ON Wednesday night, as the summer sun faded away, there was a vital spark of light, not quite a flame but enough to ignite hope and attention. The BBC journalist Emily Maitlis sat behind the Newsnight desk, looked straight into the camera lens and led the show with simmering anger.

She dismissed the myth that Covid-19 was “the great leveller”, dismantling the guff that has been written about Boris Johnson’s illness and asserted with passion in her voice that the virus is disproportionately preying on the lower-paid, the vulnerable and on those that live in care homes or in cramped or crowded accommodation homes in the forgotten Britain.

With a gust of fresh air, Maitlis made this pandemic not only about virology but about social class. For a brief moment there was faint hope that mainstream journalism had rediscovered its soul and that the compromised BBC News directorate had woken up to the onerous responsibilities of its charter.

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid siege on leadership, exposing the glaring inadequacies of the current government and the bedridden Boris Johnson. If this bumbling failure of national governance escapes a full-scale public enquiry then we will know that harsh truths are being bundled into hastily dug graves.

The night before Maitlis’s stirring piece to camera, in what now looks like a clumsy bid for national coherence, it was proposed that the weekly applause for service workers be dedicated to Johnson, who at the time lay in an intensive care unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in Lambeth, the 1960s monstrosity that watches over the Houses of Parliament.

Buoyed by the hashtag #ClapforBoris we were told that irrespective of your political views you should stand at your door and give the Prime Minister rousing applause. So much for the global reach of social media – no-one seems to have told Scotland – the silence was deafening and spoke to a more widely held truth.

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Rather than being a convincing leader, Boris Johnson has been shown up as a bungling incompetent whose one-trick burlesque act was vaguely tolerable in normal times but has become a hazard in times of national emergency.

Unfortunately for the hapless Johnson the word clap has at least two meanings, one of them vernacular for venereal disease, and so what might have been a moment of support for the wheezing clown turned out to be a demeaning source of satire. When we were supposed to rally around the flag Johnson’s well-documented promiscuity was brought to the fore, undermining even further his battered and failing premiership.

We are now left in the precarious charge of Dominic Raab, a virulent advocate of the privatisation of the National Health Service. What could possibly be worse, apart from the sight of Chris “Failing” Grayling arriving to save at the White Cliffs of Dover in an invisible ferry boat.

Whilst many have rung their hands trying not to be discourteous or inhumane about Johnson’s condition, a very different mood was gathering in the wings – a political resentment over the way this pandemic has been handled at Westminster.

A special report by the news agency Reuters has offered up a more forensic reading of health-advisory minutes and interviews with members of an official committee on the pandemic. It exposes failings that with a strong opposition could sink this woeful government. Reuters claims that Johnson was forewarned that “if unconstrained and if the virus behaved as in China, up to four-fifths of Britons could be infected and one in a hundred might die”, predicting that more than 500,000 people would die across the UK. He swaggered around anyway shaking hands, slapping backs and trying to contrive hopeless jokes – remember the one about the ventilator strategy should be called be code-named Operation Last Gasp? Hilarious?

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Rather than heed the early warnings, Johnson’s early briefings on the pace of the pandemic were in stark contrast to the information he was being given. Shrugging off expertise behind the scenes, his natural inclination was to improvise, bluster and show off. Up until now, he has been shielded by a supine press and a beleaguered BBC, who seemed to be either conned or bewitched by his act. A calamity was unfolding and the now disgraced “herd immunity” strategy was improvised like a fairy tale, when a more robust scheme of protection and social isolating was needed.

When clear leadership was most required, the Conservative Party’s kneejerk Europhobia led to another significant failure. Unwilling to accept or even acknowledge the offer of much-needed ventilators, they stalled. The benefits of an early lockdown and the learnings from Germany about how they were managing to keep deaths at a much lower rate than other countries was overshadowed by the delusionary clouds of English exceptionalism.

Nicola Sturgeon’s more down-home directness may not be to everyone’s taste but her teacherly demeanour is preferable to Johnson’s puerile improvisations. Sturgeon had her foot-faults too and was not at her most decisive in the scandal round Chief Medical Officer Dr Catherine Calderwood but at least she was trying to protect some form of continuity rather than rush to deliver a triumphant “head on a platter” for Scotland’s predominantly hostile and salivating press.

Calderwood made a horrendous error of judgment – two weeks on the trot – but time will prove it was not nearly as injurious as Boris Johnson swanning around in front of the cameras, shaking hands and slapping backs when he was already being advised to get serious. His failure of leadership was having no command over detail and being incapable of moving up a gear into a different and more serious mode of delivery. Ending his horrendous week with being known as the Prime Minister synonymous with the clap has hardly enriched his gravitas.

In America Donald Trump has at least avoided infection but his week has been a monumental series of setbacks too.

What is now beginning to surface are the statistics that lie beneath the buried bodies. Some great journalism is emerging, based principally on intelligent and counter-intuitive reading of data. CNN reported that 72% of all Chicago deaths related to Covid-19 have been in predominantly African-American communities.

African Americans living mostly in concentrated urban areas and working in essential industries face much higher rates of exposure to the virus. It was in the course of their reporting that the Guardian newspaper led with the line that gave Emily Maitlis her inspiration – “While New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo once called the coronavirus a “great equalizer”, data shows the virus has been anything but indiscriminate.”

What we are now witnessing is a macabre re-running of the Grenfell Towers catastrophe. Not that the circumstances nor the negligence are directly comparable but both expose a failure to understand vulnerability and the lived experiences of people in less fortunate social circumstances.

This was at the heart of Catherine Calderwood’s demise. It was not only that she failed to follow the advice administered to others, but that her lifestyle with a second home bordering a golf-course in coastal Fife drew attention to the social disparities of this virus. It is disproportionately cruel to those on low pay or in frontline services.

As the data journalism around Covid-19 increases in both volume and in sophistication we will find more remarkable stories hidden in the detail. I suspect this will not be good news for the care-home system here in Scotland, where older and more vulnerable people live out the last days of their lonely lives as even their care workers are laid low by the virus.

When it’s all over we can then reflect on the quality of the leadership in crisis and that will almost certainly reflect better on the no-nonsense Nicola Sturgeon than the bungling pantomime character that has somehow become Prime Minister.

As Johnson’s biographer Andrew Gimson put it: “One of the functions of a prime minister is to take the blame ... he will take the blame if it all goes wrong – he will have to go, actually.”

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