‘The best and worst of Boris’: Johnson’s stewardship of Covid crisis

Boris Johnson approaches the first anniversary of the UK’s first coronavirus lockdown on March 23 contemplating a year of human suffering and economic destruction.

Britain has recorded one of the worst death tolls and biggest recessions from the Covid-19 pandemic in the world, but the UK prime minister rarely looks back. He will also note that a year after Britain’s towns and cities fell into sepulchral silence, the country is racing ahead of much of the globe in vaccinating its population; on Friday Johnson joined more than 25m Britons in having his own jab.

A “vaccine bounce” has led to a revival in Johnson’s personal ratings in surveys, and given the Conservative party a clear lead over Labour in opinion polls. In spite of a dip in vaccine supplies in April, the UK is looking ahead to what ministers optimistically dub “the great British summer”. “As ever with Boris, something seems to turn up,” said one longtime ally of the prime minister. “He’s a lucky general.”

Decisions taken by the Johnson government in the darkest moments of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 in backing vaccine projects — investing early and heavily — now seem like a masterstroke. “We had no idea whether any of them would come off,” admitted one senior adviser to Johnson. “We just rolled the dice.” It was the turning point for Johnson and the country.

In March last year, the picture looked very different, as Johnson reacted indecisively to the impending Covid-19 crisis. He famously shook hands “with everybody” at a hospital known to have Covid-19 cases, and flippantly dubbed a government effort to secure more hospital ventilators “operation last gasp”. Critics said he was late to lock down the country.

“It’s fair to say that he never really believed in Covid,” said one Johnson adviser. “He was sceptical about the scale of it and the value of government intervention — he felt that the cure might be worse than the disease.”

The Johnson government staggered from one crisis to another. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, said this week the Department of Health was a “smoking ruin” as it tried to secure desperately needed supplies of personal protective equipment for NHS workers. And England’s test and trace system became a national joke because of its shortcomings. Johnson ended up in intensive care after catching Covid-19.

Amid this chaos, a crucial decision was taken. Those inside Downing Street in the spring of last year said officials were desperately seeking a way out of the crisis, with most focused on a “moonshot” project of mass testing or possible Covid-19 treatments.

Vaccines received less publicity, mainly because few believed they could be developed and delivered in time to make a big difference. But Greg Clark, chair of the House of Commons science committee, said the government was nevertheless alert to the possibilities at an early stage.

He recalled Sarah Gilbert, the pioneering Oxford university professor, saying in February last year that she was confident her team could find a vaccine within a year but it needed funding and government support. Clark put in call to Downing Street. “Don’t worry — we’ve got this,” he was told.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak, a former hedge fund manager, was attracted to the idea of betting big on vaccines as a high-risk, high-reward project. “Rishi went into his investor mode,” said one Treasury insider. “He said we should spread our bets and put money behind it. Let’s hope one or two of them come off.”

Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said Britain should secure its own vaccines rather than subcontract procurement to the EU. “It wasn’t an ideological decision and it worked out well,” said one person involved in the government’s deliberations. “But imagine if we’d got it wrong.”

Vallance made the case that a new nimble UK body would be required to oversee the huge logistical and medical challenges for discovering, approving, manufacturing and delivering millions of jabs.

The big moment came on May 16 last year, with the appointment of Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist specialising in life sciences, to head the government’s vaccines task force. At a time when ministers were being criticised for handing out Covid-19 contracts and jobs to favoured Tory contacts, the fact that Bingham was married to Treasury minister Jesse Norman meant her appointment was greeted with scepticism. 

In his letter offering Bingham the job, the prime minister told her she would have the authority to “co-ordinate the end-to-end process of vaccine development, from discovery through clinical trials to distribution, including both domestic and international sourcing and licensing”.

Bingham said: “I had the ultimate authority to actually get on and do what I thought was needed. We were building a portfolio of vaccines with very clear expectations that many, if not all, these vaccines would fail. And the government was willing to take on that risk.”

Bingham’s team placed early bets across a range of potential vaccines including Oxford/AstraZeneca and BioNTech/Pfizer, and the government offered to fund research and testing. Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, said the UK placed its order for 100m doses three months before the European Commission. The EU has been left playing catch-up.

Many things could yet go for wrong for Johnson. The inoculation programme suffered its first setback this week — a drop in supply of doses for April — and the EU is threatening a vaccine war with the UK in an attempt to get its hands on some of the AstraZeneca jabs ordered by Bingham. New variants of the virus could inflict more death and economic disruption. Cummings, who left Downing Street last November after a power struggle, has promised to lift the lid on what went “catastrophically wrong” at the heart of government during the pandemic.

Labour is pushing for a swift public inquiry, but Johnson’s mantra is “now is not the time”. Indeed, by the time he gets around to setting one up — and it actually reports — Covid-19 is likely to be a receding national memory. It took six years for the Labour government to set up an inquiry into the Iraq war; it produced its report in 2016, 13 years after the conflict.

Anthony Wells, director of political research at the pollster YouGov, said of the likely impact of a public inquiry: “It’s history.” He argued that by the time of the next general election, due by 2024, the country will have moved on from the Covid-19 catastrophe; Johnson’s handling of it, good and bad, may not be a decisive factor. “It will look quite a long way back,” said Wells.

But for now, with the Conservatives registering healthy poll leads over Labour, there is deep frustration among opposition party figures that Johnson may have — as one shadow cabinet member put it — “got away with it”.

One Downing Street insider admitted Johnson was temperamentally ill-suited to grip Britain’s worst public health crisis in a century, but he made the right call on vaccines and might be the right person for the recovery. “He can celebrate the great comeback for the country — the great British spirit,” said the official. “In this crisis we have probably seen the best and worst of Boris.”