Exhausted Macron and Boris struggling to stay ahead of the flattening curve

Emmanuel Macron divides opinion in France. You are either for him or against him, and until the present health emergency struck, the majority was against him. But love him or loathe him, the man will not be ignored. His most recent address to the nation, ten days ago, was watched by around two-thirds of the adult population, most of whom, apparently, thought he pulled it off. His prime minister, Edouard Philippe – Watson to his Holmes – has also, thus far, had a good war. They both look exhausted, which is exactly what voters want to see.

This is not to say that there isn’t criticism – and I don’t just mean the gilets-jaunes, who for obvious reasons haven’t been able to take to the streets in recent days, or Marine Le Pen, who would probably rubbish the President if he helped an old lady to cross the road. For this is France, where leadership is only truly appreciated when whoever has provided it has left the scene.

And the critics have much of which to complain. The initial Macroniste response to the coronavirus was seriously flawed. The same mistakes were made as in the UK, even if not to the same degree. The key difference is that Macron has since apologised, which – miracle of miracles – seems to have wiped the slate clean, albeit only until the complainants get their second wind.

The powers-that-be in Paris, divided between those mighty monuments, the Élysée, the Matignon and the Hôtel de Ville, woke late in the day to the enormity of Covid-19 and then discovered that, due to neglect and departmental parsimony, they didn’t have the tools to fight the outbreak. The government has made policy on the hoof ever since, learning as it goes and trying to avoid mistakes.

Part of the problem is that while ministers are free to make decisions and issue instructions, it is the French State, represented by its vast army of fonctionnaires, that must put the plans into action. In spite of the widely held belief that dirigisme, for all its faults, is at least efficient (the myth was that the minister of education in Paris could look at his watch and know what every child in the country was doing), there is as much chaos and uncertainty in France as there is in England.

To take a small example, I suffered an attack of vertigo earlier this month and was obliged by my wife to head into our local village, whose medical centre employs five full-time doctors. The good news is that I was seen at an hour’s notice by the man who has been treating me for the last 20 years (his French patients being too frightened to come to the surgery), with an appointment three days later with a specialist.

Neither man knew anything about Covid-19 testing in the area. Nor could they, or our local pharmacy, tell me where to obtain the masks that Macron says we must all wear when we’re outdoors. They didn’t even have information on how many confirmed cases of the virus there were in either the commune or the department. They were on their own. No one, it seems, tells them anything.

And while the police and gendarmerie are supposed to ensure that we follow the rules about social distancing and venturing out of our homes, the fact is that I haven’t set eyes on a gendarme in the neighbourhood since the onset of the crisis more than a month ago (though my wife was stopped once on her way to Intermarché). Though I dutifully filled in the relevant permits that allowed me to venture outside my home, at first in writing, later on my mobile phone, there was no one to check them.

To top it all, a friend of ours who works in a care home some ten kilometres away, told me last week (from a distance of two metres) that he had been left alone to look after 22 elderly residents for three whole days, with no one to assist him. All he had was an electronic alert, strapped to his wrist, that he was supposed to activate in the event of an emergency.

In the National Assembly, meanwhile, in which only those with pre-arranged business are free to take their seats, deputies continue to press ministers on their day-to-day response to the crisis. This week, the Prime Minister expounded in calm and measured tones on his hope that a large volume of masks would finally arrive in France from foreign manufacturers so that, for example, travellers on the Paris Metro could be confident that they could board trains without falling ill.

He also spoke on the need for testing kits to work as advertised so that they can be made more widely available, with medical staff and other front-line workers accorded priority. MPs in the upcoming virtual Commons would no doubt nod in recognition. Democracy in lockdown continues to function, but has been robbed of its vitality.

Should we be surprised by any of this? No government in Europe or America has faced a health crisis of this scale or complexity since 1918. For the previous six months, the President had been busy with pension reform and his plans to reinvent Europe. Neither he nor his senior colleagues had Covid-19 written in to their to-do lists. Just to rub it in, the health minister, formerly a leading medical practitioner, had recently resigned to stand as mayor of Paris.

The EU was no help. It allocated a miserly €50 million to a common procurement scheme about which little has been heard since, and it has refused to issue “coronabonds” to help Italy and Spain. Germany comes out of it best (surprise, surprise), with Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands firmly in the second division.

You could argue that Boris Johnson got it more wrong than anybody else – apart from Donald Trump – and you’d be right. But he had just been elected to complete the Brexit process and it took him a good two weeks to accept that Covid-19 was now the country’s number one priority. This was both stupid and irresponsible, and it will not be forgotten.

But the fact of the matter is that until late February the Labour Party was similarly insouciant. All their gripes over the nation’s health were the usual ones, to do with waiting times, cancer treatments and staff shortages. If the party’s official archive is to be believed, Jonathan Ashworth, health spokesman since 2015, didn’t so much as mention Covid-19 in public until February 28.

It was the same in the media, including at the blessed Guardian. Covid-19 was routinely referred to as a Chinese problem until it was realised that it had crossed continents to Iran and Italy, at which point the British Government was blamed for a near-criminal lack of foresight.

The Royal Commission that will inevitably be appointed to inquire into the handling of the outbreak in the UK will, in all likelihood, find successive Tory governments guilty of neglect and poor judgment, much of it due to austerity and an attitude of hope-for-the-best – though if David Cameron is to be indicted, why not Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems, now a grand panjandum with Facebook?

The Government’s medical and scientific advisers, as well as the managers of NHS England, will also find their judgments placed under the microscope. But for the moment the Tories have a job to do, and they have to get on with it. For if not them, who?

One thing is certain: they are no longer the party they were a year ago. They had already put on a new face after Johnson was elected PM. He knew that he had to pour billions into the NHS and had promised to do so. But something much more radical is now in prospect. Old-school grandees like Iain Duncan Smith, Bill Cash and John Redwood already look like mastodons from another era who should be retired to spend more time with their knighthoods. A period of silence on their part should not just be welcome, but de rigueur.

The UK will switch tracks this year, as will France, once the all-clear on the coronavirus is finally sounded. It will be a time for new thinking predicated on the idea – scarcely revolutionary – that it is not just the rich and the professional classes who make Britain great. My money is on Keir Starmer to make an impact over the next two extremely difficult years. He could be the Attlee for our times. But with the existing key-holder sure to recover his inner Tigger, it’s probably a bit early to predict that he will be in Downing Street anytime soon.

In the meantime, with Boris marooned in Chequers following his recent near-death experience, the leader of France hasn’t been so firmly ensconced in the Elysée Palace since he took office in the summer of 2017. He, too, promises big changes ahead. Bells toll, but the wheel of fortune never stops turning.