When Britain most needed a decent leader, we had a derelict at the helm
Andrew Rawnsley
Sat, 4 November 2023
Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters
If a government looks bad from the outside, it will be twice as rotten on the inside. I’ve found this a reliable rule of thumb over the years, but it underestimates the breathtaking depths of the dreadfulness of the reign of Boris Johnson. That looked ghastly from the outside, but was many times more grotesque on the inside.
Before the public inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic had taken a single minute of evidence, it was already established that he was a wholly unsuitable character to be leading the country through the gravest peacetime emergency in more than a century. We knew he was too selfish, too weak, too amoral, too capricious, too negligent and too frivolous. What the inquiry is adding to the familiar portrait of Mr Johnson is detailed and compelling testimony from people who were in the room about how utterly unfit – ethically, intellectually, temperamentally and in any other way you might mention – he was to be prime minister. His cabinet secretary, his principal private secretary, his most senior aide, his director of communications and his chief scientific adviser, very different personalities with very different perspectives, all agree on one thing: Mr Johnson was comprehensively incapable of doing the job.
When the first red flags about Covid are raised, he dismisses it as a “rubbish media hoax”, skips away on holiday for a fortnight and is distracted trying to finish a book on Shakespeare in order to pay bills for a costly divorce and his girlfriend’s expensive ideas about refurbishing the Downing Street flat. The book remains unpublished to this day and the furnishings became a scandal. When he belatedly begins to grasp that Covid is serious, he lurches from one position to its opposite, sometimes doing handbrake turns more than once in a single day, to the exasperation of everyone around him. One moment he is frightened enough about the virus to heed his scientific advisers. The next he is adopting an insouciantly callous view that Covid is “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” who “will die anyway soon” and they should “accept their fate”.
Johnson himself complains it has turned into “a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism”, which is like Caligula moaning that he can’t stand the sight of blood
Mirroring his character, the Johnson-era Downing Street is a nasty place dominated by macho posturers with unfounded self-regard. Sexism is rife, other toxic behaviours rampant and vicious vendettas constant. Mr Johnson himself complains it has turned into “a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism”, which is like Caligula moaning that he can’t stand the sight of blood. His chronic inability to make decisions on issues of critical national importance was the despair of everyone around him. Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, would return home to pour his grief into a diary he never intended for public consumption. “Quite bonkers,” he wrote of one conversation with the prime minister. “Ridiculous flip-flopping,” he shudders after another dire day in Downing Street. “One minute do more, next do nothing… It’s like bipolar decision-making.” In a further entry, he sighs: “Chaos as usual.”
The cabinet secretary, Simon Case, ventilated his angst to colleagues in messages saying “I am going to scream” and “We look like a terrible, tragic joke”. It was a joke with a punchline that was literally a killer.
One revelation from Dominic Cummings’s testimony is that his former boss could out-trump Donald Trump in his delusions about the virus. The prime minister of the UK circulated a YouTube video of a man using a hairdryer to blast hot air up his nostrils and asked Sir Patrick and Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, whether this might be a miracle cure for the disease.
When the country most needed a decent, diligent and decisive prime minister, we had a derelict at the helm. The testimony is an eviscerating indictment of Mr Johnson and an indelible stain on the reputation of everyone in the Tory party and its media who enabled him. It is no less damning about the structures that are supposed to be in place to protect the country from such a terrible prime minister. The UK was unprepared to handle a rogue pathogen or a rogue leader and had the huge misfortune to be afflicted with both at the same time.
One of the checks and balances on a prime minister going totally off the rails is supposed to be the civil service. “Speaking truth to power” has traditionally been part of the remit, and the voice needed to be especially insistent when the power was being wielded so atrociously. This didn’t happen and it is not the only dismal failure by the senior echelons of the mandarinate. Helen MacNamara, deputy cabinet secretary during the pandemic, confessed to the inquiry that she would “find it hard to pick one day” when Covid rules were “followed properly” at Number 10. And she knows of what she speaks because it was she who carted in a karaoke machine for one of the infamous lockdown-busting parties. Her responsibilities at the time – reader, I weep – included government propriety and ethics.
