Opinion

The numbers are in, and Johnson's government really is world-beating

It’s not just Cummings. From laughing Hancock to cheery Sunak, they all want to style out this whole 60,000 dead thing

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I read this week that Boris Johnson has been given permission by the Queen to exercise in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. That’s nice. Can she give him permission to act like a prime minister for more than an hour a week? He could start small, then gradually build up his prime-ministering distance, so that by the time of the next election he’s doing a whole day a week. Maybe there’s an app for it. Couch To PM.

In the meantime, we’ve all seen some shameless moves by Johnson over the past few days, but let’s open a sub-category for Thursday night’s Downing Street briefing. If you missed this How Not To video, it featured the prime minister inserting himself between some perfectly reasonable questions and the scientists Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, the government’s chief scientific adviser and England’s chief medical officer respectively, with Johnson acting for all the world like he’d take a bullet for them. Do me a favour. He wouldn’t even take a NutriBullet for them. He wouldn’t even read a bullet point written BY them.

When Marlon Brando turned up to the set of Apocalypse Now he weighed 300 pounds (21 stone), hadn’t bothered reading Heart of Darkness – the novel on which the movie was based – and was sufficiently unfocused on the job to prefer rambling tangential discussions about the script to getting anything done. Obviously he hadn’t learned his lines – indeed, he was by now quite incapable of it – having long preferred to have cue cards positioned around his sets in ingenious positions to avoid them being picked up by the various camera angles. On some productions, Brando’s lines were even stuck to other actors’ foreheads. He was, however, literally Marlon Brando, and that rightly counted for rather a lot.

Watching Johnson playing to MPs on the liaison committee this week, it was difficult to conclude he will be able to draw much longer on a similar wellspring of tolerance for the idiosyncrasies of his craft. Of his preference for prizing Dominic Cummings more highly than his public health message, Johnson kept saying: “I have already answered a lot of questions about this.” But the only earlier answers to which he is referring were also the words: “I have already answered a lot of questions about this.” His performance was the equivalent of Brando’s Kurtz turning to the camera and gurning: “LOOK MA – THEY GONE AND LET ME DONE A MOVIE!!!” Basically a production-killer. Couldn’t someone – perhaps Cummings – stand just out of shot wearing a sign on his forehead that reads simply: “DON’T SMIRK”?

The entire effort was so abject it had the flavour of that classic domestic move where someone – might be a man, might be a lady – deliberately loads the dishwasher so sensationally, historically badly that it is a clear attempt to ensure they never are never asked to do it again.

Yet, mesmerisingly, Johnson appeared to imagine he was even in the same postcode as adequate. “The trouble is,” he complained about having to be there at all, “it does take a huge amount of Sherpa time, of preparation time.” On the one hand: oh no. Did you have to be prime minister again for an hour? I’m sorry it’s so much work. On the other hand: wait. Are you telling me that this is you WITH preparation? What does busking it look like? Presumably it involves public incontinence.