Boris Johnson needs strong deputy to sort this mess out – Bernard Ingham

After nearly nine months of it, I feel like Mona Lott in the old wartime ITMA show who regularly claimed: “It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.”

There is not much to laugh about. The Government is as deep in the mire as it is in debt. Its backbenchers are restive. The UK is at odds over the extent of preventative measures against the virus. Middlesbrough was briefly in open revolt. Prime Minister Boris Johnson doesn’t know his own ordained restrictions.

The NHS, while as on top of coronavirus as the public’s restraint allows, is neglecting thousands with other potentially life-threatening diseases. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.

And what do we see across the Atlantic? President Trump down with coronavirus after advertising loud and clear with his election opponent, Joe Biden, the depths to which Western democracy has plunged.

No wonder Xi Junping is threatening to annex Taipei (and clamping down on Hong Kong) just as Vladimir Putin snatched the Crimea. When democracy’s cat’s away, the communist mice will play.

We live in dangerous times and there is little evidence of the wartime spirit that triumphed over Hitler. They are also fertile ground for those who think they could have made a better job of the pandemic.

On the basis of my 24 years on the front line of the Civil Service, almost all of it in press offices, I am not so sure. It might help if I explained why.

It is not just that we are fighting an unknown virus without a vaccine. It lies in the nature of our Parliamentary democracy. Westminster and Whitehall are a positive Tower of Babel.

The late Ian Aitken, political editor of The Guardian, used to say that before he left home for the Palace of Westminster he knew there were 650 different voices wishing to speak to him. This, incidentally, was long before the anti-social media was invented.

Similarly, in my day, the PM was only first among equals in her Cabinet. Under the deliberate objective of dispersing power each individual Minister was master in his own Department. As No 10 press secretary I could only persuade, not require, departmental press officers, to follow a certain course.

Some Ministers were as incontinent as a sieve. Others took a cavalier view of collective responsibility. There have always been senior civil servants and Ministerial advisers who cultivated particular journalists without divulging their line to the department’s official spokesman. Just try controlling the Government’s message in these circumstances.

After trying for nearly a quarter of a century believe me, it is difficult, even working for as dominant a PM as Margaret Thatcher. It was damn near impossible what with Wets, Geoffrey Howe at the Foreign Office and Chancellor Nigel Lawson demanding he be allowed to run the economy without let or hindrance.

Moreover, those days 30-40 years ago were in a more orderly age. Today I sometimes think we are governed by leaks. That is doing neither Ministers nor civil servants any good.

On top of this Covid has brought new challenges. 
Fighting it is rather like two 
blind men boxing in the dark with an army of “experts” guiding their ring craft without themselves knowing much about the art.

We should also recognise that the Government as a whole from the Prime Minister to the lowliest junior is relatively inexperienced while having to face the worst overall challenge since the Second World War.

To make matters worse, Dominic Cummings has fractured the Government machine just when it needed maximum cohesion.

Having said all that, I find it difficult to believe that things would look such a mess had Boris got the equivalent of Lord Whitelaw at his elbow. Mrs Thatcher never spoke a truer word when – oblivious of its double meaning – she said: “Every Prime Minister needs a Willie”.

We spent hours discussing the problem when he was responsible for Government presentation. Even then it too often looked a mess, especially during the “banana skin years” of the mid-1980s.

This begs one question: Does untidy Boris care what it looks like?

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Thank you

James Mitchinson