The two most important officials in the life of a prime minister are his principal private secretary and the cabinet secretary. If Martin Reynolds, the private secretary, had been performing his role appropriately he would have insisted to the prime minister that everyone in Number 10 had to be extremely careful to ensure they were strictly adhering to the Covid laws and regulations that they were imposing on the nation to contain a deadly disease. Rather than do everything he could to prevent the scandal that became known as Partygate, it was “Party Marty” who sent out the invitations to the notorious “bring-your-own booze” gathering.
The cabinet secretary cuts an even more abject figure. Material published by the inquiry records Britain’s most senior civil servant telling colleagues that he is “at the end of my tether” with a prime minister who makes an effective response to the crisis “impossible” by changing “strategic direction every day”. The cabinet secretary is expected to be the wise man of government and a figure with sufficient gravitas to cajole a bad PM to correct his ways. Mr Case comes over as a grizzling child so devoid of authority that he bleats: “Am not sure I can cope with today. Might just go home.”
Number 10’s disdain for the cabinet was expressed by Mr Cummings with characteristically pathological profanity when he scorned ministers as “morons”
The cabinet is supposed to be a vital safeguard against a rotten leader, but a striking feature of the inquiry is how little it features in events. For sure, there’s been a lot of Matt Hancock, none of it good, a man described by witnesses as “slippery”, “a proven liar” and obsessed “with media bullshit over doing his job”. Some of the most chilling testimony came from Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England at the time. He revealed that if hospitals became overwhelmed, Mr Hancock wanted it to be him, rather than medical professionals, who decided who got to live and who would be left to die. Given how catastrophically he failed to protect care homes, thank your god that we were spared that. There’s also been damaging stuff about Rishi Sunak, the pandemic chancellor, and his plague-spreading subsidised meals scheme in the summer of 2020. It’s been useful to have confirmation that the chief medical officer privately renamed it “Eat out to help out the virus”. Dame Angela McLean, who has since become the government’s chief scientific adviser, sent a message describing Mr Sunak as “Dr Death”.
We’ve heard nothing of the cabinet as a collective decision-making body and a restraint on a dangerously dysfunctional prime minister. That’s because it wasn’t. Number 10’s disdain for the cabinet was expressed by Mr Cummings with characteristically pathological profanity when he scorned ministers as “morons”, “cunts” and “useless fuckpigs” in WhatsApp messages. Powerful as he was for a period, Mr Cummings was an unelected adviser. The cabinet were elected ministers of the crown. Yet the “morons” even humiliated themselves by obeying orders to defend his “eye-test” excursion to Barnard Castle. Were they spineless, clueless or simply useless? Whichever, they failed to perform their constitutional function.
Since the rise of the populists, some analysts have sought to console us with the thought that charlatans like Mr Johnson are ultimately found out and brought down by their depravity and incompetence. His defenestration in the summer of 2022 has been offered as proof that our system still kind of works. That is a false comfort and his shocking misrule during the pandemic underlines why. Even if you are eventually rid of a rogue prime minister, he can do a vast amount of harm before he meets his end. Best not to put one in Number 10 in the first place.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
Opinion
During Covid, callous Tories knew this about old people: they’re very expensive
Polly Toynbee
Fri, 3 November 2023
Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Let “the bodies pile high in their thousands”, Boris Johnson supposedly said. Not once but often, the Covid inquiry has heard that he was for killing off elderly people, “obsessed with older people accepting their fate”. According to the invaluable diary of the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, our prime minister was saying “that’s nature’s way of dealing with old people” as he complained “we are destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon”.
It wasn’t just him. The chief whip, Mark Spencer, allegedly said: “I think we should let the old people get it and protect the others”, to which Johnson replied: “A lot of my backbenchers agree with that, and I must say I agree with them.” So this was not one irritable remark, but a theme aired many times around tables where people didn’t get up and leave the room: many are still in government, presumably including Rishi Sunak, the eat-out-to-help-spread-Covid chancellor at the time.
Members of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice say the evidence they are hearing is even worse than they feared. Age UK’s charity director, Caroline Abrahams, watching the inquiry equally aghast, tells me: “The pandemic inquiry is laying bare just how ageist many senior decision-makers are.”
