Evening Standard comment: Government looks ragged as the public judge results | Protests grip the world | Our recovery Kickstart

The Government is starting to look ragged. It happens to all administrations at some point, but usually several years after an election victory, not several months.

Tories plead in mitigation that the epidemic brought an abrupt end to the honeymoon, and no government was going to get everything right. But the public understand that, which is why in many countries governments have sustained high net approval ratings throughout this crisis.

The Germans, Canadians, Danes, Australians and Irish think their leaders have done a very good job. The Brits join the Americans, the Spanish and the French in thinking the reverse of theirs.

There are exceptions — the Chancellor, with his modest, diligent approach and creative economic rescue package, continues to command high approval. But in general, the huge popular goodwill that existed in March as ministers wrestled with dilemmas, and grew when the Prime Minister himself went into intensive care, has largely evaporated. It has yet to turn to outright hostility, but Downing Street is clearly rattled.

Hence, for the third time in this crisis, we’re being told today that Boris Johnson is stepping in to take “personal charge” of it.

It’s easy to point the finger at self-inflicted mistakes. The miscommunication over the easing of the lockdown; the farce of the travel quarantine; the sleight of hand with the stats; the absurdity of the Moggian queues of MPs; above all, the high-handed arrogance in response to the revelations about Dominic Cummings.

All these things are transitory, as U-turns are made, flailing ministers are shuffled out and the political crowd moves on.

There have also been unsung successes — our NHS has not been overwhelmed as many feared, and predicted. But the Government’s problems are rooted in a central truth: more people have died in Britain as a result of this virus, per head of population, than in most other advanced countries.

Our public knows this. A poll this week showed that there is no European country that Britons believe has handled the outbreak less well than the UK — and every European population, including Italy and Spain, thinks that the UK has handled Covid worse than them. Ultimately, administrations thrive or fail on the strength of their performance.

The troubles facing this Government are just beginning..

Protests grip the world

The world has marched in memory of George Floyd.

What started with horror at the death of one man has become a global movement shocked by wider inequality. There are things Britain has done better than many places.

The Metropolitan police, found to be “institutionally racist” by the 1999 Macpherson report, has reformed. It is far from perfect, but a world away from the behaviour of many officers in the United States.

There is no comfort, though, in the data released yesterday which shows that the death rate from Covid-19 among men of black ethnic groups is almost three times that among white men, or that the death rate in the working-age population has seen people of Bangladeshi ethnicity at 80 per cent higher risk than the white population.

The data does not say why this is the case: but although the Black Lives Matter campaign started with the police, it will not end there.

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