IMAGENS DE OVOODOCORVO
Britain deserves better than an Old Etonian
Donald Trump
Simon
Jenkins
His illness aside, Boris Johnson’s leadership style
has served the country badly during its worst crisis in decades
‘It is hard not to sympathise with Boris Johnson over
his year in office, dicing with death and turbulence in his private life. But
the country must be led.
Published
onMon 20 Jul 2020 12.58 BST
Britain’s
prime minister is looking ever more like an Old Etonian Donald Trump. A
premiership that began with sacked ministers, party purges and vacuous slogans
has continued in the same vein. Revelations in the Sunday Times of No 10 during
Johnson’s illness are alarming. With a prime minister locked in his bedroom,
his absentee aide Dominic Cummings manoeuvred the ousting of the head of the
civil service, Sir Mark Sedwill, leaving the office in the care of a press
secretary, Lee Cain. The war on Covid-19 was delegated to the health secretary,
Matt Hancock, a paralysed NHS and scientists publicly feuding over dud data.
Since
Johnson’s return the signs have not been good. He unwisely insists on taking
press conferences at which he stutters and just repeats Cummings’ slogans, such
as stay alert, save lives, build, build, build. Last Thursday, the contrast was
stark between Johnson’s mumbling about “keeping safe” and the clear, crisp
responses of his chancellor, Rishi Sunak. The partnership with “the science”
has also collapsed. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick
Vallance, has openly distanced himself from Johnson’s plea for the nation to
return to work, asserting he could see “absolutely no reason” for it. There
spoke a man with a safe job.
The British
constitution famously rests on convention. This requires a compact between
politicians working as a cabinet and a quasi-independent civil service. Last
year Johnson cleared his cabinet of its most able members, leaving him exposed
and “presidential”. Come the crisis, he was at the mercy of disputatious
scientists and a clearly demoralised civil service. His refusal to engage the
UK’s local government in any shape or form astonished foreign observers.
Every
aspect of the crisis has found a government wanting in competence. The emptying
of NHS hospitals, care home protection, PPE procurement, testing and tracing
and lockdown discipline have all delivered the worst pandemic performance of
any major western government. Even data on weekly deaths is now thought
unreliable. It seems likely that Tudor bills of mortality would have been more
trustworthy.
It is hard
not to sympathise with Johnson over his year in office, dicing with death and
turbulence in his private life. But the country must be led. The gossip – which
is all we have to go on – is of emptiness in Downing Street. The prime minister
is a determined centralist in thrall to a tactless and obsessive aide,
Cummings, whose skill seems limited to writing slogans in triplicate.
The UK’s
battered economy now urgently requires a compromise trade agreement with the EU
this autumn. Johnson in his head must know that. But the talk is that Downing
Street simply lacks the diplomatic competence to reach such a deal in the weeks
available. Just as Trump blindsides his officials, so does Johnson. The odds
are that Britain will stumble on and crash blindly into a trade wall with
Europe in December.
• Simon
Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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