Covid inquiry won’t topple the Boris Johnson myth

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. Boris Johnson was not a good prime minister. His government lurched all over the place on a variety of issues, and his poor decision-making made responding to the Covid pandemic harder. That’s the gist of yesterday’s evidence to the UK’s Covid inquiry. Tune in for today’s session, when there may be more revelations about the religion of the Pope and what bears really do in the woods.

Some (mildly) less facetious thoughts on the public inquiry below.

Dr Death, the chancellor

Laura Hughes has all the grisly details from yesterday at the Covid-19 inquiry. Annoyingly, Rob Hutton’s sketch over at the Critic says essentially everything that I planned to write today:

We didn’t get to who actually had made that decision [to put Boris Johnson in charge], but as we heard about the chaos in Downing Street, the changes of mind from lockdown to letting the bodies pile high and back again, the misogyny and the shouting and the “superhero culture” — presumably a reference to the Civil War era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — it was hard not to think of all the people who assured us at the time that Johnson was the right man to be PM, that he worked much harder than people appreciated, that he knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, most of the inquiry’s revelations can be summed up as: Boris Johnson has always been precisely who he always appeared to be.  

Boris Johnson’s premiership is a lot like that old gag about the 1960s: if you can remember it, you weren’t really there. His time in government exists in Conservative mythology (and some Labour demonology) as an era of rightwing government, though in reality it was an era of increased spending even before the pandemic.

If Rishi Sunak loses the next election, then for large parts of the Tory party, the comforting myth will be that had Sunak not resigned from the government in summer last year, Johnson would have triumphed against Keir Starmer and delivered an ideologically-driven, rightwing government, in contrast to the hapless and leftwing Sunak administration.

A passing glance at the 2019 Conservative manifesto, and a comparison between that document and the Sunak agenda ought to dispel that, just as yesterday’s session at the Covid inquiry ought to. (That’s not to say that Sunak comes out of the whole thing well: the private despair of many government scientists at his Eat Out To Help Out scheme reminded me of Janan Ganesh’s cutting and brilliant column on the prime minister’s shortcomings a year ago.)

It ought to, but it won’t. The biggest legacy of this inquiry, I think, will be that civil servants and ministers will sooner or later come under the same obligations to maintain their communications as, say, any organisation regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Under that eventuality, if you claimed, as Martin Reynolds, the former civil servant who ran Johnson’s private office, did yesterday, that you simply couldn’t recall why you deleted your WhatsApp messages you would face a whole range of possible sanctions.

But in terms of the standing of the Johnson government in the Conservative party or the country as a whole: that I think has been settled for some time, and I don’t think this inquiry is going to move the dial in either direction.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Ariel Marx’s wonderfully sparse score to the brilliant, claustrophobic comedy Shiva Baby while writing my column. I’m very, very, very excited about Emma Seligman’s next film, Bottoms, which is out on a depressingly small number of screens this weekend. If you can see it in a cinema, I’m sure it will be worth your while.

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