A rudderless prime minister is damaging the country | thearticle

The global pandemic is the type of policy challenge that happens in peacetime only once in a generation. Arguably, the coronavirus crisis is the worst since the influenza pandemic of

1918-19. The verdict on Boris Johnson’s government must be that, with the partial but important exception of economic policy, it’s handled the crisis badly. The reason is not just that it’s

taken poor discrete decisions and made culpable mistakes, though it has, but that it lacks the sense of public service that would have compelled it to seek a national consensus from the

outset. There is a philosophical vacuity at the heart, and the head, of government. As for the failings, let me count the ways. The government announced a lockdown too late, and is easing it

too early when the capacity to track, trace and isolate does not yet exist. Its claim to have achieved adequate testing capacity was based on statistics that were manipulated and

misleading. Its economic support package, which is right in principle, is being phased out for political rather than public-health reasons and without enough firepower to replace it. A VAT

reduction and a voucher scheme for eating out are of risible effectiveness compared with the urgency of properly containing the spread of infection. The government has undermined its policy

of lockdown and social distancing by not enforcing it against Dominic Cummings and his flagrant violation of it. It has undermined its own insistence that people should work from home by

requiring an unnecessary and dangerous return to face-to-face working in Parliament. Last but far from least, it has pursued a reckless maximalist policy of Brexit despite the economic

damage this is certain to inflict. What a record. And what a time for it. It reflects not just incompetence and ideological obduracy, but a failure to grasp what is valuable in the party’s

philosophical traditions. Faced with a historic crisis that threatens health and welfare and sunders family relationships, Johnson and his colleagues should have sought to bring the nation

together. Instead, they have pursued partisanship and nativism that debase public life. The immigrant health surcharge on foreign-born health and care workers who already pay taxes should

never have been levied, was lifted without graciousness in May, and still shows no sign of being waived for many of those affected. The indictment of the government is hence not only that

its policies are wrong but that it has no real notion of how to govern at all. This isn’t due to malice so much as a lack of sufficient imagination to perceive how others see them. One of

the great philosophers of modern conservatism, Michael Oakeshott, argued in a celebrated metaphor that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither

harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.” This is very far from the experience of

government headed by Johnson, and it’s worth asking why. The popular charge against the prime minister is that, despite his expensive education, he is an intellectual lightweight of no fixed

principles. Again, this is true but not especially germane to his political failings. Far more significant is his failure to grasp the ethos of public service, which is to keep the ship of

state on an even keel regardless of wider storms. Johnson can’t do that, not because he lacks the idea of an end-point — there is no such goal in politics — but because he instinctively

divides people into allies and enemies, to which all other considerations are subsumed. A prime minister with a sense of duty would have immediately sacked Cummings for showing conspicuous

contempt for his public obligations. This one doesn’t. In a historic crisis of public health and economic welfare, Johnson is — to continue the nautical metaphor — rudderless. The quality of

civic life will take a long time to recover.