Britain Has a Much Bigger Problem Than Brexit

An official investigation into a pandemic would seem an unlikely source of sordid entertainment. But such is the nature of contemporary politics in Britain that the inquiry into its official response to COVID-19 has been reduced to just that.

Over the past few weeks, in an office building near Paddington Station in west London, some of the United Kingdom’s most distinguished lawyers have questioned those at the heart of the British state about their response to the pandemic. The inquiry is set to reach its peak in a few weeks’ time, when investigators question former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other key ministers, including current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was then the chancellor (finance minister), and Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, whose reputation has been little enhanced by his decision to quit politics after a very public extramarital affair and instead become a reality TV star.

Already, the inquiry has shone a light on the bombast and buffoonery in Downing Street, led by and personified in the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson. Most of the coverage so far has been focused on the questions of who said what to whom. And it has been colorful—women denigrated with sexist slurs, other civil servants dismissed with elaborate insults, multiple hatreds laid bare— with most of the vulgarity emanating from the testimony of Dominic Cummings, a self-styled Rasputin figure who had been at Johnson’s right hand until they spectacularly fell out and became archenemies.

While the palace intrigues have caught the media’s attention, the more important failures—the gradual erosion of the publicly funded National Health Service (one of very few state institutions in Britain that remain overwhelmingly popular) and the wider weaknesses of state structures—have yet to receive a proper airing. (That time may yet come. The inquiry has been split into five so-called modules, and it is only midway into the second.)

The state’s dysfunction, however, needs to be seen in a wider context. At the onset of the pandemic, Britain was mired in self-delusion. Years of austerity had drained public services of the ability to do anything more than muddle through, with no slack in the system in case anything went wrong. A sense of entitlement among a small group of Conservative Party politicians, all educated at elite schools, had reinforced a foppish self-belief rather than self-awareness. And decades of denial about the U.K.’s real place in the world had infused, in politicians of all parties, a view that Britannia did still rule the waves.

How else to account for Johnson’s approach to the pandemic, painfully laid bare by several of his former advisors? In devastatingly deadpan evidence, the deputy head of the civil service, Helen MacNamara, said she struggled to think of a single day when Downing Street adhered to the emergency rules it had set, which many citizens were prosecuted for failing to follow.

She described how in the crucial period leading up to the first lockdown, Johnson declared that the United Kingdom’s “world-beating” systems would cope better than all others. For 12 crucial days, people were allowed to go about their daily lives unaffected, even after the World Health Organization declared on March 11, 2020, that the coronavirus outbreak was a pandemic.

The disease, Johnson blithely told colleagues, would be no worse than swine flu. He and his officials had no interest in learning from others, such as from countries that had coped with the SARS virus. MacNamara revealed how ministers fell about laughing when they were told about European states shutting down, mocking the Italians for rushing to do so.

This sense of go-it-alone braggadocio, very much a Johnson hallmark, had seemingly been turned into a governing principle since the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.

As early as March 13, MacNamara marched into the prime minister’s office to tell him that the National Health Service would be overwhelmed. “I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people.” Johnson finally declared a lockdown on March 23. By then it was already very late, and many lives were lost that otherwise might have been saved.

That was just the start. Texts and WhatsApp messages have also provided a treasure trove of material attesting to the government’s inability to cope. The head of the civil service, Simon Case, wrote to a colleague he had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country.” He described the atmosphere inside Downing Street as “mad” and “poisonous.”

Throughout the two-year pandemic, Johnson would repeatedly get the science wrong, veering between desperation and complacency. One of his officials’ diary entries noted that he had expressed the belief that the coronavirus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people.”

Nor were government structures properly equipped. The head of the health service admitted that there was a “disconnect” between government and the realities on the ground. Very few senior civil servants had any science background.

Other faults cited by experts in the inquiry and outside it have been overcentralization in the health service and a failure to consult regional authorities across broader policymaking, and a lack of understanding of demographics. Differential impacts on poorer people or ethnic communities were accepted as inevitable. Epidemiological data was inconsistent and disorganized. There were not enough hospital beds or dedicated wards. Supplies of personal protective equipment for health workers were in shambles, as was testing, and tracing was a nonstarter. Borders were not closed for many weeks. Throughout the crisis, informal procurement policies bordered on the corrupt, with several companies linked to friends of ministers receiving large contracts and sometimes producing equipment that failed to work.

In short, contingency plans for governing in an all-consuming crisis of the kind that arrived with COVID-19 did not exist. But this was not only a matter of Johnson’s administrative incompetence. The British political system has for centuries been based on the so-called good chap theory of decent people playing by informal rules and doing their best. Regulations and structures are habitually dismissed, usually by the political right, as stiflingly un-British. At the apex of power, the relationship between the prime minister, his or her cabinet, and senior officials is blurred and subject to interpretation by each set of incumbents. Civil servants have a duty to political impartiality and to not making public statements, leaving them invariably to being blamed for government mistakes. Although these pressure points have always existed, morale is said now to be at an all-time low.

The watchword now is resilience, and it is at the heart of preparations that the opposition Labour Party, which has a consistently large lead in opinion polls, is making for government after a general election that is most likely to take place between May and October in 2024. The task is considerable. Politics based in precedence and making it up as you go along may have worked in the past (although as ever in Britain, the country’s performance is seen through rose-tinted spectacles), but there’s little reason to think they will be adequate to present and future transnational crises—from climate to migration to natural resources to another pandemic.

What is required is a thorough reconstruction of the United Kingdom’s governance. One of the key figures in any future Labour government is a top civil servant who shortly after delivering her report Johnson’s “party-gate” scandals announced that she was moving to be chief of staff to the likely next prime minister, Keir Starmer. Her main task, which she has already begun planning, is an overhaul of structures, rights, and responsibilities of government departments. This is expected to be wide-ranging.

It has been necessary and, indeed, instructive—and possibly entertaining—for the COVID-19 inquiry to delve into the miscreance of Johnson and his cabal. But it has so far been insufficient in terms of addressing deep-rooted systemic failings.