You might imagine that at some point there will be a reckoning for Boris Johnson on the tragedy he and his government have presided over. Last week Covid-19 took its 100,000th life in Britain, making the UK only the fifth nation to reach that milestone and giving it a higher death rate per million than almost any other country.
The Prime Minister was late to lock the country down in March, late again in autumn, and breathtakingly reckless about the Christmas break. He failed properly to protect care home residents, or to instate a test and trace system functional enough to be effective. To cap it all off, faced last week with the grim evidence of his government’s incompetence, Johnson met it with a lie. “We did everything we could to minimise suffering and loss of life”, he said. He said it twice.
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