Politically, the plan for a slaughter of the ancients was insane, since older people are the ones who vote Tory overwhelmingly, voted Brexit and voted in Johnson. The Tory problem is that they are dying out too fast, not too slowly, while young people no longer turn Tory as they age, the way their parents did. In every sense this is the dying party.
But for the sake of argument, let’s take a leaf out of Jonathan Swift’s satirical “modest proposal” for butchering children starving in the Irish famine to serve to English landlords.
Old people are very expensive and growing as a proportion of the population, as births of new children to pay for them fall. The government has done nothing to prepare for this long-foreseen demographic change, and now complains of the soaring cost of pensions, NHS and social care.
The state pension costs it more than £100bn a year, a cost that has risen threefold since 2000. An 85-year-old’s health costs 5.6 times more than a 30-year-old’s: there are 1.7 million over-85s, and this number is rising. Across the UK, 10% of health spending goes to those over the age of 85, with 32% to those aged 65 to 84.
Ahead, needs will rise as the government has reneged on its promised social care reform, now denied to many very frail people. The Health Foundation says adult social care in England will cost an extra £8.3bn over the next decade, and that’s just to maintain its current decayed state. It would cost an additional £18.4bn to cover its full cost and to improve access to care.
So if the Tories want a smaller state, eliminating everyone of pension age could pay for luxurious tax cuts. Indeed Covid must have saved a fair bit, as Sir John Edmunds, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told Andrew Marr on LBC this week: “If we’d have moved the lockdown forward by a week, we would have saved thousands of deaths.” Another saver: the poorest who cost the state more died at a far greater rate than those who were well off.
Johnson’s delinquent Covid policy still has prominent supporters. Jacob Rees-Mogg said on GB News: “Boris Johnson’s instincts on lockdown and Covid policy were broadly right.” The inquiry heard that the cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill, suggested a herd immunity policy of deliberately spreading Covid, like chickenpox parties for children: that seems to have happened in care homes.
The idea that most of those who died were already at death’s door, or suffering terminal “pre-existing conditions”, was wrong. The average number of years of life lost by each Covid victim was 10.2. Those aged over 75 lost an average 6.5 years.
Related: ‘Dad stood at Mum’s window every night for a year’: care home visitors – a photo essay
That is an important calculation, because healthcare is rationed by counting in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs): how many years of good-quality life a treatment will deliver. That’s how the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) decides which new drugs give real value for money. A great many QALYs were needlessly lost through bad political decisions on Covid.
Although older people are now the group least likely to be poor, there are still many pensioners living very low-quality lives, without care, their day centres closed. About 850,000 pensioner households fail to claim the pension credit they are entitled to, in order to top up poverty incomes: presumably that suits the government, since it knows where every pensioner lives, and so could rectify this if it chose.
But inequality among older people is extreme. They are also the richest cohort. In 2018/19 79% of them in England were homeowners. One in five over-65s live in households with assets worth more than £1m. Meanwhile, the half of the population who are under 40 own only 3.9% of all wealth, says the International Longevity Centre UK. The Treasury did well out of Covid deaths, raising a record-breaking inheritance tax take.
The politics of social care and who should pay for it prove toxic: they did for Theresa May’s 2017 election campaign, and added to Labour’s troubles in 2010 when its social care plan was dubbed a “death tax”. The money is right there for the taking, in wealthy pensioners’ assets, for any government brave enough to redistribute some of that wealth. I doubt many older Tory voters will forget the terminal plans being hatched for them inside No 10, not just by Johnson but also by all those around him, who discussed them willingly. But it was far from the only Tory policy driving a wedge between generations.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
During Covid, callous Tories knew this about old people: they’re very expensive
Polly Toynbee
Fri, 3 November 2023
Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Let “the bodies pile high in their thousands”, Boris Johnson supposedly said. Not once but often, the Covid inquiry has heard that he was for killing off elderly people, “obsessed with older people accepting their fate”. According to the invaluable diary of the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, our prime minister was saying “that’s nature’s way of dealing with old people” as he complained “we are destroying the economy for people who will die anyway soon”.
