‘Trolley’ Boris Johnson’s reputation for governance careers even further off the rails

As if it needed further underlining, the unique and chaotic nature of Boris Johnson’s regime as UK prime minister was laid bare on Tuesday in the content advisories of British broadcasters as his former top aides gave evidence to the UK’s Covid inquiry.

“Warning: may contain expletives,” said a note on television screens as BBC showed coverage of the evidence of Lee Cain, Johnson’s former head of communications, and Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former top adviser and would-be Svengali, who later spectacularly fell out with him.

The warnings were well justified. Cummings, who, characteristically, appeared in the afternoon in a crumpled shirt, apologised as Hugo Keith, the inquiry’s senior barrister, suggested they would need to “coarsen” their language to wade through a barrage of colourful WhatsApps and other messages harvested from his time at Number 10 during the pandemic.

In the messages, Cummings called ministers “useless f***ing pigs, morons and c**ts”. He argued this was because they, and the UK’s entire system of governance, performed so poorly during the pandemic. He said his insults reflected “a widespread view amongst competent people at the centre of power at the time about the calibre of a lot of senior people who were dealing with this crisis”.

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Cummings, of course, placed himself among this coterie of “competent people”. Johnson was portrayed as something else. It will be a wonder if the former prime minister’s already flimsy reputation for governance ever recovers from the damning image portrayed at the inquiry this week.

On Monday, his loyal former principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, admitted that Johnson’s Number 10 regime was “at war” with itself in the chaotic early days of the pandemic, when the UK pursued and then abandoned a “herd immunity” strategy that would have seen deaths soar.

Contemporaneous notes of the government’s former chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, suggested Johnson thought Covid was “nature’s way of dealing with old people”. Meanwhile, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, said that Johnson “cannot lead” because he kept dithering every day.

Exchanges between Cain, Cummings and Case that were revealed to the inquiry illustrate the despair they shared at Johnson’s unpredictable approach. Cain and Cummings alluded to a nickname for the former prime minister, “trolley”, as in a shopping trolley that can go off in all directions.

The picture painted of Johnson suggests he may face a torrid time whenever the moment comes for him to make his own appearance in front of the inquiry.

The inquiry’s investigators will have to make do without the former prime minister’s WhatsApp messages for the first six months of 2020, including the first few months of the pandemic. Apparently he is unable to retrieve them from his phone. If the messages of Cummings and Cain are anything to go by, then perhaps, for Johnson, it is just as well.