Johnson and his cabinet are products of a failed political system
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Sometimes a historic crisis illuminates hitherto unsuspected depths to those occupying public office. A fortnight after becoming prime minister, which even his closest colleagues believed to be beyond his abilities, Clement Attlee wrote a terse memorandum on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It bears rereading, for it shows how he immediately grasped the existential nature of the threat of nuclear warfare and the need for counter-deterrence. His government was hence instrumental in creating Nato, on which transatlantic security has rested ever since.
Conversely, a once-in-a-century pandemic, allied to a deep economic crisis, is not the best time to discover the limitations of today’s prime minister and his cabinet. With few exceptions, ministers have shown themselves not merely disoriented in their decision-making but cruelly exposed as unfit for office. Let me count the ways and then speculate on the reasons, but the short answer is that the party system is not properly constituted to ensure that representative democracy works well.
The important exception to the rule of stasis, drift and incompetence is economic policy. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, adopted unprecedented measures at great public expense to allow businesses and households to meet their bills as the economy went into lockdown. It was the right course for a severe, temporary, external shock for the economy. As borrowing has expanded at historically low interest rates, Sunak has indicated a preference for a higher but stable ratio of public debt to GDP. This too is good economics. The government has been helped, moreover, by having made the right choice for governor of the Bank of England, in Andrew Bailey, who took office just as the crisis broke.
Otherwise, policy has been all over the place. The government went into lockdown too late, and is now relaxing it too early, when the capacity to track, trace and isolate is not ready. Only yesterday the government reversed course in its plan to develop a centralised NHS app. It is not being wise with hindsight, but was predicted at the time, that its attempt to go it alone rather than rely on technology developed by Apple and Google would at very best be suboptimal and possibly fail completely. Testing statistics have been manipulated to try and persuade the public that the strategy to protect them while easing the lockdown is on course.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has put the entire strategy of lockdown at risk by refusing to sack his principal adviser, Dominic Cummings, for a flagrant breach of the spirit if not the letter of the rules. A government that requires public compliance with severe restrictions on liberty has shown not only hypocrisy but an indifference to the sacrifices voluntarily endured by the public, such as isolating ailing or elderly relatives. The government has shown itself also consistently mean-spirited and grudging on such issues as the indefensible NHS surcharge for immigrant workers and extending free school meals, reversing course much too belatedly to gain any credit. The education of millions of children has been endangered by the patent inability of the government to ensure that schools can open safely and with enough capacity to allow social distancing. All the while, British diplomacy has been engaged in a quixotic mission to convince the member-states of the European Union that a no-deal Brexit is more of a threat to them than it is to us.
How did we get here? One answer, and it is true, is that the people aren’t up to the job. The roster is long, and failure begins at the top. Some capable prime ministers, like Margaret Thatcher, immerse themselves in the details of policy. Others, like Tony Blair, deal with the big picture and delegate. Boris Johnson, by contrast, doesn’t know much about anything and isn’t interested in filling the vacuum. Again and again, the crisis has exposed the cabinet as comprising people of minimal ministerial ability or even plausibility: Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson, Robert Jenrick (who should have been sacked the moment he admitted “apparent bias” in dealing with a property developer), Matt Hancock (who has overseen the fiasco of the contact-tracing app) and Grant Shapps have all underwhelmed.
Yet the problem is not principally personnel. It is a party system that prizes orthodoxy over ability. The Conservative Party has a leader whose failings were well known but whose declared commitment to the irrationalist course of Brexit ensured him the prize. He managed a thumping election victory not through merit but because of the accident that Labour embraced an equivalent dogmatism of its own, allowing the far left to run the party into the ground.
The problem in both cases is that the actors in a system of deliberative democracy are doing a pretty poor job of deliberation. It is encouraging but far too late that Labour has suddenly shown signs of seriousness, but the hold of party members on the political system almost guarantees that ideological conviction will prevail over evidence-based policy. James Madison famously argued in the Federalist Papers in 1787 that deliberative democracy was essential to cure “the mischiefs of faction”. Yet Britain’s current political arrangements elevate factions to the highest offices of state.