It wasn’t just him. The chief whip, Mark Spencer, allegedly said: “I think we should let the old people get it and protect the others”, to which Johnson replied: “A lot of my backbenchers agree with that, and I must say I agree with them.” So this was not one irritable remark, but a theme aired many times around tables where people didn’t get up and leave the room: many are still in government, presumably including Rishi Sunak, the eat-out-to-help-spread-Covid chancellor at the time.
Members of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice say the evidence they are hearing is even worse than they feared. Age UK’s charity director, Caroline Abrahams, watching the inquiry equally aghast, tells me: “The pandemic inquiry is laying bare just how ageist many senior decision-makers are.”
Politically, the plan for a slaughter of the ancients was insane, since older people are the ones who vote Tory overwhelmingly, voted Brexit and voted in Johnson. The Tory problem is that they are dying out too fast, not too slowly, while young people no longer turn Tory as they age, the way their parents did. In every sense this is the dying party.
But for the sake of argument, let’s take a leaf out of Jonathan Swift’s satirical “modest proposal” for butchering children starving in the Irish famine to serve to English landlords.
Old people are very expensive and growing as a proportion of the population, as births of new children to pay for them fall. The government has done nothing to prepare for this long-foreseen demographic change, and now complains of the soaring cost of pensions, NHS and social care.
The state pension costs it more than £100bn a year, a cost that has risen threefold since 2000. An 85-year-old’s health costs 5.6 times more than a 30-year-old’s: there are 1.7 million over-85s, and this number is rising. Across the UK, 10% of health spending goes to those over the age of 85, with 32% to those aged 65 to 84.
Ahead, needs will rise as the government has reneged on its promised social care reform, now denied to many very frail people. The Health Foundation says adult social care in England will cost an extra £8.3bn over the next decade, and that’s just to maintain its current decayed state. It would cost an additional £18.4bn to cover its full cost and to improve access to care.
So if the Tories want a smaller state, eliminating everyone of pension age could pay for luxurious tax cuts. Indeed Covid must have saved a fair bit, as Sir John Edmunds, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told Andrew Marr on LBC this week: “If we’d have moved the lockdown forward by a week, we would have saved thousands of deaths.” Another saver: the poorest who cost the state more died at a far greater rate than those who were well off.
Johnson’s delinquent Covid policy still has prominent supporters. Jacob Rees-Mogg said on GB News: “Boris Johnson’s instincts on lockdown and Covid policy were broadly right.” The inquiry heard that the cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill, suggested a herd immunity policy of deliberately spreading Covid, like chickenpox parties for children: that seems to have happened in care homes.
The idea that most of those who died were already at death’s door, or suffering terminal “pre-existing conditions”, was wrong. The average number of years of life lost by each Covid victim was 10.2. Those aged over 75 lost an average 6.5 years.
Related: ‘Dad stood at Mum’s window every night for a year’: care home visitors – a photo essay
That is an important calculation, because healthcare is rationed by counting in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs): how many years of good-quality life a treatment will deliver. That’s how the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) decides which new drugs give real value for money. A great many QALYs were needlessly lost through bad political decisions on Covid.
Although older people are now the group least likely to be poor, there are still many pensioners living very low-quality lives, without care, their day centres closed. About 850,000 pensioner households fail to claim the pension credit they are entitled to, in order to top up poverty incomes: presumably that suits the government, since it knows where every pensioner lives, and so could rectify this if it chose.
But inequality among older people is extreme. They are also the richest cohort. In 2018/19 79% of them in England were homeowners. One in five over-65s live in households with assets worth more than £1m. Meanwhile, the half of the population who are under 40 own only 3.9% of all wealth, says the International Longevity Centre UK. The Treasury did well out of Covid deaths, raising a record-breaking inheritance tax take.
The politics of social care and who should pay for it prove toxic: they did for Theresa May’s 2017 election campaign, and added to Labour’s troubles in 2010 when its social care plan was dubbed a “death tax”. The money is right there for the taking, in wealthy pensioners’ assets, for any government brave enough to redistribute some of that wealth. I doubt many older Tory voters will forget the terminal plans being hatched for them inside No 10, not just by Johnson but also by all those around him, who discussed them willingly. But it was far from the only Tory policy driving a wedge between generations.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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