[pasabagi]

I sympathise with your desire to separate the private and the public, but where somebody is a deadbeat dad to the point that they seem genuinely unsure how many kids they have, you would question whether they are responsible enough for the job, even if they weren't as feckless and flippant as Boris Johnson.

As conservative prime ministers go, he'd be one of the better ones in recent memory if it wasn't for awful timing. The UK had about twice the death toll as france and germany in the last couple of years, and it's hard not to blame that on Boris, and those around Boris, essentially being the wrong guys for the job. When it's serious, you need serious people making the decisions, and I don't think anybody, Boris included, genuinely thinks he's a serious person.

[gm3dmo]

Failing to turn up to 5 COBRA meetings on the bounce could account for Johnson's failure to grasp the seriousness of the situation he was dealing with. Preferring to be spoonfed reassuring pap armchair experts like like Cummings show a clear lack of judgement.

[pasabagi]

Well, yeah. He's clearly not a particularly technically-minded or diligent kind of person. I don't think anybody thinks he is, Dominic Cummings said that BJ is actually pretty conscious and self-aware about this.

I think the UK was kind of a perfect storm where Boris was both the least suited prime minister for a crisis in recent history, and the british state resources were really depleted after a decade of austerity - which also wasn't particularly good for the health of vulnerable people in general.

I'm not really particularly anti-Boris specifically, though. The nice thing about him is he clearly doesn't really care about politics. He's not a hardcore ideologue like Osbourne, or Javid, or even Blair. He's just interested in ratings, polling, and power. So I think his political program is probably better than Cameron's was, for instance, just because he's a populist, and the british public generally has more common sense than the british elite.

In general, a useless head of state isn't too bad, if you have a good state apparatus that gets all the real work done while they basically entertain the public. That's what Boris was supposed to be. Unfortunately, the pandemic happened, and a majority of the people surrounding him turned out to be morons.