Boris Johnson is unhappy.

Apparently he thinks the Covid Inquiry has turned into a witch-hunt against him, because it is demonstrating that – as Professor Simon Wren-Lewis states in his latest Mainly Macro column – he was “hopeless and harmful” and “the combination of refusing to delegate and being completely indecisive was a disaster”.

Prof Wren-Lewis goes on to ask the relevant question, which is: how was Johnson allowed to get into a position where he could do so much harm?

His answer is that the right-wing press put him there:

Johnson’s premiership was the point at which the right wing press gained maximum influence. They knew Johnson would give them that, which is the main reason they boosted his career for so long. Prime Minister Johnson was in good part the result of a few press barons having immense power with little responsibility. The same press that was critical in giving us Brexit was also critical in giving us such a hopeless Prime Minister, and it was their influence that helped delay lockdowns leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

In any assessment of how our political system could have allowed someone like Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister, the role of the right wing press should play a prominent part.

That arm of the media did indeed have immense power to put Johnson in his place. While I disagree with him about the drawbacks of Jeremy Corbyn’s period as Labour leader (we now know the anti-Semitism “crisis” was manufactured by bad-faith actors, purely to keep transformative change for the better out of the corridors of power), Prof Wren-Lewis is right that the incessant concentration on Corbyn, coupled with flag-waving, tub-thumping trumpeting of Brexit (which has proved worse than useless in practice) put Johnson in charge during the Covid crisis:

[Corbyn] was preferable to Johnson… for two clear reasons. The first is that some form of hard Brexit was inevitable under a Johnson administration, but far from inevitable under a government led by Corbyn. The second was that there is no way Corbyn would have ever suggested that Covid was nature’s way of dealing with old people. Tens of thousands less people would have died if he had been PM. Now perhaps Corbyn would have done worse things than Johnson, outweighing the economic costs of hard Brexit and tens of thousands of UK lives lost to Covid indecision, but I have yet to hear any suggestions of what that might be that are at all convincing.

In months before the election the media … spent plenty of time discussing Corbyn’s mistakes, particularly over the issue of antisemitism, but much less time talking about Johnson’s record, racist comments and past failures. If there were extensive discussions about how illegally proroguing parliament signalled an authoritarian style and a threat to parliamentary sovereignty I missed it. I also missed the constant questioning of whether you could trust someone who in the past had made stories up and had lost two jobs through lying.

The analysis Prof Wren-Lewis was missing was available – on the left-wing, social media. This Site published multiple articles on the subject.

Who read them?

All right, put your hands down; you were in a minority then and there are fewer of you now.

The reason there are fewer of you reading This Site now is the purpose of this article.

Prof Wren-Lewis states that the right-wing press has grown to be hugely influential. It is possible that this influence has extended to a point where it is able to suppress opposing voices, by influencing the platforms through which we reach our audience.

And it is possible that the Tory government that won a landslide victory with the help of these press barons has been helping out.

That would be political interference with free speech and free discourse, which is, at the very least, a violation of our human rights.

It makes sense, doesn’t it?

If a right-wing regime, together with its helpers in the right-wing media, wanted to install a complete liability as a national leader, it would do all it could to stifle voices of reason, wouldn’t it?

I have a Freedom Of Information request lodged with the government at the moment, on this very subject.

What do you think the response will be?

Source: mainly macro: How could Johnson have become Prime Minister?

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