Boris Johnson’s failed command and control administration

Conservatives once knew that command and control didn’t work. Even if they didn’t know it intellectually, one former Conservative minister told me as he looked in disbelief at the chaos of Johnson’s dictatorial administration, ‘they felt it in their bones’.

This nominally Conservative government has centralised control, Soviet style, into a triumvirate of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings: two pundits and a maniac. Even if they were the greatest politicians in history – and they are not – they would never have been able to cope with the Covid crisis. As it is, they have been overwhelmed, along with the 60,000 or so of our fellow citizens sent to their premature deaths.

The triumvirate have brought the tactics of the Vote Leave campaign, where message discipline and the selling of fantasy were everything, to the administration of a modern state, where the hard facts of a killer virus cannot be spun away.