Only one question matters to the Cabinet now: what would Boris do?

Like millions of others, the news hit me like a punch: Johnson, Boris, our Prime Minister, the general leading our fight against Covid-19, was in intensive care. I’m usually inured to the awful, and had half been expecting something like this all day, but this was different. It felt personal. There was Carrie and his family. It was also almost incomprehensible, a case of cognitive dissonance: how could such a gregarious, indomitable figure be felled in such a way? How could it be that our PM, of all world leaders, ended up worst affected, in the midst of our Dunkirk?

The political and practical impacts have been seismic. Johnson’s worldview, instincts and personality make him the best possible leader to battle the coronavirus crisis, and his presence at the top of the (digital) Cabinet table is sorely missed. The Government’s performance these past 10 days would have been significantly improved had he – and his adviser Dominic Cummings, also badly affected but now recovering – been in full control.

It is imperative, therefore, that Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Johnson, begins every meeting with a simple question to the rest of the Cabinet: What would the boss be doing in our place? How would he be imposing his will on Whitehall? How can we try to do as he would?

The first order of business for those now wearing Johnson’s shoes is that the Cabinet should urgently be mapping out an exit strategy from the lockdown, as announced in other countries. Fatalities are surging to unbearable levels, but the peak will hopefully be reached soon, and after that the situation will look less atrocious. The lockdown can’t last very long, or else the country will be plunged into a crisis that could take decades to fix. Johnson, a freedom lover, understands this intuitively; the rest of the public sector establishment, not so much.

But this must be accompanied by a plan to contain and annihilate the coronavirus. Which shops should reopen first, and when should school restart? Should the vulnerable be told to continue to self-isolate, and the young allowed back first? What about mass tracing? Or “immunity passports”? It’s about sustainability, but also speed: the economy is collapsing.

If Johnson were around, all of this would surely be on the agenda. We cannot afford “adaptive triggering”, regular returns to partial or total lockdowns if the virus surges back over the next 18 months until a vaccine is developed (why so long?). This would rob business of certainty, destroy investment and ensure a debilitating L-shaped recovery.

The next way in which Johnson’s presence is missed is in his dealings with the machinery of state. The logistical failures surrounding personal protective equipment, the stunning lack of urgency over testing and the hopeless inability of the Treasury and HMRC to deliver help quickly confirm that the UK is sorely lacking in “state capacity”. That, for years, was exactly the Cummings/Johnson critique. State structures reward incompetence and unresponsiveness; the performance of Public Health England (PHE), in particular, has been disgraceful. The armed forces are the only exception: their ability to help build NHS Nightingale was awe-inspiring.