When taking office following the debacle of the Suez Crisis in 1956, Harold Macmillan, later the 1st Earl of Stockton, was asked by a journalist what could blow his government or any government off course. He replied ‘events dear boy, events’. He was voicing the view that a government can come to power with a big majority, lots of public confidence in it and being streets away in having a good public image when compared to the public image of the opposing party. Macmillan was correct, it is unforeseen events that shatter governments and destroy public confidence in a political leader or a political party.

Macmillan’s government itself was later destroyed by the Profumo Affair where the then Minister of War, John Profumo had been caught out having a relationship with Christine Keeler a prostitute who had also been involved with a Russian diplomat. This indiscreet relationship with Ms Keeler and her connections to a Russian, was seen as a massive security hole or potential hole at a time when the Cold War was at its height. Macmillan’s government was broken by the Profumo Affair, just as Anthony Eden’s one was broken over Suez. Both government’s were destroyed by events that could not have been perceived or planned for when they came to power.

It’s difficult not to recall Macmillan’s ‘events dear boy events’ quote when considering Boris Johnson and the Coronavirus response. Mr Johnson was elected in December 2019 with a massive Parliamentary majority and on a tidal wave of goodwill from the public who had prayed for a leader who would implement the 2016 EU Referendum result to leave the European Union. Boris Johnson was genuinely popular among the public and his record during his tenure as Greater London Mayor was like a shining sun when compared to the dismal disaster created by the current incumbent Sadiq Khan.

Boris Johnson had everything going for him in December 2019. Not only was he elected with a big majority but he had trounced the increasingly Marxist Labour Party in many of Labour’s Northern strongholds. Those MP’s who were elected with him were not of the Remainiac variety that characterised Theresa May’s tenure, but solid Brexiteers who knew that Brexit must be delivered or public faith in politics as a whole would be gone. But in less than six months, his government is looking as much on the ropes as Eden’s and Macmillan’s were when these governments’ were overtaken by events.

As the full economic and social fallout of the possibly unnecessary total lockdown start to be understood by more people and intelligent questions start to be asked about how the government has handled the new virus, Boris Johnson’s government is starting to look weak. Oh yes they are still strong in the Brexit area but it is my belief that this is all that is holding up public support for Mr Johnson’s government.

Many people such as myself, voted for the Conservatives not just because the alternative, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was so damned unpalatable, for a multitude of reasons, but because we wanted to see Brexit delivered, Britain’s borders secured and traditional rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of opinion be restored. Coronavirus, or rather the Conservative government’s response to it, has killed off much of the goodwill that the new government started out with in December 2019.

We have seen a so-called conservative government not just fail over matters such as border control and returning freedom of speech, but fail to be pragmatic over the issue of Coronavirus. Gone seems to be the early promise that the government would force reform on a rabidly leftist BBC and gone also seems to be any prospect of stopping illegal migration. We are even seeing the sort of pandering to minorities that are the characteristic of socialist parties coming from the Tories. There has been much anger expressed on social media over the government hand-wringing over Muslims who cannot celebrate Ramadan in the usual way. It has been noted that there has been no similar governmental hand-wringing over Christians who saw their traditional Easter activities curtailed and Jews for whom Passover this year was a very small scale affair.

This government has also not been as open about major societal problems than it should have been. Despite Home Secretary Pritti Patel talking a good talk about these problems, the government is still unwilling to release the report into Islamic sex crime and grooming that previous Home Secretary Sajid Javid promised the British public.

But it is Coronavirus that is likely to be the primary nail in the coffin of Boris Johnson’s government. It is the unforeseen event that Macmillan unwittingly predicted would derail his government which is going to derail Boris Johnson’s.

The government allowed itself to be panicked and railroaded by the mainstream media into a total lockdown when selective safeguarding of the vulnerable and quarantining of the sick might have been a better policy. It’s looking more and more likely that Covid19 may be following the pattern of many other pandemic outbreaks and following a bell curve. Unfortunately in their panic, the government may have promoted a cure, a lockdown, that may have been worse than letting the disease run its course. We know now that Covid19 is not the Black Death or Smallpox, diseases that killed between 30-90% of untreated sufferers in the case of Bubonic Plague and 30% for Smallpox. Covid19 on the other hand has only a 1.4% death rate among those who contract the disease.

