All Boris Johnson does is ‘build’ on his failings – Jayne Dowle

It takes a hefty measure of that famous chutzpah to veer from British bulldog to leading architect of the American dream.

Perhaps Mr Johnson thinks that we don’t notice these things. I also understand that there is nothing new under the sun in the PM’s plan. However, inspiration is one thing, vacillation quite another. Especially when the future of a country ravaged by coronavirus and facing epoch-defining economic blight is at stake.

Yet Mr Johnson is turning leadership into fancy dress, shrugging on a different costume like Mr Benn. If you’re a child of the 1970s like me and the PM, you’ll remember that delightful animated television programme. Every episode, an anonymous-looking man in a bowler hat entered the magical fancy dress shop on Festing Road and emerged with a new persona. One week he might be a knight in shining armour, the next a clown.

Watching Mr Johnson’s virtuoso performance these past few months, I’ve been wondering which one he might pop up as next. But, seriously, we need to know where we stand. And what he actually stands for as close aides and senior Ministers veer off hither and thither like a herd of particularly disobedient cats.

Dominic Cummings, an unelected advisor, is allowed to take an axe to the Civil Service. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary for goodness sake, rewrites the quarantine plan every time the weather changes. And Robert Jenrick, as well as reportedly stretching lockdown travel rules, seems to think that, as Housing Secretary, planning laws don’t apply to him.

A strong, even occasionally silent, figure who rises Colossus-like above the fray would be a welcome presence right now. As a classicist, Mr Johnson might like to ruminate on this for a while instead of doing press-ups for the cameras.

Not for the first time, I’m wondering what it would be like if former Labour premier Gordon Brown was in charge. Criticised for his lack of communication skills, and generally thought of by voters as something of an oddity, the reserved Scotsman rescued the UK from bankruptcy after the 2008 crash.

Only now, with revisionist distance, can we perhaps fully appreciate the reassurance a silent – even sullen – hand on the tiller brings. And indeed, although I will never forget – or forgive – growing up under the shadow of pit closures and steel redundancies in 1980s South Yorkshire, with hindsight, I do respect Margaret Thatcher’s iron grasp of reality.

I also admire her iconoclasm. There was no-one like her before, and no-one like her since. Mrs Thatcher didn’t just break the mould of British political leadership, she was the original disruptor.

And she told it brutally straight. What she would have made of Mr Johnson’s personal evasiveness, public gaslighting, sorry, information campaigns and the weasly likes of Matt Hancock ‘in charge’ of health and social care, I cannot imagine.

Indeed, what are we all to make of the Prime Minister’s leadership as we emerge blinking into the sunlight after 100-plus days of lockdown?

I’m quite dizzy this week with the raft of announcements. Take education. Somebody, please, because the man supposedly in charge has clearly been in detention since his catastrophic run-in with the teaching unions.

The abject failure of the Education Secretary has left a vacuum which the populist Prime Minister is eager to fill. Most parents are worrying about pressing problems, such as the fact that by September our offspring will have missed a full six months of classroom learning, but he’s now trying to wow us with a £1bn spending blitz to build new schools and improve existing ones.

Excuse me while I look unimpressed. With respect to the many Yorkshire schools suffering from crumbling walls and leaking roofs, I know from experience that shiny buildings are not the quick fix the Prime Minister would have us believe.

One of the last things the Labour government did was to set rolling the multi-billion Building Schools for The Future programme. In my area, Barnsley, every secondary school was pretty much rebuilt and almost every primary school improved or replaced.

This was more than 10 years ago. Although standards achieved at primary level and GCSE results are making some progress, the cost-benefit analysis is not impressive when compared to more privileged parts of the UK. Address child poverty first, I say.

And don’t you think the last thing any social-distancing school needs right now is the upheaval of major building works on site. It’s one thing to be a disruptor, quite another to be the constant agent of chaos.

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