The Perfect Storm of Brexit and Corona
Boris Johnson's Failures Add Up to Eroding Trust
Boris Johnson thought he could handle Brexit and
believed British exceptionalism would protect the country from the coronavirus.
He was wrong on both counts.
By Jörg
Schindler in London
03.11.2020,
12.11 Uhr
It was
shortly before 10 p.m. on the evening of Jan. 31, 2020, when an unusually
statesmanlike Boris Johnson addressed his countrymen by video. Outside, on the
dark brick façade of 10 Downing Street, a huge countdown clock had just begun
ticking. In Whitehall, the government buildings were illuminated in the
national colors.
Thousands
of people had gathered on Parliament Square carrying beer bottles and waving
flags to celebrate what many were calling "Independence Day." Just
one hour later - midnight on the European continent – a dream would come true
for which half of the country had been excitedly waiting for three-and-a-half
years. But despite the celebratory atmosphere, the mood in the government
quarter was surprisingly aggressive.
"Tonight,
we are leaving the European Union," Johnson said to all those watching
from home. It is, he continued, an "astonishing moment of hope," the
moment when "the curtain goes up on a new act in our great national drama."
What
Johnson didn't say, and what the Brexit partiers on the streets weren't
particularly worried about: Just hours before, officials in the northern
England city of York had registered the first proven case in the United Kingdom
of the novel coronavirus, which had been causing so much tumult in Asia. Two
Chinese citizens, one of them a university student in York, had tested
positive.
That was
the beginning of what has turned out to be the most important British drama of
2020. And it got its start in a nondescript apartment complex some 340
kilometers northeast of London in a flat costing around 69 euros per night.
That is where the two students lived.
Making the
Pandemic Worse
Today,
three-quarters of a year after the party outside 10 Downing Street, not many in
Britain are in a celebratory mood. No other country in Europe has seen as many
deaths (in absolute terms) from COVID-19 and no other developed country has
been hit as hard economically. And the economic troubles will get worse once
the UK, following a year-long transition period, finally completes its
separation from the EU at the end of this year– whether the discordant
negotiating teams from London and Brussels are able to complete a free-trade
deal or not. Such a deal must be completed by mid-November so that enough time remains
for the 27 EU member states to ratify it by the end of the year.
If the
negotiators are successful, the first months of 2021 will be bad. If they
aren't, they'll be worse.
Brexit and
corona: After almost four-and-a-half years of tension and worry, Britain is
tired. The two crises are not obviously connected, but they are actually linked
to a far greater degree than the leaders in London would like to admit. And
there are numerous indications that the suffering experienced by the British
isn't just the result of events beyond their control. Indeed, the two crises
have been accentuated by the same source of incompetence: 10 Downing Street.
Even worse, it has seemed on several occasions that Brexit has made the
pandemic even worse than it might otherwise have been.
The history
of the deadly dual crisis began in October 2016 with Operation Cygnus, a
three-day exercise organized by the National Health Service (NHS) to see how
well prepared the country was for a possible epidemic. For years, according to
the 2008 National Risk Register, the government has believed that a pandemic
posed the greatest risk to domestic peace in the country, greater even than the
oft-evoked danger from (Islamist) terrorism.
The results
of Operation Cygnus were not encouraging, with the simulated battle against the
imagined flu pandemic ending in disaster. It showed those in positions of
responsibility acting lost and frequently changing course, the hospitals
lacking protective equipment for staff and ventilators for patients, and
infection numbers rising rapidly. The conclusion of the exercise was that the
UK was not prepared "to cope with the extreme demands of a severe
pandemic."
The
findings had the potential to alarm the public in addition to sensitizing them
to the risk. But the people of Britain learned essentially nothing about the
exercise, with all of the expert recommendations disappearing into the
government's desk drawer.
No Matter
What the Price
After all,
they had other challenges to deal with at the time. Just four months had passed
since the Brexit referendum, Prime Minister David Cameron had resigned, and his
successor Theresa May was trying to find order in the chaos. Nobody had
seriously thought that the British would actually vote to leave the European
Union and the government was completely unprepared for the massive task that it
now faced.
May
hectically restructured the government, establishing a Department for Exiting
the European Union and staffing it with hundreds of officials reassigned from
other ministries, including from the Department of Health. The government's
entire focus was redirected toward Brexit and everything else found itself
short of attention, people and money. "Every government can only cope with
a single large crisis at once," says a Tory parliamentarian today.
"Ours was Brexit."
In July
2019, after an exhausted May was shown the door, Boris Johnson took over. Even
many conservatives considered Johnson to be an egomaniacal lightweight, but
they felt that with his boisterous optimism, he was best equipped to push
through Brexit and lead the Tories to yet another election victory. No matter
what the price.
And Johnson
delivered. Yet when filling his cabinet posts, he showed little interest in
competence, instead prioritizing their devotion to the gospel of Brexit. He
tapped Dominic Cummings, mastermind of the pro-Brexit campaign, as his chief
adviser and had him launch a vendetta against the allegedly pro-EU civil
service. He sidelined numerous experienced Tories and had some of them thrown
out of the party. He sided with conservative Brexit hardliners and self-proclaimed
freedom fighters who wanted nothing more to do with the EU.
