Mark Dolan: The Prime Minister needs to be more Boris

The halo has slipped for Boris Johnson.

Now who would be prime minister during a pandemic like this? An impossible task and of course the disease nearly took his own life. So you have to cut the guy some slack and have some sympathy. And there is no doubt that Boris has been an election winning machine, but he just seems to struggle with that bit in between – running the country.

How can a prime minister with an 80 seat majority look so weak? To be fair, he got Brexit done, for which we can all be grateful. I would have feared a democratic crisis and unrest if he hadn’t. Plus the vaccine rollout and Freedom Day on July 19th which was politically brave. And if you have to lock people down, which I believe you don’t, the furlough scheme was a policy triumph, saving countless jobs and business. But since the pandemic began, there has been a lingering feeling that Boris has been in office, but not in power. As every day goes by, he is looking more and more like Theresa May in a blonde wig.

He can't sack anyone, even if they’ve obviously got to go, like Dominic Cummings or Matt Hancock. He lets Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance run the country for a year and a half, even though lockdowns, the curtailment of civil liberties, hysterical borrowing and public health strategies are a political decision. He's got himself in a pickle over who paid for his wallpaper, which doesn't really matter to most of the British public, but it further paints a picture of a prime minister that is a passenger to events, not in the driving seat. Do you think Margaret Thatcher would've put up with drunken parties at number 10 and elsewhere, when the rest of the country was in lockdown? I don't think so.

So either he and his team blatantly ignored the rules he was forcing on the rest of us, showing utter contempt, or he just doesn't know what's happening on his watch and he is oblivious to the behaviour of those under him. Either scenario is not befitting of a prime minister. It's hard to know which scenario is worse – Boris broke the rules or he just didn't know what was going on. Then there’s the overnight conversion to the environmental cause, with a hellishly expensive and scientifically debatable target for net zero by Tuesday of next week, whilst countries like India, Brazil the USA and China pollute like it's going out of fashion. Astonishingly, we can't rule out that it's pressure from er indoors, Mrs Johnson, that's behind the eco-agenda. So who IS actually running Britain? Is it Boris?

Is it Chris?

Is it Patrick?

Is it Carrie?

It’s like a whodunnit. Or a who didn’t do it...

How soon before the new baby daughter’s in charge?

Now your spouse and advisers will always have a bit of influence and I'm all for cleaning up the planet. Who doesn't want a healthy world to pass on to the next generation and who doesn’t want clean air? Plus green technology is a huge economic opportunity for this country. But the eco agenda feels hurried, uncosted and no one voted for it. It strikes me, that it falls into the category of one of Boris’s ill-fated big projects that never quite comes to fruition, like the ill-fated Garden Bridge in London.

A project that cost £53 million and never happened. A bridge too far for Bojo

Or what about the tunnel between Scotland and Northern Ireland

Coming in at an eye-popping £15 billion. Boris has always had expensive taste.

Speaking of tunnels, Boris is digging at the moment. And the hole is getting deeper. One self-inflicted disaster after another. No wonder backbenchers are losing faith. Last night's by-election result was a bad nosebleed, but nothing compared to the kicking given to him by his own backbenchers on Tuesday, in the vote for Plan B Covid measures. Almost 100 brave Tories, eight heroic Labour MPs, the Lib Dems and Jeremy Corbyn rightly voted against needless and scientifically unproven Covid passports, masks, and work from home orders. The human and economic damage from these measures will be massive and a conservative estimate suggests that this “just in case” policy will cost the economy a further 18 billion quid. Not to mention collapsed businesses and more wrecked lives. All for a variant of Covid-19, Omicron, which appears to be milder than the Songs of Praise Christmas party.

The woman who discovered the Omicron variant

Dr Angelique Coetzee, Head of South Africa's Medical Association, believes the Omicron Covid variant can actually “help us out of the pandemic”. She said “the majority of your people are going to get Omicron. Do they need to panic? No, please don't.”

'The majority of your people are going to get Omicron... Do they need to panic? No, please don't.'

Dr Angelique Coetzee, Head of South Africa's Medical Association, believes the Omicron Covid variant 'can help us' out of the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/m1RU48JDuL

— GB News (@GBNEWS) December 16, 2021

The problem with this endless political soap opera around Boris, is that it’s a distraction from the things that really matter to you. Inflation is at over 5%, which destroys the value of the pound in your pocket and sees the price of petrol, central heating and food go through the roof. We are currently in a shocking cost of living crisis and this group of politicians are just too distracted, or they don’t care.

Boris and his partner in crime, the deputy prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, are obsessed with Covid. Even Omicron, which based on South African data was clearly less of a threat. And we’ve known that for weeks. These two men have formed the coalition from hell, giving us covid passports, for which in Wales and Scotland there is no evidence of effectiveness. And masks of course, which I’ll be dealing with in a special Big Opinion tomorrow.

So Wales’ first minister Mark Drakeford who it’s rumoured wanted to cancel Christmas, has after months of masks and vaccine passports just closed nightclubs.

Wales is a salutary lesson to all of us. They have had all the circuit breaker lockdowns, passports and masks, whilst cases in England, after Freedom Day, fell. But like a true old-school socialist, Drakeford loves a bit of state control, so he’s also bringing back the beloved one way system in shops and restaurants.

All of us following arrows in supermarkets will really have Omicron quaking in its boots won’t it? We all know Covid hates in when we walk in single file. Just as covid hates it when we sit down in the pub – everyone knows you’ve got to be standing up to catch it. Basic science innit. In my view, nasty and sometimes deadly though it can be, the virus never justified this damage or these tyrannical measures, and with mild symptoms for up to five days (according to data genius Tim Spector of the Zoe Covid app), Omicron certainly doesn't justify this madness.

Is it just me or is it a cold? Remember them? Plus Omicron is everywhere. It’s quicker than Usain Bolt and catchier than Abba’s greatest hits. If it does push the NHS over the edge, that's not the work of the virus that's the NHS itself, which has been on the verge of collapse for years. The people in the NHS are heroes, the very best of us – everyone’s got a story - but the organisation is failing. Covid is the straw that broke the camel’s back. But the camel’s legs have been wobbling for decades. And yet still thousands of frontline medical workers are self-isolating at the insistence of management, because they've been in contact with someone that got omicron. I say if you haven't got symptoms, get back to work and save lives. I know if I worked in the NHS I would’ve ignore the ping from day one if I didn’t have symptoms, and many brave doctors and nurses did indeed ignore the ping. All too often, NHS workers – doctors, nurses, surgeons - have been sat at home during the pandemic, often symptom-free as the waiting list for far more serious illnesses like cancer swell. Tell me how that saves lives? Now you can play the blame game all you like, but the buck stops at the top. All of this chaos, self-inflicted damage and expense is happening on the watch of Mr Johnson. And he's asleep at the wheel. I think the blonde bombshell has got until the May local elections next year, to prove that he can do more with power than just win it. Boris is fast running out of time and friends.

The message is clear – Boris needs to BE MORE BORIS. Bojo is nojo without his mojo.