Opinion: Boris Johnson made a Brexit bet on European disunion – and the odds don’t look so good

A surprising reversal took place across the English Channel this week: Faced with a common threat, Europe came together in an unexpected moment of political seriousness and shared purpose, while Britain descended into an operetta of incompetence and self-immolation lacking much semblance of leadership or co-operation.

This was not inevitable. Island nations – New Zealand, Taiwan – have generally fared well in this pandemic, and Britain is ruled by a centralized authority without pesky states and provinces to get in the way, led by a majority government obsessed with closing its borders. The United Kingdom should have been the most pandemic-proof place in Europe.

Instead, Britain currently has the second-highest COVID-19 death rate in the world. That is largely because of political decisions made in February and March by Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the insistent recommendation of his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who pressed Mr. Johnson to keep pubs and schools and travel running, to keep shaking hands and playing down the significance of the emerging pandemic – until, panicked by new medical information, he abruptly reversed course after it was far too late.

Rather than quietly ushering him out, as any other parliamentary leader would do, the Prime Minister stuck by Mr. Cummings – a decision whose larger consequences became loudly and lengthily apparent this week.

In the midst of that period of inaction and miscalculation, and perhaps because of it, both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Cummings managed to contract COVID-19. Mr. Johnson wound up hospitalized, while Mr. Cummings embarked on a series of long-distance travels to and from a comfortable family property while infected, breaking most of the pandemic-control rules he’d authored and all of the basic principles of public health – just to obtain comforts he’d denied to British voters.

Mr. Johnson’s decision to let his adviser appear on TV to attempt to defend his actions was tactically baffling and politically self-destructive. It led to the resignation of one minister and the enmity of many formerly loyal MPs, and turned a once-united Conservative Party against itself.

It also revealed the more ominous cost of this period: The key decision affecting the fate of Britain, the negotiations to determine the post-Brexit trade and economic relationship with the European Union, have gone nowhere.

That’s partly because Britain’s negotiator, David Frost, was also stricken by the novel coronavirus, as was his European counterpart. But it’s also because Mr. Johnson seems unaware of the compromises he’ll need to make, negotiating as the country is from a position of weakness, if he wants a deal by the Dec. 31 deadline. Beyond that, Britain would face a “no deal” Brexit, which economists recently calculated would cost about 7 per cent of Britain’s economic growth over the next 15 years.

Mr. Johnson appears to have gambled that he’d get a better deal from a dysfunctional and divided EU. And, back in March, that is certainly what the 27-nation bloc appeared to be.

The failure of wealthy countries to come to the aid of virus-stricken Italy at first, the refusal of the Germans to agree to a Europe-wide borrowing and equalization-payment system to salvage a devastated economy, on top of existing schisms over refugees and political extremism and Russia – that all looked, from London, like a Europe that would be desperate to take any deal. Credible voices were predicting that the pandemic would end the EU.

This month, something changed. On May 18, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she and French President Emmanuel Macron were jointly proposing a half-billion-euro ($762-million) EU debt package to bail out the hardest-hit countries – a decision that ended a years-long feud with Mr. Macron over whether the EU should be a fiscal union. If Ms. Merkel had made this decision in 2010, at the height of the euro currency crisis, it would likely have saved Greece, Italy, Spain and even Germany years of stagnation.

It has had a uniting, healing effect. Recent days have seen previously austerity-minded countries such as Austria, Denmark and even the Netherlands appear close to accepting the proposal.

This week, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen went further, tabling a bill that would raise €750-billion, declaring: “This is about all of us, and it is way bigger than any of us. This is Europe’s moment.”

The last time European economies were facing ruin, in 2008, it was a British prime minister, Gordon Brown, who stepped up with a common plan to keep the financial system aloft. This time, there’s silence from across the Channel. His successor isn’t even in the club – he’s out on the sidewalk alone, flat on his back, wondering what hit him.

Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail’s international affairs columnist, is currently a Richard von Weizsaecker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.