Johnson's skills, or lack of them, are irrelevant. We've had inept PMs before (Churchill was practically gaga in his later years). The failures over Covid & Brexit are a) deliberate (the cronyism, the brinkmanship) & b) the result of a state capacity attenuated by neoliberalism.
https://twitter.com/lukemcgee/status/1315241423428620289
It's unlikely any other mainstream politician would have done better. They would either be equally committed to 'a' or would believe that 'b' limited their options. What we needed was not a different skillset but a different mindset: an aversion to *both* crony capitalism & TINA.
The only politician who fitted that bill, whatever his other limitations, was Corbyn, but the establishment spent 4 years doing it's level best to cast him as illegitimate. The idea that our saviour now might be a non-crony neoliberal (Starmer or the other Milliband) is naive.
The big issue isn't competence (a meritocratic fetish) or even corruption (in the narrow sense of govt contracts for mates), but the systemic dismantling over 4 decades of the state's capacity to handle fundamental change (Brexit) & its resilience in the face of crisis (Covid).
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