Britain may be emerging from years of crisis. What of those who are not?

While Westminster is consumed by the question of who paid for prime ministerial painting and decorating, other countries have bigger fish to fry. Britain may at last be emerging from what feels like years of crisis. What of those who are not?

While savouring its vaccination triumph, America is still licking its wounds: Covid has now killed more people than all the wars the United States has ever fought. Russia is hiding its true losses, but the grim truth — up to half a million dead — will out.

Most worrying of all now is India. Like the Kremlin, the Modi government is understating the colossal Indian death toll. Brahmar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, is quoted by Roger Boyes in the Times: “It’s a complete massacre of data…we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.” That would mean up to a million deaths so far — and cases, already a third of a million a day, are still rising. The health services are visibly buckling in this land of 1.4 billion. Oxygen and medical equipment are in short supply. Yet Modi is too proud to appeal to the world for help: it would not fit the image of the world’s largest democracy as a technological superpower. This could become India’s worst disaster for a generation — and the effects will be felt across southern Asia.

Much closer to home, however, the incomparably richer European Union has its own harvest of sorrow. Last week the death toll across the 26 EU countries was 662,000; next month it may well reach three-quarters of a million. European figures are relatively reliable — and they speak for themselves. Italy, France and Germany are still losing people at a rate of more than 300 a week, while in Poland the figure is more than 400. Most European vaccination rates are still agonisingly slow. 

The UK, with nearly 130,000 deaths (higher by some measures), still has the largest total for any one European country. That shocking fact is a cause for chagrin, but it may not remain true for much longer. Since the combined effects of the lockdown and the vaccination programme began to be felt more than two months ago, deaths have hardly increased at all. This remarkable achievement really is something of which the British public should be very proud. Our sacrifices have been commensurate with our success, but the economy seems to be bouncing back more strongly than at any time since the Lawson boom of the late 1980s. It would be a fatal mistake to put the recovery at risk by lifting all restrictions prematurely. 

If the leaks of his unedifying language last autumn are even partly accurate, the Prime Minister is a closet lockdown sceptic. But even he has had caution forced upon him by the science and by bitter experience. He is a gambler by nature and in the Covid crisis his delays in imposing all three lockdowns have cost the country dearly. Yet he has redeemed himself in the eyes of the public with just one of these gambles. By throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at the vaccination programme, Boris Johnson has saved more lives than any other leader in Europe. He deserves his present popularity, just as his Continental counterparts who have failed the vaccine test so badly deserve the contempt in which they are held.

Luckily for her, Ursula von der Leyen does not have to be elected, but her reputation will never recover from the fiasco of the European Commission’s failure to procure enough vaccines. Her patron Angela Merkel, who was praised to the skies last year, has watched helplessly as the European solution she advocated unravelled — and with it her own party’s standing in the polls. In six months she will be gone and her legacy will in all likelihood be a successor from the Greens. Instead of a smooth transition to one of the various “mini-Merkels” that she must have envisaged, Germany will take a leap of faith — anything but a continuation of its present political malaise.

But if Germany abhors a leadership vacuum, France is embroiled in a constitutional crisis. The emergence this week of a wide-ranging conspiracy in the armed forces has caused a political earthquake. Not only retired generals “in their slippers”, but an unknown number of senior serving officers were apparently contemplating a coup. Shocking as this is, the silence from the Élysée is almost as extraordinary. The President of the Republic has left it to others to condemn the coup and to deal with the culprits. Will there be courts martial? Will those on active service be cashiered? It is as if there were paralysis of leadership at the top. This seems out of character for a man normally as hyperactive as Emmanuel Macron. Has he lost his nerve? Is he having a breakdown? We do not know. But the future of France has seldom been less certain than it seems today.

There is a certain justice about the nemesis that has befallen the leaders who subjected Britain to such torment during the years when the terms of Brexit were being hammered out. Their hubris is long gone. It is striking how quickly the EU has got itself into difficulties without the British as members. There is no sign that those responsible regret their vindictive treatment of the UK. Yet the eagerness with which British tourists are being welcomed back to the Continent this summer indicates that we are missed. Some, at least, of our neighbours really are our friends. The EU and the UK do still need one another, perhaps now more than ever. As Brexit recedes into the past, a post-pandemic transformation in European leadership should make for an easier relationship with Britain. Who better to take advantage of that than a cosmopolitan Prime Minister, born in New York and brought up in Brussels?

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