Boris Johnson’s mindless optimism won’t do a thing to pull us out of this coronavirus crisis

The prime minister seems to have reacted to his illness with the same casual disregard with which he treats everything that has ever crossed his path, writes Matthew Norman

Johnson characterised his pre-hospital mindset as a 'terrible buoyancy' (EPA)

In this age of wonderment, it’s hard to limp through a day without entertaining a thought that not long ago seemed unthinkable.

Today’s entry in the knock-me-down-with-a-feather file is an article of potential historical import in The Sun on Sunday.

The value of its Boris Johnson interview to future pandemic chroniclers may not be immediately obvious.

On first exposure, it reads like exactly the sort of journalistic colonoscopy – the post-Covid PM joins Lady Gaga on the edge of glory as he prepares to become a political titan – you’d expect. On closer inspection, however, it offers as useful a psychological insight into his failure as there may ever be.

By now, no one who relies on less partisan news resources than The Sun could doubt the staggering ineptitude.

There are many ways to illuminate this, ranging from the general (the enduring shortage of PPE) to the specific (his insane shout-out to the indispensable joys of hand-shaking).

But for starkness and brevity, one statistic tells the story perfectly. Before the pathogen landed, Britain was ranked second, by the Global Health Security Index, in its capacity to handle such a threat.

In one category, in fact, the UK was first of 195 states. So far as “emergency preparedness and response planning”, we were simply the best.

Obviously, one suspects these metrics were outdated, failing to factor in a decade of austerity-imposed neglect.

Even so, it is chillingly bizarre that Britain belied its reputation to such a tragic degree.

It will take a long time to establish the complete explanation for this abysmal underperformance.

But the broad outline can be found in a couple of seemingly innocuous paragraphs within the interview.

Reflecting on his close scrape, Johnson recalls that despite feeling “pretty groggy … wasted … rough”, he had to be “forced” to go to hospital by his doctors.

He was “in denial” about how dangerous the virus was. He found it “hard to believe” he’d deteriorated so dramatically in a few days. “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better.”

This seems the moment to remind ourselves that on 5 April, when he was rushed to St Thomas’, Johnson had been technically in charge of the crisis for more than two months.

Even if he couldn’t find time for Cobra meetings, every hour had heaped the evidence of how unpredictable and destructive the virus can be.

Everyone with a passing interest knew long before April that obese, middle-aged men were at high risk; that the disease could turn very nasty very quickly after a prolonged period of relatively mild illness; that sustained shortness of breath was a red flag symptom requiring urgent investigation.

Everyone, apparently, other than Johnson.

In his defence, he was never less than true to himself. He seems to have reacted to his illness with the same casual disregard with which he reacted to everything that ever crossed his path, including the arrival of the pandemic.

He was in denial about more than his own respiratory system. He had cocooned himself in denial about the wider threat since January.

However you regard Johnson’s fitness for his office, there’s no denying his gift for coining a phrase. “Some terrible buoyancy ... kept convincing me,” he says of his refusal to take it seriously, “that everything would almost certainly be all right in the end”.

“Terrible buoyancy” captures beautifully how his cheery faith in the happy ending condemned thousands to death.

It was this bumbling insouciance more than anything that flipped the rankings, as Britain went in a few weeks from the second-best prepared country on earth to challenger for second place in the global death table.

Positive thinking tends to get a better press, so this once, let’s give it up for the power of negative thinking.

Any self-respecting hypochondriac (I speak from experience) would have expected the worst, nationally and personally, and reacted accordingly even if it struck the less neurotic as a wild overreaction.

The pessimistic prime minister would have chaired every meeting, read every word in the medical journals, micromanaged the stockpiling of equipment, and locked us down the moment the carnage in northern Italy was exposed.

Burying the head in the sand, to the extent of self-admitted ignorance about the severity of this pathogen, is not a sound policy for a national health emergency. This goes some way to explaining the prevalence in the field of scientists over ostriches.

The author of the interview with the prime minister informs us that, though Johnson’s “bounce and optimism are still much in evidence … he has emerged from the life-changing events of the past few weeks as a much more complex figure.

Boris 2.0 is a man who no longer feels the need to play to the crowd.”

Whether anyone outside the magic realist domain of Ebenezer Scrooge and Groundhog Day’s Phil Connors is ever really changed by the experience, however scary, is debatable. I’d be astounded if the indolent showboater doesn’t reemerge before long.

Still, in the spirit of Johnsonian sunniness, here’s hoping all the same. If he truly has changed, no doubt the default dishonesty will be jettisoned with the mindless optimism.

In which case, he will want to honour the memories of the needlessly dead by confessing that the buoyancy of Boris 1.0 proved rather more terrible for them, however close his squeak, than for him.