On 9 February, the British Prime Minister informed the House of Commons that he intended to scrap all of England’s remaining Covid-19 restrictions a full month earlier than the point at which they had originally been due for review, a week before the end of March. This included removing, by 24 February, the requirement for all people infected with the virus to self-isolate.

This news was of course sweet music to the ears of the diehard libertarians in his own party. It was also greeted with typically patriotic jubilation by the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper, which the following morning announced that the UK would ‘lead the world’ in its strategy to ‘leave the pandemic behind’, and declared the imminent arrival of what it called ‘freedom day’. 

The Guardian was rather more circumspect on the subject. Alongside this story, its front page also reported the news that more than fifty people would be facing questions from London’s Metropolitan Police in relation to their possible involvement in a series of unlawful social gatherings hosted by government figures (including several attended by the Prime Minister) during periods of pandemic restrictions and lockdowns. It later emerged that this pool partygoers of interest to the police would include Boris Johnson himself.

No doubt much to Mr. Johnson’s disappointment and chagrin, the front pages of the Telegraph, Times and Mirror were that morning similarly dominated by the ongoing saga of ‘Partygate’ rather than by his declaration of the end of the Covid crisis. Meanwhile, The Independent cited former Tory Prime Minister John Major’s condemnation of Johnson’s ‘brazen’ and ‘unbelievable’ attempts to excuse himself from responsibility for these clear breaches of his own administration’s rules. Perhaps unsure which direction the public mood might take, The Sun newspaper, rather unusually, kept its head down, and led instead with the tale of a premier league footballer alleged to have mistreated his pet cat.

It would be unmannerly and even churlish to suggest that Mr. Johnson’s decision to accelerate his own timetable for the trashing of Covid measures might be part of an attempt to turn around his own political fortunes, and, in particular, to restore his personal popularity among his core supporters. Without explicitly ascribing quite that degree of cynicism to this policy development, the BBC nevertheless observed that ‘questions are being asked about the politics of the move’ and noted that one medical expert had described this new approach as ‘as either brave or stupid’. A few days later, the BBC cited another scientist calling the gambit a ‘step too far’.

On 11 February, the Daily Mirror went on to headline the claim that scientific advice had been ‘sidelined in Johnson’s rush to end of Covid rules’. That week had seen the average Covid death rate in the UK exceeding 200 cases a day.

On the day of the Prime Minister’s announcement, the BBC had also reported that the police were reviewing their initial decision not to investigate a Downing Street Christmas quiz that had been held in 2020. This news followed the publication of a photograph of Mr. Johnson at that event: the picture showed Johnson standing alongside two colleagues, one draped in festive tinsel, and, in the foreground, an open bottle of sparkling wine. That occasion had previously been described by the Prime Minister’s office as an exclusively virtual event. That same day, it was also reported that a major donor to the Conservative Party had admitted that he believed that Johnson’s political career was past the point of no return: ‘if you lose moral authority,’ he said, ‘I think you should leave.’

As the evidence against Boris Johnson has continued to mount, and as his detractors in the media and in his own party have continued to call for him to quit, it seems unclear what his next move might be. He has nevertheless struggled on in his attempts to buy himself a little more popularity and a little more time, through acts of characteristically unthinking optimism, in the apparent hope that the resurgent glow of a national feelgood factor, however fleeting and illusory, might somehow reflect well on him.

Earlier this month, he appointed one of his most grotesque cronies, Jacob Rees-Mogg, as ‘Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities’. Mr. Rees-Mogg might be considered a modern-day version of a Charles Dickens character, as coldly calculating as Thomas Gradgrind, and as obsequious, unappealing and duplicitous as Uriah Heep – if only there were anything modern-day about him at all. He resembles an incongruous caricature of a Victorian gentleman, with a political morality, vocabulary, class-consciousness and fashion sense to match. 

Rees-Mogg appears especially suited to his new role insofar as he is very clearly aware of the commercial opportunities offered by Brexit. He was not only a zealous campaigner for Britain’s departure from the European Union, but has also seen significant gains in his financial fortunes since the country voted to go it alone in 2016.

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The day after his appointment, The Independent newspaper reported concerns as to a potential conflict of interests facing Mr. Rees-Mogg, in terms of the relationship between his ministerial and business portfolios. The paper noted that Rees-Mogg is a major shareholder in an $8 billion investment fund focused upon major economies outside Europe, the kind of markets on which the government’s post-Brexit trade deals have concentrated, and which, as the paper observed, ‘Mr. Rees-Mogg will be steering policy around’.

It was reported by the same paper that day that the Prime Minister’s freshly appointed Director of Communications had displeased his new boss when he had revealed in an interview that Johnson had sung ‘I Will Survive’ while welcoming him to the job. He had also told a reporter that the Prime Minister was ‘not a complete clown’. Moreover, he had shared on social media John Major's scathing critique of Johnson. This was not necessarily the most auspicious start for Downing Street’s incoming communications supremo. It was also reported that he had commented (some four years earlier) that Mr. Johnson had regretted having supported the Brexit campaign in the first place.

