Adam Boulton Diary – coronavirus, cakeism and completely incompetent leaders
If Covid-19 had not happened, Donald Trump would likely be breezing toward re-election and four more untrammelled years in the White House. Boris Johnson would still be enjoying a honeymoon glow with his party and the country, having won the best Conservative victory for decades. There might well have been another honeymoon for him with the new Mrs Johnson.
Instead more than a million people (and counting) have died of the disease – 220,000 of them in the US and at least 43,000 in the UK. Both these G7 nations are in the top six for deaths per capita. Only Peru, Brazil, Mexico and Spain are faring worse.
Donald Trump is now the underdog in the US election. In recent weeks he has been as much as 14% behind his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, and behind in all the half dozen swing states. Boris Johnson now trails far behind Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak in approval ratings, and Nicola Sturgeon too. Only the hapless Gavin Williamson keeps Johnson from bottom place in the cabinet rankings.
The inexperienced coterie of advisors in Number 10 blame bad luck. No government they wail has ever had to deal with such a shock. The originator of the Black Swan theory begs to differ. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated” by suggestions that the pandemic was a Black Swan – a rare, high-profile, unpredictable event with profound consequences that no-one could reasonably be expected to have foreseen. He points out that a pandemic likely to attack the human respiratory system has been on the global risk register for decades. There have even been dry runs such as SARS and MERS. More recently in January this year when Covid-19 was confined to China, Taleb and two colleagues actually published a paper warning that the disease would spread around the world in a “non-linear” way thanks to “increased connectivity”.
But Covid-19 was a Black Swan as far Western democratic politics are concerned. Trump and Johnson were no worse than most other leaders in being taken by surprise. Many others also played the outbreak down in the early stages, though only Johnson was rash enough to liken himself habitually to the Mayor in Jaws who kept the beaches open as the Great White shark hunted in shallow water.
Where the President and Prime Minister have failed is in the leadership they have, or rather haven’t, displayed since the disease struck home early this year. Covid is vindicating two political clichés, one old and one new. Here again the outbreak has been an accelerator to changes already in the pipeline, in this case accelerating the two leaders towards Enoch Powell’s hoary dictum that all political careers end in failure.
Downing Street’s snowflake SpAds are wrong. Governments have often been hit by unanticipated and unique crises; the stuff of politics is how they handle them. In modern times the Falklands Invasion, the Brighton Bombing, Black Wednesday, 9/11 and the banking crisis were all shocks with existential implications domestically and abroad.
Leaders may prosper or be destroyed by these events. David Cameron pulled off each of these fates with his Scottish and EU referendum gambles. Either way they are defined by them for as long as they stay close to power. Like Johnson, John Major had four years in office stretching ahead of him after September 1992, but when it came at last in 1997 his defeat by Tony Blair seemed inevitable.
It is also possible for a leader to thrive when things are not going well. In truth Scotland has done little better than England handling Covid-19, yet the First Minister’s popularity has soared to the point that an overwhelming victory in next year’s Holyrood might force Johnson to grant the indyref2 he has set himself against. In spite of their reputations as great communicators neither Johnson nor Trump has yet found the words to encompass the troubling circumstances in which we find ourselves.
For all their bluster and braggadocio, Covid is cruelly exposing the weaknesses of Trump and Johnson as leaders. Election winning is not the same as good government. Both men have a preference for assertion in the face of facts; both lack attention to detail and curiosity about what others have to say. Neither is naturally disposed to work constructively with others. Both glory in their personal inconsistency, willing to change policy at the turn of a phrase.
Demonstrably 220,000 corpses and calculated assaults on national institutions and experts have not Made America Great Again. Instead of being a strong and stable genius Trump risks looking weak, erratic and foolish at a moment when many are not in the mood to laugh those failings away. If the polls are right “seniors” and “suburban women”, two demographic cohorts who took him to victory in 2016, have turned against him. This year it seems being an old white man, like the President, is not an obvious handicap for Biden.
The Red Wall of constituencies remote from the London whose demolition took Johnson into Number 10, is now being rebuilt. Communities are despairing at what they perceive as the double unfairness of poorer health outcomes and care matched by a penny-pinching response from Westminster to their appeals for support.
Cakeism, having your cake and eating it, is the closest that Boris Johnson comes to a political credo. But he has not found a way to reconcile his support for restrictions to protect the public with the libertarian instincts which he shares with the Conservative MPs who accuse him of imposing an inefficient, authoritarian, nanny state. Where Johnson once united his party because he was truly “a winner”, discontent now seethes in the ranks at Westminster. Whether the issue is the ten o’clock curfew, planning deregulation, or opposition to breaking international law, the common thread is dissatisfaction with Johnson and his coterie. It would be naïve to believe that Michael Howard, Theresa May and Graham Brady and the 1922 Committee don’t discuss their central grievance with each other.
Trump could yet win re-election, although at time of writing that seems as unlikely as Good Old Boris restoring his previous grasp of the nation’s affections. Whatever happens the virus which will bring about their political destruction is already in Johnson and Trump’s bloodstreams along with Covid antibodies. What might have been had they never been tested by (or tested positively for) Covid-19, will never come again.