For the past five years, I have been in something of a conflict: was Boris Johnson an unconventional but essentially wise prime minister whose ability to see the big picture was more important than his weakness on detail, and whose gift for spreading optimism outweighed his disorganisation? Or was he, as his many detractors have argued, simply not up to the job of leading the country? Fortunately, Johnson has now answered the question himself. Yes, he was stark-ravingly unsuited to being prime minister.
A couple of weeks after Johnson had considered invading the Netherlands, the government was forced to change policy and limit the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine
True, he does say that, after calling in military chiefs, he quickly dismissed the idea of launching a military raid on a warehouse in the Netherlands in order to spirit off doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine which he believed were being wrongly withheld from Britain. But the fact that he considered it in the first place should send a shudder through all of us. Did he not immediately think through the consequences of invading a neighbouring democratic and – for the most part – friendly country? It would have atom-bombed a taboo which has been in place in Europe since 1945: that western democracies do not invade each other; they sort out their differences by diplomatic means. Britain’s relations with the EU were already at a low point following the drawn-out Brexit process. A raid on the Netherlands wouldn’t just have poisoned them further; it would have established Britain with a reputation as a rogue state.
On other occasions, he was of course right to jump into global problems at the deep end. As foreign secretary in 2018, he was quick to persuade western countries to announce a mass deportation of Russian diplomats after the Salisbury poisonings; the only shame is that it did not go further and result in Europe reducing its dependence on Russian gas at that stage. Four years later, as prime minister, he led Europe in helping to arm Ukraine with the weapons it needed to resist Putin’s invasion. As an advocate of quick and decisive action in the face of foreign aggression, he was a valuable presence around the cabinet table.
But in the top job? To be prime minister requires impeccable judgement – and that is not something Johnson seems to have possessed while he was at No. 10. It seems that he was so drunk on the idea that Britain had scored a massive post-Brexit success with the AstraZeneca vaccine that his judgement was seriously compromised. It wasn’t just his method that was mad; the whole premise behind it was flawed. Yes, the EU did mess up its vaccine procurement, and Britain did much better by going it alone. Yet by March 2021, it was also clear that AstraZeneca had a problem: it had already been linked to cases of fatal blood clots, which went on to kill over 70 people in Britain. At the same time, there were safer alternative vaccines available from Pfizer and Moderna. A wiser leader would have managed what was an enormous disappointment over the AstraZeneca vaccine. Instead, Johnson’s government continued to push it at the UK population. It became the Captain Scott of vaccines – it was certainly a tremendous achievement to have produced it so quickly, but a misplaced sense of national glory blinded Johnson and others to the obvious: that the foreign competition had done the job better.
A couple of weeks after Johnson had considered invading the Netherlands, the government was forced to change policy and limit the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was subsequently only used for the over-40s. How ridiculous it would have looked had Britain surrendered its reputation as a civilised, peaceful nation in order to launch a raid to seize a vaccine that ministers were forced to admit needed to be restricted.
Britain has had plenty of lousy prime ministers, and Johnson caused far less damage than the alternative presented to us at the 2019 general election: Jeremy Corbyn. In some ways, he lifted the country, before Covid ruined everything. But the Conservative party made a serious error in persuading itself that he had the skills to be trusted with the top job. He made a brilliant ambassador for the country as Mayor of London, but he should have been stopped before he reached No. 10.
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