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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2024
Introduction
When considering the Conservative government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a chapter of this length cannot possibly examine every event and narrate the full story of the pandemic. That will be the job of longer work, as well as future public inquiries into what might be usefully learned from the events following 2019. This chapter has to be both narrower and broader than those responses. It is narrower as it has only limited space to consider a massively complex issue. This means focusing on a series of events which are key to the argument that the chapter will make. It is broader in that it attempts to make an argument about the pandemic and the kind of conservatism that the Johnson government, which was in place through the first two and a half years of the pandemic, can be located as representing.
The chapter argues that the Johnson government, in its leadership of the UK COVID-19 response, represents a particular form of conservatism, which will be called ‘cronyist populism’, and it locates this form of conservatism in relation to the typology of Conservatives presented in the opening chapter of the book but also in relation to the ‘authoritarian populism’ suggested by Hall (1979), which was based on the Thatcher government and remained a key reference point in the Conservative Party leadership elections of 2022.
The chapter discusses the idea of cronyist populism later on, but first it provides a periodisation of the pandemic response. This periodisation, while contestable, should at least be recognisable to those who either lived through it or have read about it from other accounts. It places a stronger emphasis on the first year of the pandemic because this period demonstrates the extent to which the government struggled in terms of its response and the contradictions presented in the particular form of conservatism present in the Johnson government. The chapter then explores the key elements of the pandemic response present in the periodisation before moving finally
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