Why Boris Johnson was the wrong choice to lead Britain at a time of crisis
Given the high numbers of deaths from Covid-19 in every country in Europe and beyond, how many fatalities in the UK, do you suppose, could have been prevented if a different government under a different leader had been in place? Five thousand? Ten thousand? Fifteen? How low would the total have to have been before you felt able to say that the prime minister and his colleagues were doing us proud?
Britain was bound to be hit hard no matter who was prime minister. England in particular, with its large, tightly packed population – 85 per cent of the UK total – was a near-perfect breeding ground for the virus. But the fact is, an earlier lockdown would have saved lives – how many we’ll never know. What can be said without fear of contradiction is that if there had been a sufficient emergency supply of personal protection equipment, the NHS would have gone into battle with a greatly reduced risk of frontline casualties.
But that was only the start of it. Three months into the outbreak, with the UK now clearly the market leader in terms of mortality, the British people might have felt more confident about the post-lockdown strategy if Boris Johnson and Matthew Hancock had properly explained what lay ahead. As it is, citizens are being asked to more or less to work things out for ourselves and, you know, do the right thing in the weeks and months ahead.
Regular readers of Reaction will know that I was never a fan of Boris Johnson. There is no need to rehearse my arguments here, merely to state that much of my distrust sprang less from his gung-ho approach to Brexit, which I opposed root and branch, than from his cavalier approach to the whole business of politics, bound up as it was, and is, with his vaunting personal ambition.
But I resolved to be fair. He won the Tory leadership at a canter. He next won the general election, with a majority of 80 seats. And his first appearance at the dispatch box as prime minister showed him to be both confident and in command of his brief. I may not have wanted a Conservative government; I may still have resented the fact that he had taken us out of the EU; but at least he wasn’t Theresa May. He knew what his goal was and he was determined to reach it. Suddenly, politics was fun again. There was a definite sense of forward movement.
But then the coronavirus struck. Suddenly, the nation was in peril of its life. It was as if, to draw on the inevitable World War II analogies, VE Day had been celebrated by Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace only for news to come in that the Red Army had landed in Kent.
At first, the prime minister, a bit like George W Bush upon being told that the Trade Towers were on fire, didn’t know what to say or think. But the President at least came out of his trance after just a couple of minutes; Boris remained in denial for the next two weeks.
It will take a public inquiry to unravel the complexities of that phantom fortnight. The PM himself went AWOL, spending his time at Chevening, distracted no doubt by the fact that his latest partner, Carrie Symonds, was soon to give birth to his fifth, sixth, or even seventh child.
Insofar as he did any serious work, it was to consult with his new Chancellor on the upcoming giveaway budget and to sign off on his plans for a Battle of Britain-style trade deal with Europe. He made no mention of the coronavirus, about which he had been warned several times from late January onwards. Possibly, imagining it, à la Donald Trump, to be no worse than a seasonal flu, he absented himself from no fewer than five COBRA meetings at which the subject was raised.
By the time he woke up to the seriousness of the situation, it was too late for an early response. In Italy, the impact of the crisis stood as a terrible warning. Germany was fully mobilised; in France, President Macron, having discovered his country’s shameful lack of preparation, had assumed personal control of the outbreak. But in the UK, there was only indecision. Should we go with herd immunity? Yes, let’s do that. Except, no, maybe lockdown was the better bet. What about testing? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Possibly, but then again, possibly not.
It was now time for Johnson to make a meaningless gesture. He paid an unannounced late-night visit to a hospital in Kettering, touring the wards, shaking hands with patients. Over the course of the next seven days, he shook hands as if handshaking was going out of style (which it was). A week or so after that, with a tragi-comic inevitability, he contracted the virus himself and very nearly died.
The disease in England was by then far advanced and by the time the PM returned to Downing Street the numbers were frightening and getting more so with each passing day. Dragging himself to the Commons, he took on the new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, in PMQs and was duly trounced. The following week, he addressed the nation from Number 10, but said little that anyone could be bothered to remember. Another speech, punctuated with fist-waving, followed on Sunday night, in which he promised much but delivered little. He was like the Michelin Man with a puncture. The old Boris was gone, replaced by an imposter who hadn’t quite got the hang of it. At PMQs this week Boris was trounced again.
Which brings us up to the present day. As I have said, I was ready to give him a chance. The prime minister had proved his mettle as a campaigner. He had convinced millions of voters, including a swathe of one-time Labour stalwarts, that he was the man not only to deliver Brexit, but to come up with a better Britain. Just as important, the party was 100 per cent behind him.
On March 11, I wrote a piece for Reaction in which, against all my natural instincts, I praised the man I had previously vilified for recovering from his slow start and once more leading from the front. His latest interventions on how to deal with the unfolding pandemic were, I said, “models of their kind, in sharp contrast to the narcissism displayed by Donald Trump”.
Hmm. Fortunately, I have been around journalism a long time and, a bit like Boris with his Remain and Leave essays on the subject of Brexit, I noted that I had an alternative analysis ready on the stocks under the heading Why Boris Johnson was the Wrong Choice to lead Britain at a Time of Crisis. All I had to do was press Send, I wrote. I am now pressing Send.