Can our Cabinet chart a steady course?

The absence of ‘big beasts’ will make it all the harder to agree a strategy for the nation to leave lockdown

‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,” wrote the Bard. To lose a general in the midst of battle is about as bad as it gets: Wellington stretchered from the field at Waterloo with Napoleon still rampant.

In times of crisis, we look to our leaders for guidance, reassurance, competence and implacability of action. On Sunday, the Queen offered a matriarchal embrace to her people, instinctively understanding the mood of the nation and invoking the indomitability of its character to fight the invisible enemy.

But the words of the head of state can bring only temporary comfort. The executive authority lies in the hands of her Prime Minister and his Cabinet. With Boris Johnson incapacitated, temporarily we must hope, it is to those ministers we now look to make the right decisions and deliver on the pledges already made.

Mr Johnson is not the first prime minister to be stricken in a crisis. In September 1918 while on a visit to Manchester, David Lloyd George fell victim to the Spanish flu then sweeping the world, and collapsed after developing a sore throat and fever. The Welsh Wizard spent the next 11 days inside a makeshift sick room at Manchester Town Hall, too ill to move from his bed and with a respirator to help him breathe. At one point his condition was said to be “touch and go” though its seriousness was kept from the public.

The Great War was all but won and the cross-party Cabinet carried on until Lloyd George recovered to lead the UK’S delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference the following year.

In 1890, another pandemic, the so-called Russian flu, caused even greater political paralysis, if not at such a critical time, laying low the prime minister Lord Salisbury and William Gladstone, the Opposition leader, then aged 81, and 70 members of the Commons and Lords.

Winston Churchill, a 15-year-old at Harrow, penned a poem to the flu. “O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains/ Where Russian exiles toil in chains; It moved with noiseless tread/and as it slowly glided by; There followed it across the sky/the spirits of the dead.” In 1943, Churchill would himself be flattened by a bout of pneumonia aged almost 70 but he had the constitution of a rhinoceros and recovered.

The British system is set up so that the government will carry on regardless of the leader’s health, but it cannot tolerate a long-standing condition that renders a prime minister unable to fulfil his functions. In that case resignation is inevitable, as it was for Bonar Law in 1923, Eden in 1957 and Macmillan in 1963, though the latter was not as ill with prostate problems as he imagined himself to be. Wilson resigned in 1976 fearing the onset of Alzheimer’s.

In our constitution the prime minister is primus inter pares, but some are more primus than others. Mr Johnson is one of them. But the pares matter, too, and this Cabinet is remarkably lacking in experience. It is the youngest assembled for more than a century, and when it was put together most political commentators noted how the absence of “big beasts” had made the No 10 machine more powerful against the rest of Whitehall.

That was the intention, but with the key central figures of Mr Johnson and his two principal advisers Dominic Cummings and Sir Eddie Lister all hors de combat, this now matters far more than anyone could possibly have imagined at the time. It is not a criticism of those trying their utmost to cope with this disaster to point out their inexperience, merely an observation that it is so and that consequences may flow.

When Churchill had to step back on several occasions, he had Clement Attlee to deputise in a War Cabinet. Mr Johnson has Dominic Raab, who would be the first to admit his background has hardly prepared him for such a challenge. He may well rise to it, though let’s hope he doesn’t have to and Boris is up and about again soon.

Michael Gove, who is self-isolating himself, said the Cabinet would work collectively to get the country through but that is much more difficult to do without a prime minister wielding the authority that only he possesses.

For now, the pandemic strategy has been set: to suppress the virus through a rigid enforcement of the lockdown. But within a week or so, huge decisions need to be taken about how long this state of affairs can continue without irreparably damaging the economy and the nation’s future.

There are differing views in the Cabinet on the pace or even wisdom of normalisation. Usually a debate would be had and the prime minister would take the final decision that all others would then follow under the doctrine of collective responsibility. Even as First Secretary of State, a title that has no constitutional clout, Mr Raab may find it hard to find a way through if that disagreement is serious.

As things stand, he probably has enough time to let Mr Johnson recover sufficiently to take up the reins of office again, as Lloyd George did a century ago. But the youth and lack of experience of the top team is still a problem.

Mr Johnson, at just 55, is the third oldest member of the Cabinet. He has run one of the world’s great cities and brings the sort of irrepressible optimism to the job that the country wants. But his team is almost unknown. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, is not even 40 and has only been in the Commons for five years yet he is next in line to take over if Mr Raab falls ill. The Foreign Secretary, an MP since 2010, occupies a post that once might have taken at least 20 years at Westminster and an apprenticeship in half a dozen junior ministries to achieve.

The composition of Cabinets is bucking the demographic trend. As the nation gets greyer, they get younger. In 1931, the average age on formation was 59; by 1987 it was 54 and it is now around 48. A premium is no longer placed on experience and yet those who possess it tend to evince the unflappability of people who have seen it all before and know how to respond in particular circumstances.

Then again, one thing that can be said with any certainty about this crisis is that the most grizzled veteran would be in uncharted territory, even Churchill and Lloyd George.