The country isn’t led by dr jekyll or mr hyde. It’s just a long, hard slog | thearticle

Are we governed by Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde? To judge by the adulation reserved for Rishi Sunak, as he dispenses billions for good causes from a seemingly bottomless Exchequer, the nation wants

to believe that the good doctor has turned 11 Downing Street into a charitable institution. Yet such is the hostility directed at Boris Johnson from some quarters that one might also assume

that a sinister psychopath had taken up residence at No 10. While the Chancellor is seen rescuing the arts and the environment, the Prime Minister is blamed for tens of thousands of

unnecessary deaths. The truth is rather different. As in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, both men are really two faces of the same body politic. It may suit us to swoon over “Dishy Rishi”,

who looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, while cursing Boris the Brute, who eats babies for breakfast. Most of us project our hopes and fears onto the Government, switching from

praise to blame as the mood takes us. Three months ago, as the Prime Minister was fighting for his life in St Thomas’s Hospital, his popularity ratings soared to the highest levels since

records began. Now it suits us to lay all our troubles at his door. Meanwhile, the Chancellor is credited with saving some ten million jobs, giving a shot in the arm to the “creative” and

hospitality industries, incentivising us to go green and relieving first-time homebuyers of stamp duty. All this before he has even delivered his emergency Budget. We know that all these

measures must have been signed off by the villain before our hero can strut his stuff. So are we naive? Or just fickle?   We have seen it all before, of course. Once upon a time, Tony Blair

went from hero to zero when the US-led occupation of Iraq turned sour, while his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, somehow escaped censure. No sooner had Brown taken over than his credit was

crunched in a global banking crisis. A generation earlier, it was a similar story with Margaret Thatcher: blamed for all the trials and tribulations of the 1980s, while her Chancellor Nigel

Lawson merrily cut taxes and led the drive to privatise the economy. In reality, it was her leadership that turned round the economy, as Lawson has generously acknowledged. But if there were

a Thatcher statue in Parliament Square — which no Tory Prime Minister since has dared to erect — it is easy to imagine what its fate would be. Across the Channel, President Macron has dealt

with his own unpopularity by sacking his rather competent Prime Minister and installing a new one — who is not even a politician. No doubt plenty of Brits would love someone to fire Boris

and appoint Rishi. We should be careful what we wish for. Government by unelected officials might work for the French, but it would not be a sensible way to run this country. At least here

the Government doesn’t change merely on the whim of the head of state. How would we like to wake up one morning and find that the Queen had summoned Dominic Cummings to the Palace? Good

government is mostly a matter of hard choices. The largesse that is now flowing from the Treasury is borrowed money and the party must stop quite soon. We all hope for a V-shaped recovery,

but we are still clawing our way out of the trough. Even Rishi Sunak tempered his sunny optimism this week, warning that the confident forecast of Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief

economist, did not guarantee that Britain would bounce back.   Predictions are more than usually perilous during a pandemic, but it is probably safe to say that Boris Johnson’s popularity

will never return to the heights it reached in April; indeed, it may yet have a long way to fall. Rishi Sunak’s star will doubtless shine brightly for some time to come, but that too will

wane once the full impact of unemployment is felt. We are not led by Jekyll and Hyde, nor even Laurel and Hardy. Britain right now is neither a horror movie nor a comedy of errors. It’s more

like _The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner_ — a marathon, not a sprint, run by a borstal boy. We will get to the finishing line in the end, but how we respond to the crisis matters

more than anything decided in Downing Steet. We, the people, may think we only get to decide once every few years at elections, but in fact the everyday decisions we make matter more than we

think.