Boris must find his courage to lead us out of coronavirus

As Donald Trump has said, most people shouldn’t be afraid, or have their lives defined by the coronavirus

This should have been the greatest day of Boris Johnson’s political life – better even than the election victory last December. He was supposed to be making his keynote address to the Conservative conference in Birmingham, soaking up the adulation of the Tory faithful grateful to him for delivering the party’s biggest parliamentary majority for a generation.

In the event, he gave his address yesterday, alone and online, losing the personal connection with his audience that the digital medium denies and on which he thrives. It felt like a metaphor for his premiership.

Had the conference gone ahead as planned, Boris would have been in his element. Party conferences were always his forte. For 10 years or more he was the star turn; the one fringe speaker guaranteed to have them queuing around the block.

His first outing as PM in Manchester last year was a subdued affair because he did not have a majority, had just been reprimanded by the Supreme Court for proroguing parliament, and everything felt up in the air, not least when – and even whether – we would leave the EU. The only way out was an election and that conference was the launch pad, replete with the slogan that would become the key message of the campaign: Get Brexit Done. His speech last year was upbeat and positive, that of a politician who believed in Britain, who understood its history, who appreciated its achievements and had confidence in its future. He did not want this country to be defined for ever by its membership of the EU. We could grow and prosper after we’d left.

As he demonstrated yesterday in setting out an array of post-covid economic ambitions, Mr Johnson still cleaves to this sunny outlook, despite the lowering clouds that now hang over his premiership. This was not the speech of a broken man on his way out and, given the unbelievable pressure he is under, he acquitted himself well.

You may disagree with the Government’s approach to tackling the pandemic and its excessive reliance on the gloomiest of scientific advisers; but not for a moment can anyone consider the task either easy or enviable.

Mr Johnson is trying to strike a balance between the requirements of public health and those of the economy and wider social and cultural life. We know there are people inside the Government pushing him towards much tougher controls than we have at the moment. He is getting it in the neck from both sides. His political opponents will attack him come what may, supporting the harshest lockdowns possible while then complaining about the consequences.

However, it is among his supporters that his real difficulties lie. Many of those who backed him for the leadership did so because they share his instinctive liberalism and cannot reconcile that with what they see now – a hesitant and uncertain individual in thrall to a tiny group of advisers whom many Tory MPS simply do not trust (the disdain is mutual).

We easily forget that in the leadership contest 16 months ago his rivals promised to avoid the general election at which it was assumed the Tories would be obliterated. Mr Johnson was portrayed as untrustworthy, capricious, mercurial, self-centred and unsuited to the great task of rescuing the party from potential oblivion. In fact, he was eminently qualified to do just that and proved it on December 12 last year. He was the ultimate campaigner and election winner, as he had shown by defeating Ken Livingstone twice for the London mayoralty.

There is always an ahistorical tendency to see the crisis we are living through as exceptional, when there have been far worse events before and will be again. What no one knew a year or so ago was that the Brexit stand-off between Parliament and the Government was not the serious time requiring a serious leader. That time is now; and in trying to metamorphose from campaigner into sombre statesman, Mr Johnson is leaving his comfort zone.

He is at his best purveying his infectious optimism and rousing oratory. He is the personification of what politics is supposed to be about – persuasion, enthusiasm, vision

– even if some question his application and attention to detail. He is someone who, in a crisis, might be expected to lift the spirits and articulate a sense of defiance – and we saw some of that yesterday.

He now sees the pandemic as an opportunity to accelerate trends that were already under way, such as the move to green energy and home working. However, in setting out to build a raft of policies on the wreckage of the “old” economy, Mr Johnson is trying to make a virtue out of circumstances that his approach to tackling the virus has created.

He portrayed this as an epochdefining moment after which nothing would be the same again. But that is only true because his and other governments have closed down normal, perfectly viable activity. Yet this is not a war, nor the Black Death, nor even the Asian flu. We have had worse pandemics in the relatively recent past without inflicting such damage on the country.

While his speech held out hope of “defeating” the virus, Government strategy still emphasises caution and encourages alarm. I have no choice, Mr Johnson said. But he does. While Donald Trump was reckless in contracting Covid and spreading it around, he is surely right to urge people not to be frightened or to have their lives defined by a disease that affects most people only mildly.

Stoicism was once regarded as a virtue, but not where Trump-haters are concerned. How does he have the temerity not to die from an illness that is being treated like an existential threat to humanity? How dare he try to recover and carry on? Only an imbecile would tell people not to be scared.

Yet an earlier American president said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” It is not Trump’s braggadocio that Mr Johnson needs to emulate, but FDR’S courage and good sense. Bojo says he has not lost his mojo but he does seem to have mislaid it somewhere along the way. Let’s hope he has found it again.