[ad_1]
published:
For few leaders, there is one as clear before and after the corona virus as it is for Boris Johnson.
At the outbreak, he defied death in his attitude toward infection. Now it has become one of the most cautious in Europe.
Both he and the United Kingdom have been hit hard.
The UK is among the slowest opening countries in Europe.
Boris Johnson is most careful to keep conservative forces that want to quickly open the bar for the economy. Normally, he himself had belonged to the bold and deadly despisers who considered saving the economy as important as saving human lives.
But his own near-death experience seems to have deeply affected Boris Johnson.
At the beginning of the crisis, he did not show any idea about the risks of a coronary pandemic in the United Kingdom. His attitude was very reminiscent of that of President Donald Trump. Cheerful, arrogant, tough, and victorious.
Johnson boasted that he dared to take everyone by the hand, including the crown, and that he intended to continue with him.
Then the British Prime Minister got sick on covid-19 and disappeared for almost a month. We don’t know how close he really was to fighting, but it is obviously his own opinion that the disease could have taken his life had it not been for the talented doctors and nurses who cared for him.
Marked by disease
When he delivered a prerecorded speech a few days ago on how the country will handle the pandemic in the future, he was still visibly marked by the disease.
Gone are arrogance and joyous youthful defiance. A more serious, subdued and well-groomed Prime Minister emerged.
Now he is one of the leaders in Europe who is more cautious about returning society to some sort of normalcy. He has a difficult balance to walk between those within his own group who are pushing to move faster and those like him who want to be more careful.
Photo: Frank Augstein / TT
Boris Johnson’s near-death experience seems to have deeply affected him.
In a very short time, Britain went from being a country that did not think it was particularly affected by the virus to being the nation with the highest absolute death rates in Europe.
More than 40,000 Britons have died. As in Sweden, many older people have been infected.
The British are also at risk of a double whammy. First, the effects of leaving the EU and in addition to that pandemic crown.
Last week, the British Riksbank warned that the country’s economy could shrink by 14 percent in 2020.
The guilt of the crown
For Boris Johnson, this is both a risk and an opportunity now that he has to negotiate a new free trade agreement with the EU while facing the pandemic. Negotiations with Brussels are going very slowly as the deadline approaches and Johnson has stubbornly refused to accept an extension.
Johnson’s possession of power is entirely based on his ability to make Brexit a success. That was the message that won the December elections so far.
Many people assume that the British government will blame the economic crisis on the crown crisis and pretend that Brexit is, on the contrary, good for the economy.
When Johnson won his landslide victory, the Labor opposition party seemed to be out of power for a long time. Since then, leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn has been replaced by junior center politician Keir Starmer, who many believe can give Labor a boost thanks to the crown pandemic.
Photo: Jane Barlow / AP
The new leader of the Labor Party, Keir Starmer.
Not least because criticism from both the public and experts is very harsh on the way Boris Johnson approaches the crisis.
Opinion polls show that a third of Britons think Johnson and his government were acting too late. Former British government science adviser David King also believes that the Johnson government should have shut down British society and ordered social distancing much faster.
Excessively many dead
His view, and that of many others, is that many Britons needlessly died in covid-19 because Johnson did not take China’s virus warnings seriously enough.
It is also criticized that the conservatives’ hard savings in health care and other public sectors after the 2010 financial crisis made the country unprepared for the pandemic.
Johnson is now trying to make up for the lack of powerful measures at a safer than normal pace.
It remains to be seen whether it is enough to regain people’s trust.
published:
