With britain facing a plethora of problems, charm alone won't be enough for boris johnson

Rosa Prince 02 March 2020 4:46pm GMT If you're having a busy day back at work after the weekend, pity our Prime Minister.  A deadly pandemic threatens to shuffle thousands of us off

this mortal coil and leave millions more stuck in quarantine. Large parts of the country remain submerged under flood water. Trade talks with our dear departed friends in Europe have reached

the tricky bit. The career of his supposedly shouty Home Secretary could be hanging by a thread. Oh, and he's got a wedding to plan and a new baby on the way. As the Americans say,

it's just a lot. Yet rather than being spurred into action by all these events, dear boy – any one of which, as Harold MacMillan sort of predicted, could derail his fledgling

premiership – Boris Johnson remains an island of zen-like calm, unruffled and determined to not to be blown off whatever mysterious and brilliant course Dominic Cummings has set for him. It

seems a long time since Gordon Brown cut short a bucket and spade break in Devon after two days because a few cows were feeling poorly. If Mr Brown had been forced to deal with a novel

coronavirus rather than the relatively benign (for human society, if not for the cows) foot and mouth disease, he'd probably still be rocking in a darkened room. Our current Prime

Minister is made of sterner stuff. The flood waters rise – he remains tucked up all cosily with Carrie at Chequers. Covid-19 escalates – don't worry, he'll chair a Cobra meeting in

a day or two. Priti Patel is theatrically denounced as a bully – he'll come up with the diverting wheeze of sharing the lovely news that his fiancée is indeed thus, and yet another

tiny Johnson is on the way to boot. Mr Johnson has used charm to mop up the many crises which seem to engulf his life since he edited The Spectator two decades ago and, before that, as a

young journalist for this newspaper and others. He did the same at Oxford and Eton.  School is doubtless where he learned the trick – his predecessor but one David Cameron, his junior at

Eton by a couple of years, was known as the "essay crisis Prime Minister" and there is, in both, a sense that turning the sunshine glare of their personality towards a problem,

however belatedly, will be enough to resolve it. During the general election, the team behind Mr Johnson successfully deployed the "submarine strategy" of keeping him out of sight

of live television cameras on the grounds that they can only create hostages to fortune. When the flood waters began to rise last month, it was deemed wise to repeat the trick. No one in

Number 10 wanted a replay of the scenes which greeted the Prime Minister in Doncaster last year when he was heckled with cries of: "What took you so long?"  At this stage, as the

rain continues to pour and more people find their homes and livelihoods washed away, Downing Street's collective mind probably assumes it is too late for Mr Johnson to backtrack, that

giving way to demands to visit the north in person would make him look weak.  It wouldn't. It would make him appear sympathetic and in touch with the people who honoured him with their

votes in December, many of them backing the Conservatives for the first time in order to do so.  There is now real anger in those places to which the Tories owe their cracking majority, and

not just about what they see as the Prime Minister's abandonment over the floods. Some of his policies, particularly on the government's green agenda, are not what many believe

they signed up for.  Nationwide, there is genuine fear about coronavirus – a perfectly valid concern that demands more in response than Mr Johnson popping up on TV for a minute or two to

advise us to wash our hands. It's only a good thing that the Prime Minister has enough confidence in his team to delegate, while his refusal to panic under pressure is another powerful

asset. But sometimes, laid-back can leach into lassitude.  MacMillan, yet another languorous Eton alum, was right to warn that unexpected and to some extent unstoppable events can derail a

premiership.  But that doesn't mean a premier shouldn't do his very best to get ahead of them.