Last week the Queen of England was overheard describing the British Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock as a 'poor man.' She was in conversation with Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the time. She began to add that Mr. Hancock was 'full of something. At that point, Mr. Johnson rather unceremoniously interrupted Her Majesty and suggested that his Health Secretary was full of beans. We will never know what Elizabeth Windsor believed Mr. Hancock was full of, though we might hazard a guess. 

The exchange between the monarch and her first minister was both pertinent and prescient.

Mr. Hancock might have been considered a poor man not only because he'd been in charge of the health of the nation at a time of global pandemic but also because he'd become known for repeated gaffes in interviews and press conferences and had over the past year been characterized by the media as the whipping boy of the UK Cabinet.

Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to Boris Johnson and the prime engineer of Brexit, had recently, in testimony to parliament and blog posts, accused Matt Hancock of gross incompetence in office and mendacious conduct. 

Mr. Cummings is not considered a particularly trustworthy figure in British politics. In masterminding the Brexit campaign, he was responsible for several strategically misleading claims. During his time in government, he notoriously invented an extraordinary story to account for his breach of lockdown regulations (which included taking a drive with his family on his wife's birthday to a beauty spot in the north of England to test his eyesight).

But anyone dismissing Cummings's claims that Johnson considered Hancock's failures catastrophic as merely symptomatic of the chagrin of a disgruntled former employee and serial liar was forced to take notice when Cummings published a WhatsApp dialogue in which the Prime Minister depicted his Health Secretary as "useless".

This has all been spectacularly embarrassing, not only for Hancock and the government, but also for the country as a whole as it tries to reclaim its place on the global stage. Even as Britain hosted June's G7 meeting, and while it prepares for November's UN climate summit in Glasgow, its reputation for incompetence, misconduct, and mendacity in the highest office have rivaled the worst excesses of the Trump administration.

Related News

News from Nowhere: Political Reality

Less than two days after the Queen had expressed her sympathy for Mr. Hancock, the British press published photographs of the same minister in an intimate embrace with a senior female advisor. Both are married, but not to each other. Mr. Hancock was, as his boss had said, certainly full of beans. 
In response to this revelation, Mr. Hancock issued an initial statement apologizing for breaching social distancing guidelines. Downing Street expressed continuing confidence in Mr. Hancock. However, it was unclear whether his health minister's infidelities had made Mr. Johnson – a man as well known for his erotic indiscretions as for his ambiguous relationship with the truth – rethink his previously damning judgment of the beleaguered adulterer. However, after the extensive party, public, and media pressure, Mr. Hancock eventually chose on Saturday to resign.

In British politics today, it nevertheless appears possible for senior figures to lie and cheat to retain the support of the most powerful echelons of government. Indeed, both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been shown to have breached the codes of conduct expected of those in high office. There's an ethical vacuum at the very top of this administration whose influence has spread throughout its ranks. When Boris Johnson met Joe Biden last month for the first time, many recalled with some discomfort how very closely Johnson had once got on with Donald Trump.

The UK is in a dire mess. The government's mishandling of the pandemic will result in social and financial impacts for decades to come. Its ambitious targets for the mitigation of global warming were last week decried as so much hot air by its own Climate Change Committee, even as the economic and geopolitical damage of Brexit is starting to hit. Scotland seems more likely than ever to leave the union, and the future of Northern Ireland remains highly precarious. Education, welfare, healthcare, and social care are in freefall; ethnic and generational divides continue to grow; and for the first time in nearly half a century, more people died last year in Britain than were born.

Covid-19 has accelerated and exacerbated a series of catastrophic shifts in British society, but these were coming anyway. Britain has followed the United States into a political populism, an autocratic tendency underpinned by the disruptive impacts of social media, the related resurgence of isolationist xenophobia, and the realignment of concentrations of capital. It remains to be seen how far this crisis of democracy may spread. 

It's not simply that truth, virtue, and reason have been amongst the casualties of this pandemic. The human cost of this crisis has been made far worse by the moral incoherence at the heart of government. 

We are, in short, in a desperate situation. The absurd and lonely figure of Matt Hancock writhing in his disgrace is an apt enough metaphor for the state of the nation.
The project of post-Covid reconstruction will determine the future sustainability of national economies and societies and the global environment. Based on its current performance, it seems far from certain that this particular small island is fit for that unprecedentedly challenging task.