‘After three months he has yet to recover his Woosterish touch – and who can be surprised.’
Bernard Ingham
Previous Governments had not balanced the books even after 10 years of wrestling with Gordon Brown’s 2010 £153bn budget deficit. Now we face a deficit at least double that.
OF ONE thing you can be sure in this uncertain world: Boris Johnson will never forget his first year as Prime Minister ending on Friday. Nor will the nation.
Everything was going swimmingly. He had ended the long wrangle over Brexit, subject to settling the details, and won a commanding majority in a general election.
Why, even diehard Labour areas in the North sensibly voted for him.
Of course, the EU would play a long and vindictive game during the transition period but, come December 31, our Prime Minister was looking forward to building a strong sovereign state, freed of all Brussels’ bureaucratic restrictions.
And then the world caught a cold – the unknown coronavirus – which put Boris into intensive care with a child on the way.
After three months he has yet to recover his Woosterish touch – and who can be surprised.
As the pandemic death toll rose, we found our leader with his strong libertarian streak ordering a national lockdown unprecedented in peacetime.
Worse still, the performance of Ministers and Government agencies has been anything but consistent.
It is still inconsistent.
Is retail therapy supposed to be a masked ball or what?
It is far from clear whether a mask is a protection against the virus.
I am not inclined to condemn the handling of the emergency by the PM or his Government.
You have to cut them a lot of slack in judging their performance since nothing was known about the virus when it landed on their plate.
But it has not been a pretty sight and the eventual inquiry into the handling of the pandemic cannot credibly be a whitewash.
We have all a lot to learn from the past six months.
That investigation will hang over Boris’s tenure of No 10. Will he emerge as a passable imitation of his hero, Winston Churchill, who left a trail of monumental mistakes but proved to be the man – the only man – for the job of leading the country in its darkest hour.
This is the $64,000 question as we uncertainly emerge from lockdown, with fingers crossed against a second coronavirus spike.
For, make no mistake about it, Boris has had it easy up to now.
His real test starts on Saturday, with four years left to prove himself.
The issue is not whether he can do it – and, if not him, who on earth is there? – but whether any mortal man can make Britain a thriving economy with social services fit for heroes to live in and a force for good in the world in the years left to him.
Let us not kid ourselves. Previous Governments had not balanced the books even after 10 years of wrestling with Gordon Brown’s 2010 £153bn budget deficit.
Now we face a deficit this year of at least double that and possibly a lot more.
Unemployment stares many in the face.
The retail sector had already been ravaged by shopping online before we ever heard of the virus.
Does anyone, including Chancellor Rishi Sunak, know how to bring Britain’s finances into balance by 2025 with industry and commerce ravaged and without tax rises that could perversely reduce rather than increase the Treasury’s take?
You can be sure that while Boris is wrestling with this conundrum he will be abused from every angle by the Twitterati, and the useful idiots on the hard Left, who seek to turn our democracy first into anarchy and then into a totalitarian Communist state.
It may be argued that Britain is not unique in a world awash with debt. True.
It is also more stable than either France or Germany.
But that serves only to underline the harsh fact that the free world as a whole – and not least its leader, the United States of America – is in a weakened state and threatened in several ways by two ruthless dictators, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who seek Communist world domination.
Like the Twitterati, they will be seeking to undermine us while testing our resolve to defend our way of life when our defences are anything but strong.
And, as luck would have it, this is election year in the USA.
Would Joe Biden be an improvement on Donald Trump?
You might argue he could not be much worse.
But that misses the point.
Is Biden capable of rallying the West instead of exasperating it almost by the hour?
In short, Boris, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
But you are all we have.