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How was Boris Johnson allowed to be the most powerful man in the UK when he had no idea how to do the job?

That’s the big question at the heart of last week’s report by the Covid Inquiry, which explicitly stated that his indecision, incompetence and other failures massively increased the death toll of the pandemic that hit the UK in 2020, months after he was voted into office.

Let’s answer it.

What the report exposes — without stating it outright — is a deeper failure of the United Kingdom’s political system.

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The UK’s system allowed an unfit leader to be sold as “the best option”

Boris Johnson did not become prime minister by accident.

He was selected by a tiny fraction of the electorate — Conservative Party members — then packaged and sold to the public by an overwhelmingly sympathetic right-wing press as the only viable choice in 2019.

Fitness for office barely featured. Scrutiny of his temperament, competence, and judgement was kept to the margins.

The democratic structures that should have filtered out an unfit leader instead elevated one.

The 2019 general election produced a manufactured consensus that Johnson was the only plausible prime minister. That consensus rested on:

• A highly centralised party system, where the party leader is effectively chosen by a narrow selectorate, then presented to the public as a fait accompli.
• A media ecosystem dominated by a handful of right-wing outlets that acted less as watchdogs and more as brand managers for Johnson.
• A campaign that reduced national politics to a slogan, enabling a shallow, personality-driven contest.

The result was that fitness for office barely featured — and certainly not the kind of cognitive incompetence exposed in the Covid Inquiry.

The slogan: The Tory message on Brexit was brutally simple — and Labour’s was muddied

“Get Brexit Done” was a reductive, misleading and dishonest slogan – but those three words turned the 2019 general election into a landslide for Johnson. It was devastatingly effective because it:

• Promised closure to a weary electorate
• Framed Johnson as a man who would “cut through” obstacles
• Cast all opposition as obstructionist or indecisive

Meanwhile, Labour’s position became tortured:

• Keir Starmer, as Shadow Brexit Secretary, pushed for a second referendum when much of Labour’s base simply wanted the party to honour the original result with safeguards.
• That muddied the message and enabled the Tory narrative that Labour were “blocking the will of the people”.

This handed Johnson an artificial aura of clarity and decisiveness — qualities the Inquiry shows he did not actually possess.

Establishment hostility to Jeremy Corbyn distorted the electoral field

Then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — who, in hindsight, would probably have been a far more responsible and scientifically cautious pandemic prime minister — was subjected to the most sustained campaign of hostility in modern UK political memory.

There is no way to discuss 2019 honestly without acknowledging that:

• Then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn faced the most sustained, coordinated negative press campaign in modern UK political history
• Institutions hostile to his economic agenda framed him as uniquely dangerous
• Smears, misrepresentations and personal attacks overwhelmed substantive debate

That campaign shaped public perception far more than the content of either party’s manifesto.

This meant that, when voters looked for stability or seriousness, the media had pre-emptively disqualified the candidate who in hindsight would likely have responded to the pandemic:

• earlier
• more cautiously
• with greater respect for scientific advice
• with stronger social protections
• and with more moral seriousness

Nobody needs to claim Corbyn would have been perfect — but we should recognise that his political instincts aligned far more closely with the responses taken by the countries that handled Covid competently.

By the time voters entered polling booths, the Establishment had already determined who was “credible” — and who must never be allowed near Downing Street.

The consequences are now counted in lives.

Intellectual unfitness at the top

The Inquiry’s evidence leaves little room for euphemism: Johnson lacked the intelligence, comprehension skills, and cognitive steadiness required for crisis leadership.

He could not grasp exponential growth.

He could not retain information he had been given.

He could not hold to a course of action.

He could not appreciate the consequences of delay until they were playing out on hospital wards.

The United Kingdom entered its worst peacetime national emergency in a century with a prime minister who simply was not intellectually equipped for the job.

That was a political failure long before it was a personal one.

The deeper question

We are led to ask: What kind of political culture produces a situation where the individual least suited to managing a pandemic was packaged as the safest pair of hands?

The Inquiry’s report is not just a record of past catastrophe; it is a warning.

Unless the United Kingdom confronts the political culture that allowed chaos, incompetence and scientific illiteracy to masquerade as leadership, the next emergency will play out the same way.

A system that rewards slogans over substance, personality over competence, and media manipulation over public service will keep producing the wrong leaders — and the public will keep paying the price.

Look at the current situation, in which Labour leader Keir Starmer – who had four years to prepare a plan for government and used it purging his own party of its socialist backbone instead – is trying to justify 16 months of incompetence with pleas that we should give him another 44, and a general election, before judging him.

That is the real scandal at the heart of the Covid Inquiry.

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