Can Boris Johnson come back from this? That question has been asked so many times throughout his career, and the answer has always turned out to be “yes”. He has survived crises that would drive most people out of public life, and even turned many of them to his advantage.
He may well view today’s Covid Inquiry report, which found “inexcusable” delays in the UK’s response to the virus and personal leadership failures from the former prime minister himself, as just the latest blip.
There should be no doubt though: this isn’t the latest blip, but an official verdict on his lack of seriousness. It should mark the point at which any ambitions that Johnson holds of a return to political life are shown up as being delusions rather than realistic.
He presided over a “toxic and sexist workplace culture” in Downing Street, the report said, adding: “By failing to tackle this chaotic culture – and, at times, actively encouraging it – Mr Johnson reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making.”
He did nothing to rein in his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, whose behaviour contributed, the report found, to a “culture of fear, mutual suspicion and distrust”. He did not chair Cobra meetings in February 2020 and decision-making appeared to stall over the February half-term, contributing to that period becoming what the Inquiry dubbed a “lost month”. Those failings stand over and above the way the three devolved governments of the UK also responded. Those administrations were also guilty of action that was “too little, too late”, and there are clear systemic failures in the way government functioned across the nations. But Johnson comes in for the worst personal criticism, and rightly so.
It is probably easy for the former prime minister to think that, as with his other failings, this criticism has been “priced in” by the public, who already know that Downing Street was dysfunctional when he was in charge, and who are largely trying to get on with their lives and not spend too much time thinking about the pandemic. The way the news agenda moves is different to the way voters think about their lives and about individual politicians, though, and a better term than “priced in” may be that they have in fact baked in their views of how Johnson did – or didn’t – run the country.
What makes it even harder for Johnson to pitch himself in the future as a credible candidate for the Tories to take on Reform is that he now has his name hitched to the “Boriswave”. That surge of immigration to Britain as a result of Johnson’s post-Brexit visa rules is more salient than the Covid Inquiry’s report, and will remain so for years as well. Even the Brits who’ve tried to forget about the misery of lockdowns, and the losses they endured while Johnson allowed Downing Street partying to continue, are still very much alive to the battles of the current government to get the numbers back down.
Johnson at the time had pledged that Brexit would drive down immigration and give the government more control over the numbers. Instead, the “Boriswave” has passed into popular parlance, and as Johnson himself well knows, it’s hard to push back against these kinds of catchy political slogans. It’s just it was normally the case that Johnson would be the one generating such slogans, rather than being on the receiving end of them. Now, he has to listen to Reform and Labour politicians gleefully talking about the “Boriswave”, all the while hoping they’ve finally found the political Kryptonite that will finish Johnson off.
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The Covid Inquiry has rumbled on for so long that the report might sting a bit less than had it arrived when people were still very raw from the pandemic. But had it reported sooner, Johnson would have had more true Boris believers getting his defences out even before the report landed. They seem quieter these days, muffled perhaps by their own worries about the impact of the Boriswave.
Still, neither that wave nor the Covid report will make any difference to Johnson’s ability to command huge speaking fees overseas, nor to the interest that always follows him. He will not feel the level of accountability that many of his critics feel he should face for his failures, whether on Covid or immigration. It’s just that those things might – just might – from now on be decoupled from his future prospects as a politician.
We may never stop asking if Boris Johnson is going to make a comeback. But we now have an answer on whether he should.
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