At about 7 P.M. on Monday, Boris Johnson was moved to the intensive-care unit of St. Thomas’s Hospital, on the south side of Westminster Bridge, suffering from COVID-19. Just eleven days before, the Prime Minister, who is fifty-five, told the nation that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, had mild symptoms, and was self-isolating. Last Friday, Johnson, who continued to work long days at Downing Street, was unable to emerge from isolation, because he was still running a temperature. The Guardian reported that St. Thomas’s, which has been treating Britain’s COVID-19 patients since the start of the outbreak, had readied a bed for the Prime Minister. On Sunday afternoon, after waking from a nap and feeling worse, Johnson had a video consultation with his doctor and was taken to the hospital for tests. Johnson’s spokesman replaced the word “mild” with “persistent” to describe the Prime Minister’s symptoms. On Monday, Johnson continued to read government papers in bed. Then he was given oxygen, but his condition worsened. In the late afternoon, at the daily press conference to update the nation on the progress of the pandemic, Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary and Johnson’s official deputy, said that the Prime Minister was still “in charge” of the government. But that had changed by the evening. There were reports on Monday night that Johnson was admitted to the I.C.U. after receiving four litres of oxygen, rather than the fifteen that many patients are given, and that he was being treated with an abundance of caution. He was conscious and had not been intubated and put on a ventilator. On Tuesday morning, there was “no change” in the Prime Minister’s condition.
Johnson is a feel-good politician. Although he has been Prime Minister for less than a year, he has been a more or less permanent fixture in British public life since the late nineties: comic, tousled, knowingly outrageous, and usually ensnared in one drama or another. A large part of Johnson’s political identity and appeal derives from his undeniable vigor. Johnson is heavyset, but he is a keen tennis player and cyclist. He loves table tennis, which he calls “whiff whaff.” In May, 2006, Johnson wiped out a German international soccer player, Maurizio Gaudino, during a charity soccer match—an act of apparently baffled British public-school violence that is replayed endlessly on YouTube. I checked the comments on Tuesday morning: “Get well soon you absolute wrecking machine!”
Getting stuck on a zip line during the London Olympics and shoulder-charging a Japanese boy during a game of touch rugby during a trade mission have been part of Johnson’s expressive energy. Unusually for a world leader, he has an unspecified number of children by an unspecified number of partners. (Johnson’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, who is recovering from symptoms of the coronavirus, is pregnant.) The British government, like almost every government, has made mistakes in its handling of the pandemic, but part of the problem, particularly in the early stages, was that COVID-19 is not the kind of challenge that Johnson was born to solve. This is a politician whose best known aphorism is “having your cake and eating it.” He couldn’t bluff his way through the coronavirus. In his initial briefings to the British public, Johnson struggled to find the right tone. He couldn’t bear to be grim or censorious. As late as March 22nd, he was still resisting a national lockdown. “Other countries that have been forced to bring restrictions on people’s movements altogether—as I say, I don’t want to do that,” Johnson said. The following day, Johnson finally imposed restrictions on businesses and people’s lives. In doing so, he also found a seriousness and a language that helped to unify the country for the emergency. Four days later, Johnson tested positive for the virus. It is genuinely shocking to see him laid low.
Now more attention—not less—will be paid to how Johnson’s inexperienced administration responds to the crisis in the coming days. Since the Prime Minister contracted the virus, COVID-19 has ripped through the small, close quarters at the top of the British state. The country’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, is now back at work after recovering from the virus, but neither of Johnson’s two most senior advisers, his seventy-year-old chief of staff, Edward Lister, or Dominic Cummings, are currently at their desks in Downing Street. During Johnson’s self-isolation last week, gaps appeared between various government departments responding to the outbreak, particularly around the issue of testing, which has been a shambles. On Monday, Raab, who is Johnson’s “designated survivor,” revealed that he had not spoken to the Prime Minister since Saturday. Raab’s most senior job before becoming Foreign Secretary was an unhappy four-month stint as Theresa May’s chief Brexit negotiator, in 2018. He is not a deputy Prime Minister in any conventional or constitutional sense. Speaking on BBC on Tuesday morning, Michael Gove, Johnson’s longtime ally and Minister for the Cabinet Office, stressed that any decisions made in Johnson’s absence would be made “collectively” by senior ministers and officials. Gove declined to say who was currently in charge of Britain’s national security. Shortly afterward, Gove announced that he was self-isolating, too.
If, as seems likely, Johnson requires more invasive or long-term treatment for COVID-19, then there will be pressure to formally appoint an acting Prime Minister with the authority to serve in his place. The last time a British Prime Minister was incapacitated in office was in 1953, when Winston Churchill suffered a series of strokes. His intended successor, Anthony Eden, was also ill at the time, and Churchill’s condition was kept secret from the public until he had recovered. That is not conceivable this time around. In recent days, former Prime Ministers, including Gordon Brown, who helped coördinate the global response to the banking crisis in 2008, and Tony Blair, have been making policy suggestions: create a temporary international institution to unify efforts to develop a vaccine and insure assistance for poorer countries; set up a British government department to roll out a national testing program. (On Monday, officials admitted that none of the 3.5 million antibody tests ordered by Johnson’s ministers from China actually work.) It won’t take much, at this point, for the country to move toward a government of national unity, as it did during the Second World War. As of Monday, Britain had just over fifty thousand confirmed cases of COVID-19, and 5,373 people have died. On Sunday, the Queen recalled her experience as a fourteen-year-old princess, comforting child evacuees from London during the Blitz, to reassure the population. “While we may have more still to endure, better days will return,” she said. “We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.” The peak is approaching now.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we've scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
