On 17 March, in the second of the daily press conferences that have become a staple of British news during the pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared war on the novel coronavirus. He announced “steps that are unprecedented since World War Two… We must act like any wartime government… Yes, this enemy can be deadly, but it is also beatable… And however tough the months ahead we have the resolve and the resources to win the fight.”
Harking back to Winston Churchill, the second world war and the ‘spirit of the Blitz’, what Johnson is missing is the nature of political popularity in war, and the manner in which positions of political power can crumble away before governments even realise it.
Last November, he could have been forgiven for thinking a pandemic would meet its match in the UK. That was when the World Economic Forum published a league table of different countries’ planning for a pandemic. The best prepared, out of 195 states, was the US, followed by the UK, with the Netherlands, Australia, Canada and Thailand not far behind.
