Read on Twitter
I know the obvious counterfactual is what would pandemic management have been like under Corbyn (prob couped by his own party in March 2020). But it's just as interesting to ask what would it have been like under Cameron > https://twitter.com/mattyrichy/status/1354369274199085057
I suspect he would have locked down (very) slightly earlier than Johnson did, would not have shown off about shaking people's hands or admitted his govt was considering a herd immunity approach (though it certainly would have!) But would the substance have been any different?
It was Cameron and Osborne who gutted NHS capacity. I very much doubt they would have had any more success in procuring PPE or setting up an adequate test-and-trace system. They were similarly fond of handing out govt contracts to incompetent swindlers
And they would have been even more keen to open up the economy as quickly as possible. They would have pushed policies like Eat Out to Help Out, school opening and the university accommodation fiasco just as hard. Overall, I suspect we'd be looking at a very similar death toll
Which is why attributing the disaster to the individual "incompetence" or "populism" (lol) of Johnson and his ministers is not only wrong but obfuscatory. Barring some presentational differences, there is almost complete continuity with what came before
This is why I've always found it bizarre when people call Johnson a "right populist" and compare him to people like Trump & Bolsonaro. Their UK equivalent –from the rogue, outrider section of the elite– was Farage...
Johnson was always an insider, a conventional career politician who was just slightly more unscrupulous than his peers. He hitched his career ambitions to Brexit once it already had its own momentum. He never pushed the boundaries of national debate, never mobilised anyone...
...who wasn't already mobilised. He's never held mass rallies or tried to communicate directly via social media. He's not anti-vax or anti-mask or even, really, anti-lockdown. During the pandemic he's just made the same economic calculations that any other Tory leader would have
His leadership didn't represent the takeover of the Tories by a populist rabble: it represented the traditional Tory elite *regaining control* of the rabble. The rupture from the GOP elite to Trump can be overstated ofc, but from the Tory elite to Johnson there was none at all
All of which is to say that the reason the UK has the worst covid death rate in the world is not because of "populism" or Johnsonism (which doesn't exist). It's because of mainstream modern conservatism...and the opposition's disastrous failure to oppose it
