Tom McTague is a journalist and author and he has written a lengthy article for The Atlantic magazine notionally about Johnson and Britain's response to coronavirus but looking also at the deeper truths it tells us about the UK as a nation. It is well worth a read. However, in my opinion although McTague is on the right track he doesn't go far enough. Johnson comes in for a lot of criticism but our present position is not Johnson's fault - he isn't the cause but he is a symptom.
Mc Tague says:"In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward. As one senior British government adviser put it to me, 'We’ve had our arse handed to us recently.'
"When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus."
And he ends with this:
"If Britain is to solve them [our problems], it needs to up its game or be left behind; to realize it is no longer 'world leading' in as many fields as it thinks, and that its problems run far deeper than whichever crop of politicians is in charge. 'The really important question,' Boyd [a professor on SAGE] said, 'is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.'
"Britain was sick before the crisis hit. If it is to survive the next one intact, it has to address its underlying health conditions."
For a journalist and an academic, it must seem as if we have simply been unfortunate in getting things wrong in the last few years but if we take McTague's advice and step back - much further than he has done - it's not difficult to see our problems are societal and stem from our education system.
Johnson is a product of the Tory party, and his cabinet is a reflection of him and his MPs in the parliamentary pool. A few days ago, Winston Churchill's grandson Sir Nicholas Soames, said this cabinet was the worst he had known in his 36 years in the House. This says a lot since he was no admirer of Blair or Brown. I am sure he's right and we can go back a lot longer than 36 years, perhaps it's the worst ever.
When a woman like Priti Patel is Home Secretary and Gavin Williamson is at Education we have stopped scraping the bottom of the barrel and are now looking underneath for a bit of spillage. This must be obvious - but for many people it isn't. And this is getting to the heart of the problem.
Even those like McTague who think our politicians are incompetent should take a bit of time to look at industry where things are no better and if possible, even worse. The 'world-beating' track and trace system and the government phone app that didn't work are not outriders, in industry they are the every day common experience.
Having spent a lifetime in industry - working in process control and packaging/palletising you tend to work in almost every sort of industry - one sees examples on a daily basis, and I'm not exaggerating either. From managers who have little idea what they're doing to operators and maintenance engineers who don't seem to care about the multi-thousand pound machines they are responsible for, incompetence is endemic.
Compared to continental rivals we have slipped behind and we are still slipping behind.
The men and women you meet every day are the ones charged with picking an MP every few years and it is clear to me that many if not most are woefully equipped to make a decision about who is likely to look after their interests best. Let us be honest, there are members of the public who vote for Mark Francois or Peter Bone or IDS regularly (and there are plenty of other examples, too).
If the House is stuffed mainly with men and women (with some exceptions) who look like the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus, then it's no surprise that we are badly governed. We have got the government we deserve.
I have met a few MPs and candidates in the last few years and some have impressed me, but mostly they did not. They seemed concerned about things and even ardent but they didn't seem to me to always be the brightest of individuals. They did have strong opinions but not much else.
And here is the nub of Britain's problem. If the well of talent in the country begins to dry up, we can't provide the outstanding individuals that we need to elect as MPs. When MPs collectively are no better than the average and fall prey to ideology, a strong PM can at least try to filter out the best and form a reasonable cabinet. Cameron, I think managed it but May struggled. Johnson and Cummings haven't even tried for fear of somebody opposing Cumming's grand plan (Johnson doesn't have one and never has). So, what we get is placemen and a psychopath in charge.
When the majority of a nation succumbs to populism then the education system is doing something wrong and needs to be looked at seriously. Blaming it all on politicians fails to recognise the scale of the issue or to define a remedy. But McTague is right, we have to address the underlying problem and this means looking at ourselves because there is nowhere else to look.
