Out-of-touch Boris Johnson has scored a series of own goals - Euan McColm

What a completely avoidable mess Prime Minister Boris Johnson has got himself into on the issue of whether face-masks should be worn in public when coronavirus restrictions are lifted in England tomorrow.

The unsatisfactory answer to the question is that Johnson has lifted the legal obligation to wear a mask in, for example, a supermarket but that he’d like people to continue doing so, nonetheless.

Johnson’s need to “set people free” made him take on a battle that’s populist rather than popular. Instead of standing with the majority, Johnson has ceded ground to exhausting anti-vaxxers and mask-rejecting culture warriors.

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Johnson wanted the best of both worlds – to be the PM who scrapped the mask laws while also being the PM who inspired a nation to continue wearing masks. To nobody’s surprise, this has not happened. Rather, Johnson has quite righty been condemned for the risks to those with chronic underlying health conditions that removing the mask mandate might create.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson departs 10 Downing Street. Picture: Ian West/PAPrime Minister Boris Johnson departs 10 Downing Street. Picture: Ian West/PA
Prime Minister Boris Johnson departs 10 Downing Street. Picture: Ian West/PA

People are not so daft as the Prime Minister might hope. They can see when someone’s winging it and Johnson’s doing precisely that.

The Prime Minister was no more surefooted when it came to what should have been the relatively straightforward business of supporting the English national football team during the recent European championships.

Asked at the start of the tournament about the decision of some supporters to boo players if they took the knee in a gesture of opposition to racism, Johnson’s line was that he respected people’s right to protest. He hoped people would get behind the team but there was to be no condemnation of those booing the war on racism.

Just as he did over mask-wearing, Johnson followed his instincts to the populist position. But, again, the Prime Minister misread the public mood. It became clear before the first ball was kicked in England's first match that those turning up at matches in order to boo were in a vanishingly small minority. Most fans found the booing minority an embarrassment. That’s where Johnson should have been standing instead of trying to find some middle ground between people who think racism is bad and racists.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson kicking a football during a visit to the Hartlepool United Football Club. Picture: PAPrime Minister Boris Johnson kicking a football during a visit to the Hartlepool United Football Club. Picture: PA
Prime Minister Boris Johnson kicking a football during a visit to the Hartlepool United Football Club. Picture: PA

With each successive England victory, Johnson looked further out of touch. A series of photographs issued by Downing Street and purporting to show the Prime Minister in the process of enjoying the team's campaign through the tournament was excruciatingly inauthentic. Johnson looked like a pathetic try-hard. Entertainingly, the members of the current England national squad are savvy enough to know when politicians are trying to exploit their success for personal gain and confident enough to call this out.

After three black England players were subjected to appalling racist abuse following defeat in last Sunday’s final, Home Secretary Priti Patel tweeted of her disgust. Just a few weeks earlier, Patel had accused players of engaging in “gesture politics” by taking the knee. Player Tyrone Mings wasn't amused.

“You don’t,” he replied to Patel, “get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as gesture politics and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we're campaigning against happens.”

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How did Boris Johnson end up here in this miserable place where members of his Government are unable to offer solidarity to footballers without those footballers calling out their hypocrisy?

But last week wasn’t all about failure for the Prime Minister. He did manage to slash overseas aid, an act that will ensure the deaths of more poor people around the world.

The sort of people who rail against the allocation of financial aid to areas of great poverty and deprivation overseas are, by and large, the sort of people who aren’t racist but who condemn taking the knee because, actually, it’s a gesture in support specifically of the Black Lives Matter organisation and that’s a divisive, Marxist group. The same exhausting little men who booed players as they knelt will have been delighted by the decision to shave £4billion off the foreign aid budget.

When it came to matters of compassion – public support for the protection of the vulnerable through the continued use of face masks, a simple demonstration of solidarity with victims of racism – Johnson got things wildly wrong. When it came to playing to the compassionless right in his party, he was bang on the money.

Johnson has written so many appalling things on the matter of race over the years that, even if he had come out as a full-on taker-of-the-knee, his message would have been brutally undermined. When it comes to matters of equity, we may be forgiven for not trusting the current inhabitant of 10 Downing Street.

I wonder whether Johnson might reflect on events of recent weeks and ask himself whether his electorate is a little more thoughtful and compassionate than he gives them credit for? Perhaps he’ll ask himself whether what he believes to be the priorities of “ordinary people” are in fact the priorities of a caricature of “ordinary people” that he’s dreamed up based on a couple of taxi drivers and a plasterer he once met who complained the Poles were putting him out of business.

The SNP has a large and receptive audience for a story that says independence is necessary because England is not epitomised by the worst actions of Johnson. But while recent weeks have certainly shown us the Prime Minister at his cynical worst, they have also reminded us that there are exists a compassionate, progressive England that doesn’t resemble either the version dreamed up in SNP press releases or the one envisaged by Boris Johnson.

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