Britain needs a replacement Prime Minister to make emergency decisions

The good news is that Boris Johnson is out of intensive care and back on a hospital ward beginning a recovery that is expected to take a month and perhaps even longer than that. The Prime Minister has just had a near miss, a terrifying brush with mortality, or as his father, Stanley, put it on Friday morning: “To use that American expression, he almost took one for the team. We have got to make sure we play the game properly now.”

Boris is such a driven and irrepressible figure – someone imbued with the life force – that when it was suddenly revealed earlier this week that he had been rushed to hospital, it stopped many of us short. I don’t know about you, but I confess to having been stunned by the enormity of the news. I woke with a dread first thing the next morning. That dread was only broken by hearing the radio bulletin reveal that he was in a stable condition.

Across the political spectrum, supporters and opponents were floored. For a few hours, the usual, narrow, glib calculations about politics – who is up and who is down? – were set aside. Boris was down and quite possibly out. A handful of maniacs with access to social media accounts and the combined thinking power of a geranium wished Boris ill. These were pockets of idiocy as a worried country contemplated the possibility that the virus would kill the Prime Minister.

Amid the relief this weekend that he is on the mend, Stanley Johnson’s most important point must  not be overlooked, however. A Tiggerish Boris is not going to come bouncing back to work next week or the week after. Stanley, with the clear sightedness of a parent who narrowly avoided losing his son this week, gets to the human essence of it.

Boris must get well. He was lucky and can now not afford to take more chances with his health, especially when it was apparent ten days ago that he had a worse dose of this than was being admitted when he spluttered his way through conference calls. A persistent feature of the build up to his admission to hospital was official denial about the seriousness of his condition. Whether this was down to Boris himself – out of duty to country, or a standard issue male refusal to face what was happening – is of no consequence now.

What matters is that Boris takes all the time he needs for a proper recovery. When he leaves hospital he will likely require weeks more recuperation. In no meaningful way can he be expected to be back soon as an effective head of government, chairing meetings, meeting with officials and functioning for 12 to 16 hours a day as a leader.

This prompts a delicate question. If not Boris, who, exactly, is running the country during the peak of the outbreak and how are important decisions about what happens next being taken?

Everyone senior involved – Prime Minister , cabinet ministers, senior officials and agency bosses – should face it. Going through this peak without a fully-operational Prime Minister is not desirable or acceptable.

The Number 10 response is that it is all under control, thank you, nothing to see here, move along. As there is traditionally no formal deputy Prime Minister position, something improvised and British has been patched together instead.

Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, is the designated survivor, the senior member of the cabinet who is tasked with implementing the Prime Minister’s plan. But Raab does not operate with Prime Ministerial authority and the plan was formed weeks ago. What if it needs to change. Raab is left in an impossible position, granted seniority and responsibility without the remit to decide.

Ordinarily, say if a leader had the flu or needed an operation, and this took place during a quiet few weeks when nothing beyond the mundane stuff was  happening, this British set-up would be fine for getting by.

This is, to put it mildly, not a quiet few weeks. This is the peak but much is set to get worse. The economy is shrinking this quarter somewhere between ten and 25 per cent. Large parts of business and commercial society will be bombed out within a month if this carries on. Although there was never going to an easing of the lockdown next week (and it was bizarre to see the question posed this week) very soon there will have to be a plan formulated to ease restrictions, if possible, to save the economy.

This crisis has been instructive on the role of senior scientists. Experts disagree – as generals disagree during a war on the facts on the ground and on strategy – and in a democracy the decision rests with the elected leader.

Those grave decisions needed for confronting the next phases of this crisis can only be taken, ultimately, by a Prime Minister or someone standing in with full authority.

Instead, there are four ministerial groups – MAGs – each chaired by cabinet ministers – Raab for foreign affairs, Michael Gove for the public sector, Matt Hancock for health and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, for the economy. “It is surprisingly collegiate,” says one minister. “They are exhausted and there are disagreements,” says another.

The Cabinet Secretary, Mark Sedwill, is the lynchpin of this operation. He might be said, ultimately, to be in charge, informing the Palace of anything the monarch is deemed to need to know.

There was a spate of criticism of Sedwill a week or so ago, when various Johnson advisors thought, incredibly, that this crisis was a sensible moment to start trashing the civil service system and promoting their own claims to organisational genius.

Sedwill – from what I hear – didn’t warrant the attacks. But no-one elected Sedwill. He is there is to transact the business of government, as instructed by the Prime Minister. Only we don’t have a fully-operational Prime Minister.

This is not a sustainable situation. Already, in February and early March, the dysfunctional nature of the Number 10 operation Boris built seems to have hampered decision-making. Earlier this year there were plenty of opportunities to bring order and clarity, by instituting a proper deputy Prime Minister, when Boris is a generalist not hot on detail. The adviser network needed cleaning up too. That failure to put a proper operation in place turns out to have costs, in terms of operational effectiveness and clarity of communication in a national emergency.

Only the cabinet, lobbied by Conservative MPs once the (virtual) Commons returns, can insist that this be fixed next week.

There are options. Raab could be vested with full authority for a month to six weeks, to allow Boris to recover. He grew in confidence in his public performances last week and he seems to be a calm and effective administrator. I’ve always been slightly baffled – beyond the way in which certain figures in the Brexit wars drive their opponents to fury –  why he attracts such frenzied criticism from opponents.

Rishi Sunak, struggling to make the Treasury and Bank of England rescue plan work, has quite enough going on already and the economy craters.

Michael Gove has the administrative and communications ability, but they are, in the words of one Westminster watcher, “worried that once you put Michael in there you’ll never get him out.” For Team Boris there is always the memory of 2016, when Gove knifed Boris, and 2019 when he had a pretty good go at blocking his path to power again.

If you really want to spook a pro-Boris minister or adviser, send them a text suggesting that Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary and leadership race finalist, might be up for standing in as Prime Minister.

Whatever the cabinet decides on this question, an effective decision is in order – quickly.

This theme – who is in charge exactly and what have they decided about what is to happen to us next ? – will not disappear until there is a satisfactory short-term solution provided or Boris comes back, eventually, to full health, by which point weeks will have passed and bad news will be magnified, viewed through the prism of no-one being properly in command.

For now, it is Easter weekend. At Reaction, the team is taking a break. They’ll be back on Tuesday with the full commentary and analysis service on the site and the daily email briefing. Until then, I hope you have a restful Easter.

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