J is for Judgment

An open letter to Boris Johnson

Dear Prime Minister Johnson

or may I call you Boris since you are now to be perceived as one of the people,” in it together”? I wish you well on your recovery from Covid 19 and I despise those who have made political capital out of your illness and I wish you no harm as a fellow human being.

Whilst I disagree strongly with decades if not centuries of the policies of your party, I know you are not responsible for all that, but you have willingly picked up the mantle. On a personal level, l am given to understand that your position on Brexit had more to do with seeking the highest office in politics rather than conviction and now you have achieved it. Your personal approval ratings are high as the jolly man who promises to “Get Brexit Done!” But this pandemic means that all bets are off, Brexit almost irrelevant for now except that the benefits of international co-operation have never been more needed or more obvious. Furthermore, now that you have experienced the very best treatment by a National Health Service which your party has done so much to wear down under your plans – to change it into an American for-profit system – I hope you have seen the results of those policies, understaffed, under-resourced, yet offering heroic service to the nation in the present crisis.

I hope when you return to work after the rest which your father has prescribed for you, that you’ll see things in a different light – you may question the wisdom of your earlier judgments. I know you will be surrounded by a cabinet full of the people who still believe in austerity as the default position, the same people who pressured this country into Brexit and they will not be happy to see you turn your ideas around but I beg you to do so for it is not possible for this country or indeed the world to return to things as they were. Do you endorse your stand-in having said, whilst you were ill, that “this is not the time to be thinking of a raise in salaries for nurses.” Surely you of all people must now agree that there can be no better time…

You may wish to emulate the man I understand to be your hero – Winston Churchill – a man who made many errors of judgment in his career before finding his ultimate role as leader of the country in a time of war, much as you are now, However, remember, despite having led us through the war successfully, Churchill was disappointed to lose the election in a landslide to Labour after the war, because the people knew by then, that they were entitled something better and they rejected those who traditionally felt entitled. This is how the Welfare State was born and the time has come for the government to renew the Social Contract and rebuild the Welfare State for the people, or as Labour would have it “For the Many Not the Few”. After your election victory you realized you had to look after the so-called Labour red wall seats or else you might lose at the next election. None of us could have foreseen that this crisis would spring up so quickly on your watch, but here it is – your Churchill moment. How are you going to play it? You have the chance to be an outstanding leader if you dare to take a radical position as the times call for. Or you can just attempt to restore things as they were with the massive gaps between rich and poor. But will you then succeed at the next election with an electorate who have had unlimited time to understand and consider how we got to this place in such a poor state of preparedness and to watch how you manage to deal with the crisis.

Please! Go for blue-sky thinking, out-of-the-box thinking, make judgments based on new criteria, try something different – make no mistake that is what is required in what will be a new world order.

PS Your senior advisor – the self-styled Disruptor, Dominic Cummings – is he the right man for the job now. Breaking things is so much easier than trying to fix them and Covid 19 has surely given him as much disruption as even he could wish for -just saying…