Chaos at No. 10
Can Johnson get a grip?
“A circus run by clowns.” “The most inept government in living memory.” And those are the judgements of some of Boris Johnson’s own MPs, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Just 13 months after the Prime Minister took office, verdicts on his administration have “set new levels of obloquy”, mainly directed at its handling of the Covid crisis which has been an “omnishambles”. The discontent goes far beyond his own backbenches, said the Daily Mail; and far beyond Covid. The exams fiasco ( see page 22) is but the latest of a series of U-turns – most recently a last-minute decision to extend the ban on landlords evicting tenants – which give the impression of a government “rudderless and adrift”. If all that weren’t bad enough, the PM returned last week from a summer break (cut short after the location of his Scottish holiday cottage was revealed in the press) to face “a raft of immense challenges”. The national debt has hit an “eye-watering” £2trn ( see page 15); the reopening of schools will involve all sorts of political headaches; unemployment could climb to 2.5 million by midwinter. With Parliament set to return next week, “ministers need to raise their game – and quickly”.
Some hope of that, said Ben Kelly on Reaction.life. When Johnson moved into Downing Street, the “big idea” was that he would confine himself to the role of a hands-off chairman, leaving a team of talented ministers to “crack on with their jobs”, just as he did when he was mayor of London. Trouble is, he chose a “Cabinet of toadies” selected more for their loyalty and allegiance to Brexit than for their ability. Predictably, they have proved “woefully inadequate”. To make matters worse, the Prime Minister has maintained a “Pinteresque” silence throughout the crisis, said Rod Liddell in The Sunday Times. We have waited in vain for any statement on the exams debacle, on the failures of track and trace... and on almost anything else, for that matter. Yet rather than a show of leadership, all we have seen is “a succession of steps in the wrong direction and then some hurried steps back to Square One”. I voted for him last December. “What a sense of disappointment.”
Give Johnson a break, said Stefano Hatfield in the I newspaper. Admittedly, a short address to the nation would have been welcome at this moment of national crisis. But if the PM has lost his customary “sparkly vim”, it may well be down to the after-effects of his bout of Covid-19. And the Tories are by no means on the ropes, said Stephen Bush in The Guardian. Johnson’s own approval ratings may have slumped to just 41%, down 20 points since April; and more voters may now think the Labour leader Keir Starmer would make a better prime minister. But for all the Government’s stumbles, the Tories are still ahead in the polls, albeit by just two percentage points. Plenty of voters clearly believe the party has bungled the crisis; Labour has yet to convince them it could do better.