The COVID inquiry is really starting to get to the meat. Over the last few days, we have heard from the key players how utterly shambolic the UK government’s initial response to the pandemic was. It has been a Wizard of Oz moment when the curtain is being pulled back. We have heard (from Lee Cain, No 10 Communications Director at the time) how the crisis was the "wrong one for Boris Johnson’s skill set” as if he wanted a disaster specially designed for a bumbling narcissist who couldn’t make a decision to save his life.
Personally, I can’t think of any crisis that would have been better managed by Boris Johnson and it’s clear that people in No 10 in February and March 2020 - and later - thought so too, they were trying desperately to avoid involving him as much as they could.
The more you hear, the more Johnson’s name crops up as being not just at the centre of the chaos but as the main cause of it, even when he wasn't actually there. More than one person has admitted nobody knew who was in charge and that can only be Johnson's fault.
It’s impossible to conceive of any crisis where changing your position by the hour, being easily bored, indifference to human suffering, and a planet-sized sense of entitlement would be considered useful attributes. In fact, even conducting normal government business was beyond him, as was the ability to pick men and women with basic competence. But we knew all that didn't we?
What the COVID inquiry is uncovering is not so much the exceptional nature of the pandemic, although it was certainly that in spades, but the absolutely unprecedented incompetence of Boris Johnson and the people he surrounded himself with, especially foul-mouthed psychopaths like Dominic Cummings.
Under normal circumstances, we would never have gotten access to all of the WhatsApp messages and private emails, but you can be sure that even if COVID hadn’t hit us, the backstabbing, chaos, lack of focus and Olympic class ineptitude would still have happened because they were always going to be the main features of any organisation led by Johnson.
He comes across ever more clearly as a man with no deep thinking or any convictions of any kind, one way or another, so he’s forced to listen to others in order to reach a decision, and he’s always worried that it was the wrong one.
Yesterday, it was Cain and Cummings, today it's Helen McNamara, who was the target of one vitriolic, misogynistic attack by Johnson's former chief adviser. Her evidence about Cummings will be fascinating.
There was no government department or function that Cummings didn’t find fault with. No 10, the cabinet office, COBRA meetings, DHSC, SAGE, everybody, and every body came in for it. Compared to Cummings' own intellect, one that you needed climbing gear to abseil down, they were nothing. He alone knew how to manage the crisis. He was a danger to himself.
James (Lord) Bethell was on the Today programme yesterday morning talking about what is emerging from the inquiry. He was a health minister at the time (appointed in March 2020) and has apparently known Johnson "all his life" - which is why he got a peerage in July 2019 and the job in health the year after, I assume. He had no obvious qualifications unless an arts degree from Edinburg University and managing the Ministry of Sound nightclub were regarded as such.
Bethell admitted he supported Johnson for leader despite knowing Johnson was ‘chaotic’ but thought he had pulled off a "remarkable trick" in winning the 2019 election and he was inspired by his “vision for Britain where he combined sorting out Brexit with leveling up.”
He said he was "conscious that Downing Street was chaotic" pointing to “an office culture that had gone badly wrong" where "bullying and chaotic behaviour had become normalised.”
Was that due to Johnson? Bethell said: “It’s 100% about leadership” which I assume was longhand for ‘yes.’ He also talked BoJo’s limitations but thought that someone would “put a system around him that would make the most of his political skills and compensate for his lack of organisation.”
This was I believe what a lot of people thought.
On the pandemic Bethel was “aware of the toxic culture around Downing Street” and the “U-turning made decision making very difficult” and “hampered our efforts tremendously.”
He said Johnson “found the prospect of a pandemic very difficult to focus on, it was bad news he didn’t like to respond to and did everything he could to avoid the subject.”
Johnson has been used by a lot of people over the years, all with their own agendas. Newspaper proprietors, in the beginning, later Tory Party managers, Russian Oligarchs, Brexiteers, shadowy donors, and hangers-on like Bethell. They all thought a "system" could be put around him because they rather liked his ability to tell whopping great lies without shame and seemingly with total sincerity.
In truth that is his singular attribute. You can see why crisis management wasn't his forte, especially when he didn't like to think about bad news.
He was like an evil dummy with a lot of different hands stuck up his backside.
These people all thought Johnson was a wonderful distraction, that they could persuade him to speak their words and do their bidding, to control policy from a distance. It was like trying to use plasticine in place of steel beams. He couldn't keep a position for more than a few days.
The inquiry heard that he more or less ignored his own experts, the growing evidence, and what everyone in No 10 was telling him about the risks of the pandemic and preferred what columnists at the Telegraph were writing.
At one point yesterday afternoon Cummings was asked why he helped put Johnson in No 10:
Cummings is asked why he helped install as PM a man he knew to be unfit for office.He said the alternative was a second referendum on #Brexit and a possible Corbyn gov't, so "we decided to roll the dice". ~AA #CovidInquiry pic.twitter.com/5B4Ddk1qRf— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) October 31, 2023
He wasn't sorry because the alternative was a second referendum and Jeremy Corbyn. Note that in January 2016 Cummings told The Economist that he thought "there’s a strong democratic case for [a 2nd referendum]."
Strange how your appetite changes if you think you might lose isn't it?
It beggars belief that Brexit supporters think Johnson was right about Brexit! Sooner or later the truth about that will emerge.
