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.
