For Queen and country, not to mention himself, Boris needs time off to recover
Just how worried should we be about the Prime Minister’s admission to St Thomas’s Hospital at 8 pm on Sunday evening? The right response, of course, is to avoid speculation about his health, at least until we have more information. The facts in the public domain, though, are quite sufficient to warrant a degree of concern about this “precautionary step” on the orders of his doctor.
Boris Johnson has had persistent symptoms of coronavirus for more than ten days and has remained in self-isolation throughout. He himself admitted in his video last week that he continues to have a high temperature and colleagues report that he is still coughing. On admission to St Thomas’s — by car, not ambulance — he was given oxygen and “tests”.
We do not yet know which tests these may be, but they could well include an X-ray of his chest to determine whether or not he has developed pneumonia. If radiologists decide that this is the case, physicians might decide that the Prime Minister should be kept in hospital for further treatment and observation. If that were to happen, he would have no choice but to ask his Cabinet colleagues to take over most, if not all, of his responsibilities
Even if the Prime Minister is allowed to go home today, however, he will surely be advised to take much more rest than he has done so far. We need the man the country chose to lead it only four months ago to recover his health — indeed, to be fighting fit. So who should step in to assist him? As First Secretary of State, Dominic Raab is the official primus inter pares. But the Foreign Secretary has much less experience than Michael Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and is even less familiar to the public than Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Even if Raab is obliged to deputise for Boris Johnson, if he is wise he will involve the two Chancellors in all the important decisions. An Oxford classicist such as the PM might describe these three as a triumvirate. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, would continue to have the key role in fighting the pandemic, advised by the top medics and scientists. But it would fall to the triumvirate to balance the demands of the war on Covid-19 against the needs of the economy.
Needless to say, Boris Johnson won’t want to take this lying down. Yet his lungs may force him to do exactly that. Temperamentally, he is ill-disposed to accept that the imperative of recovery may have to take priority over running the country. It is the job he always wanted; he tells friends with great gusto, “I absolutely love it!” Labour has just elected Sir Keir Starmer — a Leader of the Opposition who looks incomparably more prime ministerial than his predecessor. As a former DPP, Sir Keir arguably has more practical experience of running an organisation than the PM himself. Politically, this is not the moment for Boris to be hors de combat.
Now, however, he is evidently engaged in a different kind of combat: his body must beat the disease he likes to call the “invisible enemy”. Though his health has hitherto been robust, that body is not, perhaps, in optimum physical shape. Just over a year ago he revealed his weight, 16.5 stone (105 kilos). His BMI then put him in the obese category. He will have lost a good deal of weight since contracting coronavirus, but his BMI may have been an underlying risk factor.
The British people evidently don’t mind having a fat man In Downing Street, but it happens very seldom. The last Prime Minister who could be characterised as fat was Winston Churchill (Edward Heath only became corpulent after leaving office), and he was the first in more than a century.
Boris Johnson won’t mind being alone in the same boat as his hero, Churchill — who had many health problems in and out of office but lived to be 90. My grandfather, Thomas Hunt, was Churchill’s doctor for a period in the 1930s and was consulted by him later, too. His medical advice to the great man was to reduce his intake of food, drink and tobacco. Churchill took little or no notice.
The Queen’s speech happened to coincide with the Prime Minister’s admission to hospital. Her address to the nation was full of wisdom and we must hope that he has caught up with it since — if indeed he was not shown the text of it in advance. The Queen reassured us that “we will meet again” and, for her Prime Minister, this message has a very personal significance. If he wants to meet his monarch rather than his Maker, he needs to take time off to recover. It will take as long as it takes and the country will be willing him on. As the Queen put it, in reference to staying at home: “We know, deep down, that it is the right thing to do.” For Queen and country, not to mention himself, Boris needs time off to recover.