Furthermore,
as one of his first moves in office, Johnson eliminated the subcommittee
responsible for pandemic response within the National Security Council. In the
eyes of the prime minister, the greatest threat facing the nation at this point
in time was EU sympathists both within and outside his party.
Then winter
arrived. The news from the Chinese city of Wuhan came at a bad time for
Johnson. He had just won an election and wasn't far from the formal completion
of Brexit. The "Global Britain" that he had promised the country
seemed to be within reach. The world, he promised, was waiting for an unleashed
UK - and suddenly the narrative shifted to constraints, cutbacks and closed
borders.
"Beyond
What Is Medically Rational"
It was the
exact opposite of the Brexit dream he had conjured, and Johnson didn't shy away
from saying as much. In a speech in Greenwich on Feb. 3, he gushed about the
unlimited possibilities for the "independent actor" Britain would
become and said the "bizarre autarkic rhetoric" about barriers going
up due to the coronavirus "goes beyond what is medically rational."
A short
time later, on Feb. 14, he began a 12-day "working holiday" with his
girlfriend Carrie Symonds at the country estate of Chevening in Kent. He
interrupted the escape for a gala event of the Tory party, for which a tennis
match with the prime minister had been auctioned off for 60,000 pounds. But he
elected to skip a meeting of Cobra, the crisis team focused on the coronavirus
pandemic. Indeed, between the end of January and the end of February, Johnson
ended up staying away from all five Cobra meetings.
Still, in
late February, he proclaimed that battling the pandemic was his government's
top priority. But that didn't prevent him from announcing to the public that he
had just visited a hospital with no protection and shaken hands "with
everybody, you'll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands."
Finally, on
March 7, two days before Italy would announce a countrywide lockdown, Johnson
and his fiancé went to a rugby match in Twickenham Stadium - along with 80,000
others. Images from that visit show the prime minister eagerly shaking hands
with the players.
"Boris
Johnson was so fixated on Brexit that he ignored all the warnings,"
Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet told DER
SPIEGEL. The result, he says, was that pretty much all of February passed by –
a month used by other European countries to prepare – with very little
happening in the UK. "We didn't increase our testing capacity, instead
doing exactly the opposite. We were told that testing wasn't important. We
didn't procure enough personal protective equipment. We didn't adequately
prepare the NHS. We didn't protect our care homes, leading to a lot of people
dying there. We failed at all levels." There is, says Horton, "no
reasonable excuse."
Herd
Immunity?
Johnson
seemed to only come to his senses in the middle of March, at a time when more
and more EU countries were implementing lockdowns and other measures and when
case numbers in the UK rose into the four figures for the first time. Yet to
the surprise of his European neighbors and the World Health Organization, Johnson
again chose a unique path. Johnson's top scientific adviser Patrick Vallance
said the government wouldn't attempt to stop the spread of the virus. "Our
aim," he said, "is to build up some kind of herd immunity so more
people are immune to this disease."
A lockdown
also wasn't under consideration for the time being, said Johnson, adding that
he considered it an "inalienable right of free-born people of the United
Kingdom to go to the pub." They were the words of a man who views freedom,
particularly his own, as the absolute priority. Years previously, Johnson had
identified the fictitious mayor of Amity in "Jaws" as an idol of his.
In one scene of the Hollywood blockbuster, the mayor insists on keeping the
beaches open despite the massive great white patrolling the waters off the
coast. "As you can see, it's a beautiful day. The beaches are opened, and
people are having a wonderful time."
In this
first phase of the pandemic, in other words, Britain's fate was in the hands of
a man who had always managed to somehow bend reality to his worldview. A man
who had made British exceptionalism into the core of his brand. The problem
was, however, that the virus couldn't be eliminated by force of will.
Almost
every measure deployed by the British government in this pandemic seems to have
been shaped by "a refusal to do the obvious thing," wrote the Irish
author Fintan O'Toole in the New Statesman. The UK, he continued, had had
plenty of time to learn from other countries, to copy their successes and avoid
their mistakes. "But that would be to admit the one thing that cannot be
conceded: that Britain is pretty much like most other countries. The
coronavirus had to be seen instead as an opportunity to demonstrate British
difference and British greatness."
An example
from mid-April demonstrates the degree to which the desire to prove the UK's
superiority guided the steps taken by the government. At the time, it was
revealed that Britain had declined an offer from the EU to jointly purchase
masks and protective equipment, which were in short supply across the globe.
A
"Misunderstanding"
When
journalists asked about the decision, the government became entangled in
contradictions. At one point, it was claimed that the email from Brussels
wasn't received, another time it was said that the mail went to the incorrect
recipient. Finally, in late April, a top Foreign Office official let slip that
it had been a "political decision." Hours later, he then retracted
that statement and said there had been a "misunderstanding."
The episode
was hardly an outlier. In the months that followed, Johnson would revive the
Brexit playbook and repeatedly emphasize his country's exceptionalism. Britain,
he promised, would develop the "best testing program in the world."
