Johnson leaves dirty work to everyone else

An awkward question hangs over the Covid-shuttered world of Downing Street. At his daily morning meeting, Boris Johnson, back to full duties after suffering a serious bout of the virus, recently asked who was in charge of relaxing Britain’s lockdown plan, with all of the risks and uncertainties that entails for a government. “There was just silence,” an insider told the Sunday Times newspaper. “He looked over at Mark Sedwill (his top civil servant) and asked, ‘Is it you?’ The official replied, ‘No, I think it’s you, prime minister.’”
Sedwill was right. The UK’s leader enjoys some of the strongest centralised powers in Europe — and yet, paradoxically, the man who fought so hard to gain control of his party and Britain’s destiny is reluctant to take responsibility. Before the crisis, Johnson ruled as a near-absolute monarch, often through his eccentric but effective adviser (and key Brexit strategist)
Dominic Cummings. In a tale familiar to English court politics down the centuries, the arrogant outsider resented by lesser talents has himself become a hindrance to the man he serves. Cummings, one of the architects of Britain’s lockdown, bent the rules by driving his sick wife and child 250 miles to his family’s northern home, where he may or may not have breached self-isolation to walk in local beauty spots.
Hitherto, an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons and the trouncing of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the December election had boosted the prime minister’s natural self-confidence, and a cabinet largely composed of inexperienced unequals reinforced his dominance.
The Coronavirus has changed everything. It has seen Johnson dither over using his executive power to lay down the law. True, most democratic leaders find life-and-death decisions unnerving, but the prime minister has made too many missteps for Britain’s emergence as the “the sick man of Europe” to be seen as mere bad luck.
The UK has an unwelcome lead in the continent’s league table of fatalities, in part due to its role as a transport and business hub. But Johnson’s administration bears the blame for failing to lock down as quickly as Germany, for prematurely terminating track and tracing of the infected in March, and for allowing hospital patients to be discharged untested into care homes for the elderly. Voters have given Johnson the benefit of the doubt so far out of sympathy for his own near-death encounter with Covid-19. But the prime minister, while a convincing advocate for social distancing, still sounds uncertain on many big calls. No. 10 staffers and his chief ministers lack confidence. His acolytes are already looking over their shoulders at a likely public inquiry into their handling of the emergency.
An unfamiliar crisis that demands fast, big-state solutions plays more easily to the strengths of social democrats or even paternalist Conservatives. Johnson, a carefree libertarian by instinct, at first ignored the peril, expecting others to take responsibility for a threat that seemed more tangential than finalising a post-Brexit trade deal with the European Union.
Personal foibles matter too. Johnson’s absence from five key meetings in the initial stages of the pandemic is a matter of record. There are crude metrics that suggest Scotland’s devolved government has performed even worse during the outbreak, but perceptions are otherwise and they matter. The left-leaning Scottish nationalist leader, Nicola Sturgeon, cuts a more commanding figure, happy to tell her fellow citizens what to do (or in the case of following Johnson’s lead in easing the lockdown, what not to do).

—Bloomberg