The Irish Times view on Britain’s Covid-19 ‘tidal wave’: nobody at the tiller

Just a day after Boris Johnson warned that a "tidal wave" of Omicron cases was about to hit Britain, the shoreline has already been breached. The variant that emerged in southern Africa only last month now accounts for 40 per cent of Covid-19 cases in London.

In anticipation of the coming crisis, Johnson on Sunday delivered a televised address in which he urged people to take a booster shot to prevent the health service from being overwhelmed. He has also announced new measures, including a recommendation that people work from home and a legal requirement for mask-wearing in most public indoor areas. Vaccine passports will be needed to enter large venues such as nightclubs. Viewed from Ireland, such steps look minimal, in some cases recklessly so, yet they have ignited a rebellion within his Conservative parliamentary party, where civil libertarians and Covid-deniers are resisting all new public health measures.

With the exception of the vaccination campaign, which got off to a quick start, Johnson has had a terrible pandemic

The legislation’s passage is assured thanks to opposition support. A bigger problem for Johnson, and for Britain, is that the country’s prime minister is asking the public to trust his judgment in matters of life and death just as his own fundamental lack of trustworthiness is on full view. Johnson’s shortcomings are not news, but an accumulation of questions – most recently over whether he told the truth about a party at 10 Downing Street during a lockdown and misled his own standards adviser in an inquiry into how the refurbishment of his flat was paid for – have hit his standing and coincided with a steep fall in public support for his party.

With the exception of the vaccination campaign, which got off to a quick start, Johnson has had a terrible pandemic. He was too slow to impose lockdowns, built a costly test-and-trace system that failed to work, oversaw mistakes in moving patients into care homes and continually sent mixed messages on public health measures. Sadly there are few signs that lessons have been learned. A new wave is about to hit, and its effects will once again be compounded by an absence of competent leadership.