The prime minister followed the advice of government scientists and imposed three long lockdowns. He emerged promising to lay off the booze and “the delicious late-night binges of cheese and chorizo” and insisted that his energy was unimpaired. The virus laid him low medically as well as politically, as he was hospitalized in intensive care. The prospect of striking a sweet spot in relations with Brussels soured with the onset of the pandemic in the third month of Mr. Johnson nevertheless claimed that his Brexit deal was the “cakiest treaty” possible. “Our policy is having our cake and eating it,” he quipped in 2016, assuring the British public that Britain could leave the European Union but remain within its trade zone.
But he is also a man of appetites and evasions. No other Conservative could have won a landslide by breaking the “red wall” of Labour seats in Northern England, as Mr. The prime minister is affable and witty, a Falstaff with the common touch. Johnson’s humbling is a foretaste of voters’ revenge. As President Biden may find in November, Mr. The bureaucrats who devised the lockdowns and masking rituals are beyond the public’s wrath, but the elected leaders who took their advice are vulnerable. Its economic hangover shows little sign of abating, and the mood in the U.K., as in other Western democracies, is bitter. It was about his greatest strength and weakness-his outsize personality-and his government’s handling of an unprecedented challenge, the Covid-19 pandemic. Johnson’s policies, disarrayed and unpopular though they are.
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