In just two months, Boris Johnson’s election campaign promises have already crumbled to pieces

Editorial: As the government is slowly learning, sound bites are easy enough to deliver but translating them into concrete strategies and plans is rather more difficult

The staffing crisis facing the NHS and social care sector was already acute long before Boris Johnson came up with his eye-catching plan to boost nursing staffing (Reuters)

First, we witnessed the emasculation of HM Treasury as the engine room of government, in favour of the detested, shambling, muttering dictatorship of Dominic Cummings. Then, in a tragi-comic diversion, the recruitment, and rapid resignation, of a Downing Street “weirdo” adviser, Andrew Sabisky, who had written controversially about race and intelligence.

Swiftly following the brief Sabisky affair came serious allegations of the bullying of senior officials by Priti Patel, the home secretary. Now, as The Independent reports, civil servants at the Department of Health are expressing deep scepticism about the government’s pledge to “recruit” (to use a broad term) 50,000 nurses.

Two months after they won a famous election victory, the wheels on the machinery of the Johnson administration seem to be wobbling, if not actually falling off.

The staffing crisis facing the NHS and social care sector was already acute long before Boris Johnson came up with his eye-catching plan to boost nursing staffing. It was an ill-defined manifesto pledge – it included staff retention as well as fresh recruitment – and it was always going to be difficult to achieve.

No doubt the prime minister and Matt Hancock, his maladroit health secretary, are sincere in striving to meet their own promise (allowing for some legerdemain) and the restoration of some of the funding for nurse bursaries will help. However, the new “points-based” immigration system cuts right across the aim of hiring new nurses, and an official NHS plan to recruit thousands of overseas nurses has already had to be ditched as the aim of reducing immigration has come to fruition. It might be added that a severe shortage of care workers – not defined as a labour shortage sector – will merely add to the pressures on nursing staff. It takes some perverse ingenuity to try and recruit nurses and care workers while simultaneously cutting off the supply.

Two things seem to be happening in Whitehall. First, that simple sound bite campaign pledges that are sometimes mutually contradictory are difficult to reconcile and to translate into concrete coherent policy and workable strategies and plans. The effort involved in trying is plainly putting a severe strain in every department of government. They are attempting to fit Mr Johnson’s soaring rhetoric and insouciance to spending taxpayers’ cash money into figures on a spreadsheet that will actually add up. It is hard work.

Such strains are exacerbated by the second unfortunate fact about the Johnson administration, which is its chaotic way of doing business, especially with too many ministers still visibly out of their depth after the reshuffle. Even more than under Theresa May, this is an intellectually underpowered cabinet.

Demanding the illogical and the impossible of the civil service is one thing – they are used to that. But ridiculing their abilities, undermining their authority and ignoring their advice simply means that a minister or a super-advisor such as Mr Cummings will spend too much time in employment tribunals, infighting and getting even less done. You don’t need to be a super-forecaster to see where this is likely to end; in tears.