What Boris Johnson should do once dreaded virus has gone – Bernard Ingham

After all, his idol, Winston Churchill, had three bouts of pneumonia and possibly a heart attack during the Second World War, as well as a stroke in 1953.

Boris could do no other than return to the fray. Their type is very near indestructible.

It is good he is on his way back to deliver his peculiarly inspiring – if occasionally bumbling – charm.

It will be some time before we can assess whether his Government got it more right than wrong, since it is 
fighting a new bug that comes in perhaps three forms with the population unprotected.

Meanwhile, our thoughts go to the families of the so-far 10,000 dead and not least those of the doctors and nurses who have succumbed on the medical equivalent of the Somme.

Before he went into intensive care Boris mischievously, no doubt, mocked Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society”.

But, unlike his predecessor, he did not define the society he pronounced to be alive and kicking.

As she said, it is not so much the disembodied “State”, as you and me and millions more like us.

We define our society and the State is our servant.

As someone who has not been any further than the terrace of his bungalow since March 13, I reckon we are coping pretty well with an entirely novel and unwelcome experience.

It is no fun for even a largely housebound old fogey like me to be cut off from personal contact with family and friends.

Thank the Lord for the telephone. Heaven only knows how families are managing cooped up in city flats even with modern communications technology at their disposal.

But we are clearly doing better than the critics, the carpers and the prize clots who are deservedly being sent down for trying to infect the police and even nurses.

It is in the nature of society – people – to grumble and apparently know better than those in the ‘general’s staff office’, as it were. Indeed, soldiers grumbling away like mad with a gallows humour got us through two World Wars.

Moreover, being without an incapacitated Prime Minister is nothing new. Why, Churchill recovered from one of his wartime bouts of pneumonia while painting in Marrakech.

I don’t recommend this for Boris.

But I do wish we would stop wittering about who is in charge when Dominic Raab is his chosen deputy, and when his Cabinet colleagues know that unity of purpose is crucial to the defeat of coronavirus.

Politicians will not be forgotten or forgiven for trying to weaponise the pestilence for party advantage.

In many ways, the current Government’s position is stronger to withstand a Prime Ministerial illness than was Mrs Thatcher’s.

I recall her telling me in 1983 that she daren’t stay more than two days in hospital after a retina operation because she feared a run on the pound.

Perhaps that was another way of saying she needed to be on hand to keep the troops in order.

Throughout her 11 years in office a dissident element would have cheerfully got rid of her.

Fortunately, she stayed reasonably well in the second half of her term. Otherwise Michael Heseltine and Sir Geoffrey Howe would have had us in the single currency and Nigel Lawson would have tried to run the economy on his own without her attention – both with damagingly expensive results.

It may well be that we are now through the worst of the pandemic.

If so, then society – you and me – need to turn our minds to recovery, both economic and social.

The prime need is to get the economy moving, people back at work earning sound money, reducing the drain on what is left of the nation’s wealth and improving the operation of essential services.

We shall be less than honest with ourselves if we do not accept all that involves priorities.

Leave aside the overriding need to repair the economy and cut out expensive nonsenses such as the HS2, I suggest four essentials:

Overhauling the management of the NHS – it is the least doctors, nurses and support staff deserve;

Properly integrating the NHS and elderly care;

Maintaining a register of volunteers for social duty;

Look to our military and economic defences since China is on the march and Vladimir Putin is an ever present menace to a weakened West’s freedom.

Boris’ job is to jolly us along this path and keep “society’s” eye on the ball.

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