Boris Johnson has failed to protect the nation. Instead he's protecting one man

If only Boris Johnson had acted as swiftly and forcefully on the pandemic as he has to save Dominic Cummings. No 10 has thrown everything into defending one man, while it has failed to protect 66 million other Britons.

Over February and early March, Johnson was scarcely to be seen, even as the coronavirus crept into the UK through our airports, our workplaces, our pubs and gyms. But in the past few days he has put himself front and centre, displaying a speed and decisiveness that contrasts shamefully with his previous lethal complacency.

Describing how the government was plunged into chaos over Covid-19, one senior adviser to No 10 recently told the Sunday Times: “There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there.” Well, 60,000 dead bodies later, the prime minister is here and he is at war. Except, he is not out to save our lives, but to spare the career of his employee.

The part-time prime minister is now doing overtime. The shiny-eyed boyfriend who devoted weekends to country breaks with his fiancee as the virus took hold, spent last Sunday in a Downing Street bunker with his aide finessing alibis.

However great the rage vented at Cummings, his actual sins are not so rare ­– just ask Neil Ferguson or Catherine Calderwood, who also broke the lockdown rules they helped author. But whereas those government scientific advisers made their apologies and left, what’s been extraordinary this week is the way in which the institutions of the British state have been mobilised to defend one man.

Nobody elected Cummings. He boasts no policymaking expertise and bears no inherent authority, bar that lent to him by his friend the prime minister. Yet to keep him in post, cabinet ministers have been used as sockpuppets, tweeting the same ridiculous excuses for his behaviour.

“Entirely right,” declared health secretary Matt Hancock who, somewhere on the Cummings itinerary between Durham and Barnard Castle, had instructed us it was entirely wrong for infected people to leave the house. The attorney general of England, Suella Braverman, whose job is to provide independent legal advice, rushed to declare possibly illegal behaviour above board. Over the weekend Downing Street desperately tried to kill off the story. Then finally, the day after a disastrous public briefing by Boris Johnson, a mere adviser was granted the kind of press conference, in the No 10 rose garden, normally given for world leaders or for major national occasions ­– once the stage set for Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, for Nick Clegg and David Cameron.

For the sake of one father of one four-year-old, the public health guidelines have been binned and, as one of the government’s scientific advisers has said, the credibility of both the advice and those giving it has been “trashed”.

Clutching at terms for this spectacle, many have called it “hypocrisy”. If only. At least that’s a familiar vice. Hypocrisy in politics? We’ve all seen that box set. But in truth, this is its opposite ­– an ugly display of naked honesty by both Cummings and Johnson about who really matters in Britain today. Namely: them. Not us, the Little People who have to follow the rules; nor the health of a democracy that relies on everyone respecting norms and procedures.

In that revelation lies so much of the huge public disquiet. The government has displayed huge force in trying to rescue Cummings, while showing just how hugely corrupt it is, by ripping up rules to accommodate one associate of the prime minister. The hard-right groupuscule running Britain has exposed how rotten Britain has become.

Just why the prime minister has lashed himself to his ideas guy is a question best left to biographers. For now, let us observe that, while Cummings has broken the rules, Johnson is bending the machinery of state to his defence, pronouncing: L’etat, c’est Dom et moi. As Danny Kruger wrote to his fellow Conservative MPs last night, “Appreciate the inbox and press are horrific but the PM is signalling that he’s serious … calling for [Cummings] to go is basically declaring no confidence in [the] PM.” You can always judge a man’s priorities by his diary, and this prime minister skipped five Cobra meetings on the coronavirus crisis on the trot, even while finding time to attend a giant fundraising ball for the Conservative party.

Johnson’s coterie will go to war for Cummings, yet they couldn’t equip doctors and nurses with essential masks and gowns. The result is that 200 healthcare workers have so far died of Covid-19. Although the UK has a GDP per head of nearly £35,000, it still can’t run a test-and-trace regime to touch that of Vietnam (GDP per head, £2,000).

When you run one of the richest countries in the world, inaction is as much a choice as action. The prime minister who has thrown a protective ring around Cummings also let thousands of residents of care homes die for want of testing. While Johnson this week commended his aide’s fatherly instincts, he said nothing about the fathers and mothers and grandparents who have died needlessly over the past two months, many without a hand to hold in their final hours.

The scandal that today rightly roars around Cummings and Johnson is nothing compared with the their gigantic failure on Covid-19. Both men must know that their real reckoning is still to come. Those Westminster bubble descriptions of two “political geniuses” leave out what a mess they’ve made in government, on everything from suspending parliament to Brexit deals. Get past the 20,000-word blogposts and the three-word slogans ­– Take Back Control, Get Brexit Done ­– and all they have is a talent for self-preservation and media manipulation. It gets them into power, but leaves them no clue what to do with it.

So the endless jokes about driving to Barnard Castle for an eye test distract from the government’s multiple failures on sourcing protective equipment for key workers, which in turn overshadows the double-counting of coronavirus tests, which in turn hides the complete failure of the testing regime, which in turn obscures the awful and disgraceful reality that the UK is second only to the US in its total number of Covid-19 deaths.

Soon will come a point when the memes peter out and the media scrum disperses. What will be left is a historic economic depression and a public realisation that far more people have died in this pandemic than in the Blitz, thanks to an administration that could barely bring itself to care for anyone beyond its own senior members.

Stay at Home? That was just for us; for them it meant Stay Where You Like.

Protect the NHS? Protect Yourselves.

Save Lives? Save Dom.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist