Boris Johnson seeks a state fit for crisis

THE BRITISH government thought its preparations for a pandemic to be among the best in the world. In 2016, 950 officials drilled for an outbreak of “swan flu”, a hypothetical illness which killed 400,000 people. It gave ministers some useful pointers on enlisting retired doctors and drafting emergency legislation.

Yet the planners did not prepare for a virus that could spread asymptomatically. Since they did not imagine a national lockdown, no plans for a furlough scheme were drafted. The permanent secretary at the business department was not even aware the exercise had taken place. The planners fretted about how the public would react to mass burials and soldiers on the streets. The resulting report stayed secret. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former aide, told MPs last month that when a pandemic actually struck, Whitehall froze.

Mr Johnson now wants to build a more muscular state, which intervenes in the market, and tells judges and museum curators what’s what. He wants it to be harder, too: less permeable to hostile states and readier for emergencies. Successive governments have trimmed fat from public services, and chased foreign investment. Mr Johnson is twisting the dials back, from openness to guardedness, and from efficiency to resilience. Defence of the realm is the spirit of the age (see chart). Think-...