Boris Johnson’s government has done immense damage to the UK by the way that they have responded to it. Britain as a nation is now in debt up to our eyeballs because so many people have been furloughed from their employment with the taxpayer picking up the tab for 80% of these workers wages. The economic damage is so huge that many of those furloughed may not have jobs to go back to as their employers may well have gone bust during the lockdown. The hospitality and entertainment industries have been decimated and it’s more than likely that many pubs, restaurants and venues for music etc, will never reopen. During the Covid time, an alleged conservative government has behaved like the socialists that Britons rejected in December 2019. As with all socialist governments and socialist policies., Boris Johnson is going to find out that as Margaret Thatcher once said, his government will run out of other people’s money.

The economic cost of what may have been an ill-judged total lockdown is going to be compounded by a potential huge social cost. The health cost of the lockdown is going to be immense. With the hospitals to all intents and purposes closed to normal patients and normal activities, we are likely to see a massive spike in non treatable cancers exacerbated by patients not being able to get access to either their GP’s or to specialist cancer testing and treatment. A lot of people who may have had treatable cancers are going to die because the NHS was concentrating on Covid19 and the staff on stupid Tik Tok videos of nurses dancing. The mental health cost of the lockdown is also likely to be substantial. I would not be at all surprised if the number of suicides that have occurred because of the government’s policies over Covid19, both during the lockdown and because so many people will have lost their jobs because of it after it, ends up being similar to the number of deaths caused by the coronavirus itself which is approximately 38.3k. There were 6,507 deaths by suicide in 2018 and I suspect that this number will be considerably higher by the time Britain (hopefully) gets out of the other side of the economic mess that the lockdown has caused.

Then there’s the other social damage that has been done by the response to Coronavirus by a government that is not so much led by science and by calmly looking at the history of various pandemics and epidemics, than by media panic. This damage has taken the form of the fear that both the media and the government has instilled in people and the sort of petty grassing culture that has grown up during this time a grassing culture that would not have been out of place in the old East Germany. As well as the economic damage and the suicides, Britain is going to take a long time to recover from the damage to mutual trust between people themselves. In addition, Britain is now a country where the relationships between state agencies such as the police (who have acted during the coronavirus with neither common sense or probity) and the damaged personal relationships caused by informers are going to be an ongoing problem.

Boris Johnson took over an economy that had only recovered in recent years from the disaster of both Labour Party mismanagement between 1997 and 2010 and the economic crash of 2008. He was sitting pretty with an economy that was getting better and which could have got even more solid once Britain left the EU. Now he’s presiding over a mess the like of which Britain has not seen since the 1930‘s.

Now Boris Johnson, instead of presiding over a nation that was looking forward to the future and was growing in confidence, is governing a country full of people that have been deliberately frightened, are suspicious of one another and are by now unwilling to get back to work and get the country functioning again. Britain, instead of being ready and willing to put the debacle of the Brexiteer/Remainer political war behind us, as we were on the 1st January of this year, is now a nation that is divided, scared and has had the self confidence of its people deliberately knocked out of them.

Boris Johnson is a man I once admired from the day I first saw him in the flesh during a hustings at a synagogue in London when he was running for his first term as London Mayor. I admired his erudition, his no nonsense manner and his willingness to stand up in front of various different audiences, even ones that might be hostile, such as the Jewish Left and make his pitch. Now my view has changed somewhat. Having seen how he’s handled the Covid19 issue I have much less confidence in his ability to deal with such social matters such as communally distinct crimes, increasing the freedom of Britons to voice their views and dealing with the problems caused by two decades of the Left inserting themselves into the public and third sectors and into the Civil Service.

It’s looking more and more likely that Covid19 might be Boris Johnson’s Suez debacle or Profumo Affair and rather than being remembered as the man who took Britain out of the prison that is the EU and who dealt with problems that others have left to fester, he will only be remembered in the context of Covid19 and its subsequent disasters. I believe that it was Enoch Powell who once said that ‘all political careers end in failure of one sort or another’. From my position it looks as if Covid19 and the response to it may be Boris Johnson’s moment of failure as a leader.