To this day, however, he still hasn't admitted that it doesn't really work and
that the British have even been forced to send tests to Germany and Italy for
evaluation.
He also
proclaimed that the country's corona app would be purely British and superior
to all others. The end result, though - as he has been careful not to mention –
has been a defective app that was produced with significant assistance from
Silicon Valley in the U.S. For Boris Johnson, O'Toole writes, "saving
lives is not a common human task, it is a competition in which Team Britain
must take the gold."
Ultimately,
Boris Johnson has only beat the others in two aspects of this pandemic. He
became the first head of government to become infected with the SARS-CoV-2
virus, ahead of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the U.S.
"For
Boris Johnson, saving lives is not a common human task, it is a competition in
which Team Britain must take the gold."
Irish
author Fintan O'Toole
And, by the
end of August, when the number of coronavirus infections finally began to
(temporarily) fall in the UK as well, an official total of 45,000 people in
Britain had died of COVID-19. A short time later, the government would employ a
statistical trick to reduce that total by 5,000, but even then, no other
country had seen a larger total of coronavirus deaths by the end of the summer.
According
to statistical models produced by former government adviser Neil Ferguson, many
of those deaths could easily have been prevented - if Johnson had reacted
faster and more decisively. An epidemiologist at Imperial College London,
Ferguson is certain that if Johnson had ordered the lockdown just four days
earlier than he did – on March 23 – "only half as many would have died."
"If we
could repeat history, that would the one decision that we would have to
change," Ferguson told DER SPIEGEL.
Johnson,
though, regrets nothing. He says he is "very proud" of his
government's record on coronavirus, he said in June. And once the pandemic began
rampantly spreading again in the fall, he started making one empty promise
after the other. He also began to increasingly ignore the advice of experts,
which he claimed to have meticulously followed for several months. And the
rules he and his government imposed grew increasingly confusing and the
rationale ever more erratic.
What
Johnson either didn't realize or intentionally ignored: He was gambling away
the most important currency that governments have in times of crisis – the
trust of their citizens. It evaporated almost completely in the affair
surrounding Dominic Cummings, Johnson's chief strategist. Whereas the British
had spent months practically under house arrest, an infected Cummings drove
across the entire country, only to then try to justify his repeated rules
violations with outrageous excuses.
An
Astounding Army of Enemies
He claimed
that he undertook one of the excursions only to test his eyesight and his
ability to drive – with his wife and child in the car. Despite the absurdity of
the excuse, Johnson kept him on. After all, the prime minister needs Cummings,
who is seen as the primary visionary for Britain's post-Brexit future.
After the
scandal, though, even other Conservatives became fed up. According to a recent
survey, not even a third of Tories feel that Johnson is doing a good job
responding to the corona crisis.
On top of
that, Johnson has found himself in a number of conflicts. One of those has saw
the prime minister at odds for several weeks with mayors in northern England.
Because the government in London didn't manage to produce a credible exit
strategy and denied economic assistance, northern mayors refused to implement
strict lockdown measures for millions of people. Ultimately, Johnson forced
them to do so.
The Welsh
government even threatened to close the border to England in order to keep out
people suffering from COVID-19. In Scotland, meanwhile, First Minister Nicola
Sturgeon has emerged as the complete opposite of Johnson with her consistent
and transparent corona strategy. Never before have surveys recorded as much
support for Scottish independence as they do at the moment. And rarely has the
United Kingdom been as disunited as it is under Boris Johnson's leadership.
Johnson has
even faced several rebellions in the House of Commons from his own party and
the House of Lords is also opposed to the Johnson government on key issues.
Even conservative media outlets have begun speculating openly about the prime
minister's political death. Indeed, the man about whom his biographers say he
wants to be liked by everybody has managed to generate an astounding army of
enemies.
And then
there is that pesky little issue known as Brexit. London and Brussels have
under eight weeks left to produce a treaty governing their future relations
once the Brexit transition period comes to an end. A free-trade agreement is
within reach, though a treaty text must be ready for ratification by the middle
of November at the absolute latest. Yet Johnson is continuing to disrupt the
negotiations even at this late date. His problem: With or without a treaty,
there will almost certainly be long traffic jams leading into Dover in the
first several months of next year, including supply chain interruptions for a
number of industries, including for vital medical drugs and supplies.
But Johnson
needs a triumph, or at least something he can sell as a triumph. As a result,
some in London are seriously considering allowing a no-deal Brexit initially,
somehow muddling through the first months of 2021 and then forcing the EU back
to the negotiating table in the hopes of receiving better conditions.
The risks
would be huge. Right in the middle of winter and likely at the apex of the
second corona wave, the prime minister would bet everything on a single card,
with an uncertain outcome. Economists and medical experts alike say that doing
such a thing would be irresponsible and could result in what Jonathan Portes,
an economics professor at King's College in London, describes as a
"perfect storm." But if there is one thing this year of competing
crises has shown us, it's that Boris Johnson is a gambler.
Even if he
is wagering with human lives.
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