acted upon. It was a system that is credited with the relative success of the British war effort from late 1916 onwards.

As Hankey himself wrote in his 1961 memoir, The Supreme Command 1914-1918: “War cannot be ‘departmentalized’. A major war throws up problems interacting upon one another that require the incessant, day to day vigilance of the Supreme Command. Not only has the main policy to be decided, but it ought to be kept under continuous review from day to day, and almost from hour to hour… Such co-ordination, which involves very delicate considerations, is likely to be best assured by a body in continuous session, composed of persons free from departmental and Parliamentary duties, who can give all their time to the central problems of the war.”

Cummings is right to focus on the administrative failings: they are central to our Covid story. But he is wrong to think that rule by science is preferable. The British system demands a great leader at its centre. Only the Prime Minister, can legitimately take on the “Supreme Command”, just as no public inquiry has the power to settle the fate of politicians and governments – only voters can do that, and this crisis has some way to run. With whispers about divisions between Boris and his new Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, this essentially uncoordinated government may yet have its Dardanelles moment, when a disaster midway through the crisis forces change.

Whatever happens, we have been given a fresh reminder of an old historical lesson. To work in a crisis, the British system needs a great leader paying full attention.