Boris Johnson and Ministers failing competence test – Bernard Ingham

Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, is almost daily canvassed for the chop over anything from wearing masks in schools to vaccination and the examination system. To be fair, he has not been helped during the pandemic by local councils and the teachers’ unions – as distinct from individual teachers.

Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is regularly blasted for promising the earth, like her boss, and achieving little to contain crime and immigration. Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, would not be first choice as organiser of a grand tour while Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, was ‘missing in action’ as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.

It would be unfair to saddle the new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, for the failures of the NHS, including the waiting list. But the Government cannot expect to bask in the glory of its undoubted international achievement in vaccinating 75 per cent of the adult population from scratch.

Then we have the fallout from Brexit with the EU trying to colonise Northern Ireland and British agriculture worried it will be undermined by the 67 or so deals that Trade Secretary, Liz Truss, has industriously signed since we left the EU.

Nor does the Government seem very effective in counteracting the Scottish National Party. The SNP has so far got away with a host of searching questions about the “independence” for which it lusts. Perhaps Westminster thinks Holyrood will collapse under its own incompetence and political correctness – a view encouraged by its call to end North Sea oil and gas development.

After all, it was the prospective oil and gas bonanza from “Scottish waters” that gave Scottish Nationalism lift-off.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak seemingly floats above all this. He is more popular than the PM and is frequently canvassed as his obvious successor. But, if he is as clever as many think he is, he will not be kidding himself about his likely popularity when he is forced to get to grips with the budget deficit. The day of reckoning cannot be far away.

You may reasonably argue that the Government deserves a lot of leeway for its handling of the worst pandemic for just over a century. I certainly have never made any bones about it.

I and my former Civil Service colleagues are profoundly relieved we have not had to handle such a crisis.

But the situation is changing with this week’s lifting of Covid restrictions. From this day forth the public will expect more of its Government now that vaccination has controlled, if not eliminated, Covid.

There is not, of course, much pressure on the Government from a disastrously split Labour Party. Nor does there seem any prospect of Her Majesty having a Loyal Opposition worthy of the name, even if Boris’s government goes down with all hands on deck.

Which, incidentally, raises the question as to whether there has ever been a time when British politics was so starved of talent as today.

I am fed up of telling Boris to snap out of it and rapidly coming to the conclusion that, for all his undeniable charisma, he would have done better to stick to his writer’s craft.

What then is to be done when the place seems to be falling apart?

Well Johnson, Williamson and Patel provide the clue. Get yourself a coherent strategy, give the impression that you are not all talk and little achievement and know what you are doing. And in the case of Williamson demonstrate you are in command of your brief so that parents, pupils and students know where they stand.

A government that is driven from pillar to post and scratches around for clues as to how to make the presentational best of its self-induced turmoil is, by definition, not a government, but a vessel adrift on the high seas of events.

In the end only one man can bring order and a consistent, systematic approach to Harold Macmillan’s “events, dear boy”. That man is Boris Johnson. I profoundly wish for all 66m of us that he soon reveals hidden talents.

Meanwhile, irony of ironies, people daily risk life and limb to land illegally on our shores to add to Patel’s woes and the housing shortage as Afghanistan implodes. If it is any consolation, it does not say much for France and the EU.

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