As someone who has observed government and politics since before I was a teenager back in the days of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan, I’ve been well aware that what damns a Prime Minister and what leads to various political scandals and adverse outcomes for the nation is more often the result of cock up rather than conspiracy. Heath, Wilson and Callaghan were faced with massive economic and industrial problems culminating in the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ which saw strikes nationwide and the dead being unburied due to industrial action. The Trade Unions wanted to control the government but although some TU leaders were Marxists, it’s unlikely that these strikes were entirely the result of a Marxist conspiracy, a lot of the agitation was down to union members wanting higher wages to keep up with rampant 1970’s inflation. The main problem was the Governments of the day failing to deal with industrial strife or stabilise the economy. It was incompetence rather than conspiracy that damned Britain and its economy during that time.

Yes of course some of these leaders were ‘iffy’ and I am thinking here of Heath who was less than honest with the British people about the effects that membership of what was then the Common Market would have on the nation. But on the whole, what damned these governments were not plots and conspiracies by external actors or shady or shadowy secret societies, it was their own incompetence. If Britain was not the ‘sick man of Europe’ there would have been no need to join the EEC, if the Trade Unions had not been given free reign to strike at will and the economy had not been so badly mismanaged then we would not have had the Thatcherite revolution. The ‘Illuminati’ or whatever did not give us Thatcherism, incompetent previous government did. The only way we ended up where we were in the early 1980’s was because of the incompetence and mismanagement of previous governments not by some capitalist conspiracy to bring in Margaret Thatcher.

I know enough about government to know that when things go wrong it’s often not the result of some conspiracy but more to do with incompetence, geo-political events and governments not being ready for unforeseen problems or problems that should have been foreseen but were badly planned for. When things look chaotic and you have a situation where ministers are promoting policies that are quickly dropped or sidelined then this might not be because the Prime Minister is being leaned on by the Illuminati or whatever, but because the situation inside government is chaotic.

Toby Young is a man whom I agree with wholeheartedly on the subject of freedom of speech but less so when it comes to things like vaccination programmes for example or the measures that the government has used to try to handle the Covid crisis. However where I do readily agree with Mr Young, having read various accounts of how the Government handled the early stages of Covid, is that we are not seeing some sinister conspiracy going on but massive and very obvious levels of governmental incompetence.

In an article for Mail Plus, Mr Young said:

The week began with Boris saying he wanted a ‘bonfire of Covid regulations’, only for him to give a press conference yesterday warning of more restrictions to come this winter.

Then there was Professor Chris Whitty’s bizarre remarks on Monday about vaccinating healthy 12 to 15-year-olds, which will have left most parents none the wiser about whether it’s a sensible precaution or not.

The only thing Boris seems to have set fire to this week is his last vestige of credibility.

According to some cynics, this conflicting advice is a deliberate attempt by the Government to gaslight us. Trying to discover some rhyme or reason beneath the recent spate of back-of-the-envelope announcements is to misunderstand what Boris is really doing, which is to deliberately confuse us.

This ‘abusive spouse’ type behaviour can look deliberate to some but as Mr Young said ‘one should never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence’. All through the Covid crisis there has been a lack of joined up thinking by government. At first there was the herd immunity strategy that was quite rightly dumped when it could be shown that Covid was not the same thing as seasonal influenza. Then there’s the lack of prior planning for a novel respiratory virus where what planning was done was centred on the concept that influenza would be the main problem. We also have to take into account that the Government has basically had to make up policy on the hoof based on rapidly changing information about Covid and its effects.

Maybe if we’d had a government that was not somewhat rudderless in the face of Covid, had been able to have consistent messaging and was not cursed with ministers who were alleged to be incompetent such as Matt Hancock, the Government would not have created a situation where people’s trust in government about Covid was so low. Margaret Thatcher’s Government managed to turn an utter and complete cock up situation such as the intelligence and diplomatic failures that led to the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands, into a triumph by taking back the Islands from the Argentine aggressors. Boris Johnson’s government did not manage to turn a bad Covid situation around as well as it should have done. Sure the vaccination programme has been a massive success and Britain is doing better than the USA is doing with regards deaths and hospitalisations because of that. But the messy communication and the incompetence of how they’ve managed other areas of the Covid crisis has led to people seeking their information from various conspiraloons rather than sources that they should be able to trust.

From the beginning this government handled aspects of the Covid crisis badly. We had the mixed messages on masks, the ‘rule of six’, the seemingly incomprehensible tiers system, the public conversations about whether a Scotch Egg constituted a ‘meal’ and so on and so on. All of these along with the fact that when Boris Johnson contracted Covid and was hospitalised and there was no clear alternative chain of command or responsibility contributed to people losing trust in government.

Mr Young characterises Boris Johnson as a ‘wonky supermarket trolley’ wobbling this way and that according to whatever is pushing him. Sometimes that sort of flexibility in a Prime Minister is necessary in order to prevent bad policies doing too much damage but in situations where clear decision making and communication is needed, for example when faced with a pandemic, it’s unwanted and possibly dangerous.

I tend to agree with Mr Young on his main premise, which is that whatever is behind the problems that the Government has had regarding how it has handled Covid is less to do with conspiracy and much more likely to be rooted in a failure of governmental competence.

Britain faces a number of problems in the next few years, some of them economic and which have their roots in the pandemic and others which are social and political such as the rise of wokery and Britain’s porous borders, which need clear and solid leadership if they are to be dealt with. The question for me is whether or not people will trust Boris Johnson to deal with these issues after seeing how his government has dealt with Covid? He might be able to ride on the wave of goodwill brought about by the vaccine programme but I wonder will that be enough to keep him in Number Ten or will an increasing number of people start to demand that a proper conservative take his place? Incompetence is never a good look for a politician and the Covid crisis has provided a large number of examples of incompetence.