Yet, despite this wealth of embarrassments, Boris Johnson doubtless feels he still at least has the so-called ‘Brexit dividend’ to draw upon in his various schemes to bolster his diminishing stock of public goodwill. It is, of course, merely a political dividend rather than an economic one. Brexit is never going to do much, for instance, to benefit the standards of living of the people of the UK.

He has therefore, at the height of his political problems, been able to throw his allies in parliament and the press some scraps of consolation, in the form of promises of legislation designed to remove swathes of European laws from the UK’s statute books. He has also primed his new chief of staff to herald the dawn of a ‘smaller state’ but brought forward effusively enthusiastic (albeit insubstantial) plans for the social, economic and cultural ‘levelling up’ of the more deprived areas of the country, in his continuing efforts to appeal simultaneously to both the conservative and progressive wings of his own party, and to make people believe that things might really get better under his leadership. 

He has even, as a sop to his fickle allies, threatened the future of the national broadcasting organization which had once propelled him to extraordinary heights of fame, through the frequent appearances he used to make on one of its more popular shows. In a typically rabble-rousing ploy, the Prime Minister, the BBC’s most prodigal offspring, has demonstrated a sudden determination to bring that corporation down in a blaze of blinding devastation – like the former reality TV star Donald Trump turning the anger of his supporters towards the very media which had spawned him – or like Frankenstein’s monster bearing the corpse of its late creator onto its own funeral pyre.

There seems little doubt that Johnson will continue to try to distract his dwindling audiences with similar acts of political legerdemain in increasingly desperate bids to court their support and to divert their attention away from the utter farce into which his administration has descended. These classically populist gambits are again straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook, riffing carelessly upon a culture of engrained xenophobia and anti-European sentiment, decades of discontent born out of domestic disparities in wealth and power, a common distrust of the liberal intelligentsia in the supposedly elitist media, and an overwhelming sense of impatience and exasperation as we near the end of two years of this terrible global pandemic. In the crazy gamble of this final tactic, he has once more clearly demonstrated his eagerness to base public health policy not on the guidance of scientific authorities but upon the exigencies of his own political survival.

So, one feels one must ask, with some trepidation, what might be next for Mr. Johnson, when his current bag of political tricks runs empty, as it of course eventually must? At this point, it remains uncertain how far he might be willing to go. After all, even his most libertarian friends might draw the line at the legalization of recreational drugs, the return of cigarette-smoking to public bars, or the removal of speed limits from Britain’s motorways. He has already given everyone two additional days of holiday in June to mark the Queen of England’s Platinum Jubilee. He cannot really go much further on that point to boost his approval ratings: the Treasury might balk at any prospective proposals to give the entire population free beer, balloons and ice cream.

Rather more worryingly, of course, he might, like so many leaders before him, look to venture a crowd-pleasing display of machismo by flexing his political muscles in some dramatic intervention upon the world stage, in one last mad shot at proving his worth to his most hawkish associates. A demonstration of a country’s global power always wins votes. Yet a Prime Minister’s Falklands moment can so easily turn into their Suez, their Iraq. 

The major Tory donor who called this month for Mr. Johnson to resign argued that today’s urgent global challenges require ‘very serious, engaged politicians’ and suggested that this particular incumbent of Downing Street was hardly best-suited to address the current environment of international crisis. It is a situation which requires that a nation’s allies and opponents both appreciate its leadership’s consistency and integrity; that they can be sure of its reliability and resolve. Unity is clearly crucial at times of national and international emergency, but unity requires confidence and trust in the strategy, authority and moral probity of one’s leaders. There are those who feel it’s time for Britain to find a leader whom it can unite behind.

The week that Mr. Johnson declared his intention to risk the complete lifting of England's coronavirus regulations, the Leader of the Opposition had been threatened in the street by an angry mob. This group had apparently been provoked by the Prime Minister’s false and baseless claim that the Labour leader had, years earlier, been involved in the decision not to prosecute a notorious paedophile. The capricious premier had made this allegation a week earlier, against the advice of his senior aides, in the heat of parliamentary debate. Despite extensive concerns raised by many of his own colleagues, he had refused to withdraw his comments, let alone apologize for them. Sir Keir Starmer has since revealed that, as a result of those reckless remarks, he was received threats to his life.

Like a wounded feral beast, Mr. Johnson, when cornered, seems likely to lash out in a rash and disproportionate fashion, keen to escalate hostilities and careless of the collateral damage this may cause. Alongside relatively inexperienced leaders in Germany and France (one new to his nation’s highest office, the other still quite new to global statesmanship), and disappointingly ineffectual leadership in the White House, the international community might have hoped for something rather better from the UK.

As both the British and the American peoples now know, this is the kind of hazard a nation takes when it elects to its highest office a charming but lazy man-child, a bombastic swaggering narcissist, more cunning than clever, and nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, lacking substance and focus, inconstant and prone to petulance and random bouts of levity and ill temper. Both his party and his country deserve so very much better than this. The world needs much more than this.