What will Boris’ legacy be? And what do I want it to be?

Throughout this pandemic, the polling has shown the public to have been largely in favour of lockdowns. But public opinion of lockdowns and hence of Boris may well change if - and when - in a few years’ time damning reports emerge exposing the disastrous short and long-term impacts of lockdown. People will also feel the long-term economic impacts in their day-to-day lives, and Boris will risk going down in the bad books of history. That is opposed to being remembered as a suitably Churchillian leader who guided us through the pandemic and got Brexit done.

But this will not have to be the case if Boris plays his cards right: with a strong recovery plan and a revival of patriotism surrounding Brexit, Boris could save his legacy. A large part of me, however, doesn’t want Boris’ lockdowns to be remembered in a positive light. Although leaving a good legacy will save us from the horrors of a Labour government, we can’t allow the gross removal of our liberties and democratic values to become an accepted precedent for the future. We should expose the folly of lockdowns, but give Boris the benefit of the doubt for being forced into them by public opinion and the pressure of events. 

It’s quite surprising how desperate people have been to have reams of legislation passed without any vote in Parliament, and to have so many of their liberties stripped from them. The three lockdowns we have had thus far (I hope I haven’t jinxed another one by saying that) have been loved by the public. Despite having three harsh national lockdowns, many of the criticism aimed at the terrible trio - Bojo, Whitty, and Vallance - has been an attack at the government for not locking down harder and sooner, as opposed to the other way around. ‘Too little, too late’ has been a common buzz-phrase heard over the past year.

This government has tried to occupy the middle ground with its lockdown strategy. Just like Theresa May’s Brexit deal, it has pleased nobody; the pro-lockdown fanatics pin our highest-in-Europe death toll on Boris’ failure to lockdown soon enough. Meanwhile the lockdown sceptics are appalled by how long we have spent in lockdown, stripped of the liberty to do the basic day-to-day activities we always took for granted. Boris and his team also made themselves out to be incompetent, regardless of which side of the debate you are on, due to tardiness in ramping up our testing capacity in the early days. Alongside this, constant U-turns: ‘12 weeks to turn the tide’, ‘back to normality by November’, and ‘keeping schools open is my top priority’ were all lies.

But despite the never ending exposure of incompetencies and U-turns, the public are surprisingly forgiving. They recognise that these are ‘unprecedented times’ with ever-changing science and unexpected variants. They will forgive and forget if they believe the government is trying their best. The public also seem to have quickly forgotten about all the previous incompetencies now that they are wooed by the success of the vaccine rollout, which has also boosted national pride following our exit from the European Union. 

Will the public see lockdown in such a positive light in the long-term? Will they think it was worth it once the narrow lens of COVID-19 death figures we currently look through is widened? People’s opinions are dominated by short-term thinking - that’s simply how the human brain works - with little regard for how painful the sting to our lives and economy will be in the long-term. I suspect there may be a lull in criticism of the government’s response to the pandemic initially, but a resurgence or criticism (as with the Iraq Inquiry) in perhaps a few years’ time, if and when damning reports come out showing that Boris’ strategy caused terrible death rates for other diseases, a mental health emergency, and a crippled economy.

Even with exposing reports, however, there is still a chance that the public think only in the short-term and blame the incumbent government for the problems they see around them, meaning Boris’ legacy could remain relatively unscathed. If Boris carefully keeps positive messaging around the NHS in the years following the pandemic (I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with some annual NHS celebration day) then people might be scared to criticise Boris’ choice to pursue lockdowns rather than the sterling example of our Swedish friends. Nigel Lawson was right when he said “the NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion” and as much as I hate the aura surrounding the NHS, Boris will be smart if he uses it to his advantage. Bojo’s legacy could also depend on whether the Orwellian-style precedents that have been set over the past year continue or are abandoned. If the Prime Minister is not careful, he could go down in history as the man who turned the wheel backwards on liberty.

The Prime Minister’s legacy will also depend on the success he makes of Brexit. The doomsters and gloomsters were expecting everything to go wrong after 11PM on the 31st December. But it didn’t, and we triumphed over the EU with our vaccine programme. Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised again to see Britain’s post Brexit success in the global market. Perhaps Boris will go down in history as the man who ‘got Brexit done’. And although the focus of our lives right now is Coronavirus, remember that the impact of Brexit will last forever (as long as we don’t vote to rejoin!), whereas the pandemic will simply be yet another crash of the economy, from which we will recover (even if it takes a decade). 

With both the pandemic and Brexit, Boris’ legacy will depend on whether or not he leaves office on a high note. There will inevitably be short-term economic issues as a consequence of both, and if he leaves office before prosperity is on the horizon, he will be the man who made a mess of Britain and passed the problems onto the next Prime Minister. Boris needs to stay, with the help of a good Dishi Rishi recovery stimulus package, until we have recovered. That way he will hold the legacy of being the leader who got us through and out of both a global pandemic and the EU successfully. 

But do I want Boris’ legacy to be golden? Does he deserve a good legacy? As much as I am a proud Tory and have said from a young age that I would love for that guy Boris Johnson with the floppy hair to be Prime Minister, part of me flinches at the idea of us celebrating the government that stripped us of our basic liberties, encouraged us to spy on our neighbours, and filled the streets with NHS propaganda posters. It is, quite frankly, unacceptable in my eyes and I do not want to see it happen again. If we don’t shame Boris’ government for this, the precedent will be set for this to happen again in future every time a new flu goes around. I cannot live in that world. 

That being said, if the Conservatives are heavily criticised for their handling of the pandemic, the arrival of a Labour government may be around the corner. Even though Labour probably would have done the same and worse to us, sadly people don’t think that way at the ballot box. To the Prime Minister’s credit, he had his hands tied throughout this pandemic. He is constrained by public opinion; if he was in my position, he would probably be making the same arguments as I. But with, at times, around 80% of the public supporting lockdown, he has no option but to go with the grain of public opinion. Thus, perhaps the public are the ones to bare the greatest blame for all this. Boris can come out as the leader who successfully got us out of the EU and the pandemic with economic prosperity if he plays his cards right, and the rest of us can expose how damaging lockdown was without putting all the blame on Boris. 

Chloe Dobbs (NEO for OCA Liaison, Ex-NEO for Legal, Ex-Publications Editor) is a second year reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Pembroke College.

The OUCA blog is dedicated to publishing a variety of opinions from its members. The views expressed on our platform are those of the individual authors.