With post-Brexit Britain quite the most acutely affected nation by the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory. Pertinently enough, his response has been criticised as one of “:missed opportunities and dismal misjudgments”.
In a word, the narrative of his crisis management has been referred to as one of “blunder after blunder”. Now in his initial stint in 10 Downing Street, Britain will expect him to recognise that the mistakes have compelled his country to pay a heavy price for the blunders that were made, and learn from them.
Arguably this cannot be readily expected of a country whose Prime Minister boasts that he presides over a “world-beating” performance: with 64,000 excess deaths, that is one excess death for every 1,000 people. The medical prognosis must be quirky.
Nay more, the UK has recorded the largest global spike in deaths compared with the average yearly death toll; and misgivings that the country will suffer the deepest depression of any developed economy are dangerously real as the nation gears up to step out of the European Union.
The UK went into lockdown rather late in the day, indeed a decision that the former government modeller, Neil Ferguson, thinks has cost tens of thousands of lives because the higher the coronavirus infection rate when restrictions were imposed, the higher the death rate. The country shut down its testing regime too soon, leaving it unable to track the speed and spread of the virus.
During February and March, opportunities to suppress the spread of the infection by introducing travel restrictions and quarantine requirements were missed, allowing the infection to be brought into the UK on at least 1,300 occasions.
Entering the lockdown late cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and leaving it early risks more deaths. It is not often that a pandemic can have an impact on intra-ministerial affairs. Very recently and in the anxiety not to rock the boat, Johnson did not sack his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, for breaching lockdown rules.
That rather wimpish response has compromised with his resolve that was starkly manifest in his decision to quit EU. More basically, Britain today has a government that has blundered, and continues to blunder. Which cabinet minister is responsible for the official guidance that instructed hospitals to discharge the elderly to care homes when testing and personal protective equipment were non-existent?
Who has signed off on the policy to hand over contracts to private companies without competitive tendering or even a cursory check on whether they are up to the job? Which minister decided that local authorities who regularly manage outbreaks of meningitis and sexually transmitted diseases were not needed for the delayed test-and-trace system? Boris Johnson, therefore, has much to answer for.