If a government looks bad from the outside, it will be twice as rotten on the inside. I’ve found this a reliable rule of thumb over the years, but it underestimates the breathtaking depths of the dreadfulness of the reign of Boris Johnson. That looked ghastly from the outside, but was many times more grotesque on the inside.
Before the public inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic had taken a single minute of evidence, it was already established that he was a wholly unsuitable character to be leading the country through the gravest peacetime emergency in more than a century. We knew he was too selfish, too weak, too amoral, too capricious, too negligent and too frivolous. What the inquiry is adding to the familiar portrait of Mr Johnson is detailed and compelling testimony from people who were in the room about how utterly unfit – ethically, intellectually, temperamentally and in any other way you might mention – he was to be prime minister. His cabinet secretary, his principal private secretary, his most senior aide, his director of communications and his chief scientific adviser, very different personalities with very different perspectives, all agree on one thing: Mr Johnson was comprehensively incapable of doing the job.
When the first red flags about Covid are raised, he dismisses it as a “rubbish media hoax”, skips away on holiday for a fortnight and is distracted trying to finish a book on Shakespeare in order to pay bills for a costly divorce and his girlfriend’s expensive ideas about refurbishing the Downing Street flat. The book remains unpublished to this day and the furnishings became a scandal. When he belatedly begins to grasp that Covid is serious, he lurches from one position to its opposite, sometimes doing handbrake turns more than once in a single day, to the exasperation of everyone around him. One moment he is frightened enough about the virus to heed his scientific advisers. The next he is adopting an insouciantly callous view that Covid is “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” who “will die anyway soon” and they should “accept their fate”.
Mirroring his character, the Johnson-era Downing Street is a nasty place dominated by macho posturers with unfounded self-regard. Sexism is rife, other toxic behaviours rampant and vicious vendettas constant. Mr Johnson himself complains it has turned into “a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism”, which is like Caligula moaning that he can’t stand the sight of blood. His chronic inability to make decisions on issues of critical national importance was the despair of everyone around him. Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, would return home to pour his grief into a diary he never intended for public consumption. “Quite bonkers,” he wrote of one conversation with the prime minister. “Ridiculous flip-flopping,” he shudders after another dire day in Downing Street. “One minute do more, next do nothing… It’s like bipolar decision-making.” In a further entry, he sighs: “Chaos as usual.”
The cabinet secretary, Simon Case, ventilated his angst to colleagues in messages saying “I am going to scream” and “We look like a terrible, tragic joke”. It was a joke with a punchline that was literally a killer.
One revelation from Dominic Cummings’s testimony is that his former boss could out-trump Donald Trump in his delusions about the virus. The prime minister of the UK circulated a YouTube video of a man using a hairdryer to blast hot air up his nostrils and asked Sir Patrick and Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, whether this might be a miracle cure for the disease.
When the country most needed a decent, diligent and decisive prime minister, we had a derelict at the helm. The testimony is an eviscerating indictment of Mr Johnson and an indelible stain on the reputation of everyone in the Tory party and its media who enabled him. It is no less damning about the structures that are supposed to be in place to protect the country from such a terrible prime minister. The UK was unprepared to handle a rogue pathogen or a rogue leader and had the huge misfortune to be afflicted with both at the same time.
One of the checks and balances on a prime minister going totally off the rails is supposed to be the civil service. “Speaking truth to power” has traditionally been part of the remit, and the voice needed to be especially insistent when the power was being wielded so atrociously. This didn’t happen and it is not the only dismal failure by the senior echelons of the mandarinate. Helen MacNamara, deputy cabinet secretary during the pandemic, confessed to the inquiry that she would “find it hard to pick one day” when Covid rules were “followed properly” at Number 10. And she knows of what she speaks because it was she who carted in a karaoke machine for one of the infamous lockdown-busting parties. Her responsibilities at the time – reader, I weep – included government propriety and ethics.
The two most important officials in the life of a prime minister are his principal private secretary and the cabinet secretary. If Martin Reynolds, the private secretary, had been performing his role appropriately he would have insisted to the prime minister that everyone in Number 10 had to be extremely careful to ensure they were strictly adhering to the Covid laws and regulations that they were imposing on the nation to contain a deadly disease. Rather than do everything he could to prevent the scandal that became known as Partygate, it was “Party Marty” who sent out the invitations to the notorious “bring-your-own booze” gathering.
The cabinet secretary cuts an even more abject figure. Material published by the inquiry records Britain’s most senior civil servant telling colleagues that he is “at the end of my tether” with a prime minister who makes an effective response to the crisis “impossible” by changing “strategic direction every day”. The cabinet secretary is expected to be the wise man of government and a figure with sufficient gravitas to cajole a bad PM to correct his ways. Mr Case comes over as a grizzling child so devoid of authority that he bleats: “Am not sure I can cope with today. Might just go home.”
The cabinet is supposed to be a vital safeguard against a rotten leader, but a striking feature of the inquiry is how little it features in events. For sure, there’s been a lot of Matt Hancock, none of it good, a man described by witnesses as “slippery”, “a proven liar” and obsessed “with media bullshit over doing his job”. Some of the most chilling testimony came from Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England at the time. He revealed that if hospitals became overwhelmed, Mr Hancock wanted it to be him, rather than medical professionals, who decided who got to live and who would be left to die. Given how catastrophically he failed to protect care homes, thank your god that we were spared that. There’s also been damaging stuff about Rishi Sunak, the pandemic chancellor, and his plague-spreading subsidised meals scheme in the summer of 2020. It’s been useful to have confirmation that the chief medical officer privately renamed it “Eat out to help out the virus”. Dame Angela McLean, who has since become the government’s chief scientific adviser, sent a message describing Mr Sunak as “Dr Death”.
We’ve heard nothing of the cabinet as a collective decision-making body and a restraint on a dangerously dysfunctional prime minister. That’s because it wasn’t. Number 10’s disdain for the cabinet was expressed by Mr Cummings with characteristically pathological profanity when he scorned ministers as “morons”, “cunts” and “useless fuckpigs” in WhatsApp messages. Powerful as he was for a period, Mr Cummings was an unelected adviser. The cabinet were elected ministers of the crown. Yet the “morons” even humiliated themselves by obeying orders to defend his “eye-test” excursion to Barnard Castle. Were they spineless, clueless or simply useless? Whichever, they failed to perform their constitutional function.
Since the rise of the populists, some analysts have sought to console us with the thought that charlatans like Mr Johnson are ultimately found out and brought down by their depravity and incompetence. His defenestration in the summer of 2022 has been offered as proof that our system still kind of works. That is a false comfort and his shocking misrule during the pandemic underlines why. Even if you are eventually rid of a rogue prime minister, he can do a vast amount of harm before he meets his end. Best not to put one in Number 10 in the first place.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
