Boris, refighting the Brexit war and why the Coronavirus truth may end up being in the middle

After a brief coronavirus-induced grace period, the toxic polarisation that has become such a feature of British politics is back with a vengeance.

The report at the weekend by Sunday Times journalists Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Leake has reignited a bitter war between Boris Johnson’s government and the tribe of politicians, journalists and commentators who have been hell-bent on tearing him down ever since he switched to lead the Vote Leave campaign in 2016.

The Sunday Times report makes damning reading. It catalogues a litany of alleged errors in healthcare planning, logistics, procurement and government response that may prove devastating to the UK’s eventual Covid-19 death toll, not to mention the hit to the economy.

These issues demand proper scrutiny. But they are not what has whipped up the ire of those most audibly outraged. The focus over the last 24 hours has been on the Prime Minister’s personal failings: his absence at Cobra meetings, his holiday plans, his reluctance to read briefing documents, and his tendency to delegate key decisions to those working beneath him.

This, it is claimed – both implicitly by the tone of the report and explicitly by Johnson’s critics, who point to graphs of rising fatalities – is why the UK is due to suffer far more than our European neighbours.

A dash of perspective is desperately needed. This narrative on the part of Johnson’s angriest critics is not only simplistic and unfair – it is a dangerous distraction from the very real ways that the government has botched and continues to botch crucial decisions.

There are clearly some areas in which Britain was especially poorly prepared for this crisis. Three years of Brexit infighting had sucked the political oxygen out of virtually every other policy area, pandemic preparedness included. It is a stroke of desperate bad luck that Covid-19 began to spread just as the government was finally succeeding in leaving the EU, with all eyes in Westminster fixed on the issue that has dominated our national debate for so long.

There are disturbing revelations about pandemic planning over the last decade, long before Johnson got hold of the keys to Downing Street. The Sunday Times report stresses the impact of austerity on the NHS post-2010, a policy implemented by a government that did not involve the current Prime Minister. And details about Exercise Cygnus, the UK’s 2016 pandemic rehearsal simulation, reveal gaping holes in the contingency planning – particularly on the lack of PPE and ventilators – that were not rectified by the time the real virus struck.

It seems likely too that our national obsession with the annual NHS winter crisis, which pits ministers against health service officials in a perennial blame game over funding and beds, has drawn attention and resources away from long-term pandemic investment for years.

This is not to excuse government mistakes since January. One major point that the Sunday Times piece gets spot on is the inevitability of a public inquiry in the handling of Covid-19. And there are questions to answer that cannot be cast back to previous administrations.

In particular, what did the scientific advice indicate, and when? Were the contrasting views of different scientific teams taken into account? How much was policy led “by the science” (at the government likes to insist), and how much by the panic over scenes of crowded Italian hospitals and the media demands to “do something”? Were the economic, social, and indeed health consequences of an extended lockdown taken into account when decisions were made? How did the speed at which Britain moved compare to other European countries, and what impact did this have on the eventual outcomes?

On logistics, exactly whose job was it to ensure adequate supplies of test kits and PPE, and why has every step in the chain – NHS trusts, Public Health England, the Department for Health, the cabinet – been able to bounce the blame back and forth? Why wasn’t there an adequate plan for care homes, given the obvious risk of outbreaks there? And most crucially, why did it take so long to start implementing the plans drawn up for precisely this purpose?

These questions go beyond who chaired Cobra meetings or where the Prime Minister went on his holidays. And the country deserves proper answers. Unfortunately, we are not likely to get them while the focus remains so heavily on the personality battles of the past.

In newspapers, TV interviews, social media posts, the lines are being drawn. The Sunday Times report has become a rallying point for the old political camps to coalesce around.

On one side, Team Boris: the usual suspects, many of them vocal Brexiteers or Tory heavyweights, stubbornly insisting that now is not the time to question a government acting under extremely challenging circumstances, however high the stakes and obvious the failings. On the other: embittered Remainiacs and lifelong critics of the Prime Minister, screaming that it has always been obvious that Johnson is not fit to be anywhere near Downing Street.

The former group are dangerously misguided. Scrutiny of the government has never been more vital. The latter have let their obsession with Johnson’s perceived laziness – a charge suggested repeatedly in the Sunday Times – distort their reason. The idea that Britain could have avoided this crisis had Johnson turned up to more Cobra meetings is farcical.

What may be true is that Johnson’s leadership style – delegating responsibility to ministers and officials, and trusting them to run their department – was not suited to an all-encompassing national crisis of this scale. Some previous Prime Ministers – Margaret Thatcher, perhaps – would most likely have been inclined to interrogate scientists and department heads more thoroughly throughout January and February, asking difficult questions when Johnson appears to have accepted the consensus.

But lest we forget, such an iron grip on government was repeatedly cited as one of Theresa May’s major flaws during her time in office. Flexibility and delegation, which seems to be what Johnson was attempting in those early months, were back then considered key prime ministerial qualities. This is possibly one reason why, despite the list of errors, the government is still riding high in the polls – a YouGov poll on Friday put public support for the government’s handling of the crisis at 66 per cent.

Regardless, while it is undoubtedly true that Britain’s coronavirus experience would have looked very different under another Prime Minister, we won’t be able to determine exactly how until long after this is over, when we can compare the UK data with other countries which acted differently. At the moment, the focus on the government needs to be on what’s happening right now: the continued farce over testing, PPE, business support, and a strategy for exiting the lockdown.

Those questions are much easier to dismiss in an atmosphere of tribal polarisation. Accusing the Prime Minister of being lazy and absent, when he is currently recovering from what looked a lot like a near-death experience, hands the government a perfect excuse to dismiss valid and necessary criticism as a partisan attack. Similarly, demanding apologies and explanations for decisions taken years back under a completely different administration detracts attention from the mistakes that are still being made now.

And presenting charts of infections and death rates without context (such as showing them relative to population sizes) whips up panic and makes it impossible to properly scrutinise how the government is actually doing, and where it must improve.

Clearly, there have been errors – from this Prime Minister, from his government, from its predecessors, from the WHO, and from institutions like Public Health England and NHS trusts. But turning coronavirus into the latest instalment of the Brexit Wars won’t help us fix them or save lives. It will simply prevent us from asking the questions that could.