The blame game has come early for the Johnson administration with Juliet Samuels writing in The Telegraph that "The myth of Britain as a well-run country has been exposed by the ineptitude of the state apparatus." She is talking about the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic which has seen us near the top of the world league for mortality rates, just behind the USA and Brazil. In Europe we are top.
The headline is "Our ‘Rolls-Royce’ civil service has been found out"
Of course, this is only the opinion of a newspaper columnist and it may not yet be the government's view - but it will be soon. Because it's typical of the way those at the top think - especially those born without a shred of self-doubt and who have lived a life of privilege without once being called to account for their own actions. It was always somebody else's fault.
And so it will be in the next year.
Samuels quotes Tolstoy in 1869, “An Englishman’s self-assurance,is founded on his being a citizen of the best organised state in the world.”
I am not sure this was true at the time but we were certainly the wealthiest and this is what made the difference. We look at Germany now as being well organised and it is. I have been to Germany many times and once asked a German how it was that everything in Germany just - well, works. He shrugged almost apologetically but didn't really know. In my opinions, apart from being logical and rational, it's also a question of money which they have plenty of.
She says, "For years we told ourselves we were 'well-prepared' for a pandemic and even 'a world leader in preparing for serious disease outbreaks', as England’s deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries put it. Actually, it’s worse than embarrassing. It is tragic."
It is tragic but whose fault is it? It is politicians who tell the population these things. I have pointed out on this blog many times how we are told we are world-leaders in something or other. For Johnson it's batteries, for Greg Clark when he was business secretary it was robotics. No, we are NOT.
Politicians (on both sides) have for years - perhaps a century or more - failed to recognise that we are not world-leaders in anything, if we ever were. It is the British habit of fooling ourselves into a mind-set that says we are the most creative, the most innovative and hard working people on earth but something or someone is holding us back, cheating us out of our rightful reward. The latest being the EU of course.
Samuels is now setting up the civil service to be the new Aunt Sally. Watch out for much more of this in the coming years.
She talks about the NHS app as being the latest failure which "has a depressingly predictable air."
"The NHS’s development of a phone app to perform automatic contact-tracing, meant to improve the system’s thoroughness and efficiency, has run into the sand. Apple phones won’t behave the way the Government needs them to – a realisation reached by Germany and Italy weeks ago."
But people were telling the government the same thing at the same time as Germany and Italy, the difference is their politicians accepted the opinion of experts - we didn't. Johnson wanted a "world-beating" track and trace system to showcase Britain's "world-leading" grasp of this new technology but only succeeded in demonstrating the opposite.
After criticising government departments for inertia and shuffling blame between each other, Ms Samuels says this:
"All of this could be compensated for by a really slick operation at the top. But Mark Sedwill is no Jeremy Heywood, who was known for his capacity to descend on a problem and dig into every aspect of it at once. And Boris Johnson must know of himself that he is a free-wheeling type who needs a control freak in the background managing things. Instead, he has Dominic Cummings who, far from being the despot he is painted as, has little interest in the mundane chief of staff role he is meant to fill, keeping the PM briefed and ensuring he has the right pieces of paper. One insider, asked recently whether the system would collapse without Mr Cummings, grimaced and said: 'It already has'."
Remember this is from The Telegraph who employed Johnson and encourage his election. It follows attacks on the PM and Cummings in The Spectator and from Stever Baker at the ERG and Tim Montgomerie in the pages of The New Statesman.
They all knew Johnson's faults and I assume Cummings' as well.
At the moment of national crisis we have managed to thrust behind the wheel of our Rolls-Royce civil service two men who are both completely unfit. One inept and useless and the other reckless and inattentive. We are in mess.
To be world-leading at anything you must begin with a ruthless examination and a recognition and acceptance of your own limitations. From that base you can at least make an honest start but I am afraid we are not at that point yet.
Perhaps the combination of Brexit, coronavirus and Johnson will be the signposts that lead us to some sort of salvation and a recognition that we are not the people we think we are. Now that would be something.
