Johnson underperforms Trump

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This week, both the UK and the US have reported record levels of deaths from the pandemic. The US is reporting truly horrific numbers, and this is rightly being blamed on the chaotic leadership of the outgoing president, Donald Trump, who has spent the last few months fixating on imaginary electoral fraud instead of getting to grips with the pandemic. With the daily death toll passing 4,000 for the first time yesterday, and a total of 356,000 deaths to date, the incoming president, Joe Biden, has a huge task on his hands in trying to get control of a problem which has been ignored and downplayed by his predecessor. We need to remember, though, that absolute figures can be misleading, and relative numbers are usually more informative. With a population of 330 million, one would expect that the US would have a larger death toll than smaller countries even if its leader had given the problem his full attention, although that will provide little comfort to those impacted.

The UK has had a much smaller number of deaths in total. To date, the total is somewhere between 80,000 and 95,000 (depending on whether we start with the official daily running total or the ONS analysis of excess deaths) and has this week gone above 1,000 per day for the first time since April. The UK population is 66 million, about one fifth of that in the US, so one would reasonably expect, even if the level of competence and control was no better than that of Donald Trump (and that’s a very low bar indeed), that the death toll both overall and in terms of the daily peak would be no greater than one fifth of that in the US. Simple maths, however, tells us that it is worse – and significantly so. One fifth of the US totals would amount to 800 per day and an overall total of 71,000, both of which have been comfortably exceeded by the UK’s ‘world-leading’ performance.

What this tells us, in simple terms, is that the UK under Boris Johnson has performed less well than the US under the chaotic regime of Donald Trump. That’s worth repeating: Boris Johnson has demonstrably done an even worse job of managing the pandemic than Donald Trump. Yet still the sycophantic UK media trumpet the ‘world-beating’ promises and statements of Johnson and his cronies as though they have some relationship with fact. Poor management of the pandemic isn’t the only similarity. Both men have had their attention diverted by products of their own imagination – in the US it’s imaginary voter fraud and in the UK it’s the imaginary benefits of Brexit. Both have shown an astonishing inability to empathise with others, particularly those who have lost so much. Both seem to believe that they are the real victims – Trump of a vast conspiracy to steal an election and Johnson of being made to do things he hates. Instead of learning from experience and changing their approach, both heap praise on themselves for their achievements and seem genuinely surprised or even upset when others don’t do the same. And whilst the removal of either doesn’t guarantee a more successful approach, it is in both cases an essential precondition. The difference is that Trump is going now – we could be stuck with Johnson for almost four more years.