Boris Johnson’s expected return to Number 10 this week is triggering much speculation about whether his brush with mortality has made him a changed man. We should hope it has. The pre-infection prime minister belonged to the entertainer branch of populist leadership that prospered in more insouciant times. Before an invisible enemy changed everything, one former cabinet minister tried to explain the Johnson phenomenon by telling me: “Boris is not really a politician like the rest of us. Boris is a brand. One day, someone will start selling Eau de Boris.” He has lived his life to Winston Churchill’s maxim: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” His career is potholed with scandals, betrayals and mendacities that would have undone many another politician, but he somehow always bounced back. His party did not make him leader because they thought he would be a diligent administrator, a wise head or a safe pair of hands in a national emergency. His party made him leader because they thought he was a lucky mascot, he was their best communicator and they were desperate for someone to cheer them up after the mirthless agonies of the May years. I lost count of the Tory MPs who voted for him saying: “Boris is a terrible man, but he will be great fun.” The voters confirmed him as prime minister not because they thought he had the qualities necessary to handle a pandemic. He was returned to Number 10 because he was an energetic frontman for the Tories up against a deeply unpopular opponent. He is about to marry his third wife and has children by women who have never been his wife. A raffish private life and a rascally public one magnified “brand Boris” in the mind of both his colleagues and the public. He became one of those rare politicians who is referred to by their first names. Before he was struck down by the coronavirus, he had thought himself unusually robust. Getting to the top of the greasy pole despite his many career car crashes was taken as further evidence of his indestructibility. Friends report that he used to view illness in others not as a misfortune but as a sign of personal weakness. I dwell on these character traits because they have made a material difference to the government’s response to the epidemic and are essential to understanding many of its mistakes. In the early period of the crisis, he was conscious that he needed to get more serious, but only patchily successful at being so. He oscillated between straining for a pseudo-Churchillian gravitas and sounding blithe with occasional lapses back into clowning. In early March, he casually declared that he had visited a hospital with coronavirus patients “and I shook hands with everybody”. He used the comedy phrase “squashing the sombrero” to describe the effort to flatten the peak of infection. In conversation with potential manufacturers of ventilators, he joked about “Operation Last Gasp”. All of which strongly suggests that he was slow to grasp the seriousness of the threat and oblivious to his own vulnerability to infection. Number 10 has reacted with a scolded defensiveness to the revelation that he missed the first five Cobra meetings about coronavirus in late January and February and only started to turn up once it was confirmed that infection had broken out in Britain. It is true that the crisis committee has not always been led by prime ministers in the past; it is equally true that a prime minister who was fully alert to the scale of the menace would have insisted on chairing those meetings. There is a gathering consensus that he ought to have been quicker to order a lockdown. It now seems incredible that, even after the government accepted that Britain faced “the worst public health crisis in a generation”, pubs and gyms remained open while many thousands of people were permitted to mingle at football matches, racecourses and pop concerts. The personality of the prime minister was not the only factor in play, but it was a significant one. This is a man who doesn’t like rules and much of his biography involves the breaking of them. Overestimating how many of his fellow Britons think as he does, all his basic instincts were repelled by the idea of a lockdown and he reckoned there would be a rebellion against it. Officials and colleagues also report that he was reluctant to accept that the triumphant story he had composed in his head about his premiership was going to be rewritten by a microbe. You will recall how he would ridicule opponents of Brexit as “the doomsters and the gloomsters”. He couldn’t resist a similar boosterism when it came to the disease. In mid-March, he breezily proclaimed that “we can send coronavirus packing” before suggesting that “we can turn the tide within the next 12 weeks”, an assertion that his scientific advisers conspicuously declined to agree with. Even when he did finally announce a lockdown, it was with obvious reluctance as he lamented “taking away the ancient and inalienable right of every freeborn Englishman to go to the pub”. He did then get much crisper in his communications with the nation. One thing that can be said for Mr Johnson and the team around him at Number 10 is that they have a talent for crafting strong and simple messages, skills with the demotic that were honed during the Brexit referendum and the 2019 election. The frontman for “Take Back Control” and “Get Brexit Done” now bashed into the public consciousness “Stay at Home”, “Protect the NHS” and “Save Lives”. The video he released after his discharge from hospital was his most effective public performance of the crisis to date. There was dramatic revelation about his personal ordeal: “It could have gone either way”. The thanks expressed to the NHS – “the best of us” – gave every appearance of being heartfelt. And he used the opportunity to again drill home the government’s essential messages on social distancing. This has worked. Public cooperation with the lockdown has been much more comprehensive than ministers anticipated. Fears that the NHS would be overwhelmed by coronavirus victims have not, so far, been realised. Much of the rest of the picture remains grim. The official fatality rate is now around 20,000 and the real one is higher. The toll on the economy becomes more savage by the day. Some Tories are hoping that their leader will return to Downing Street wearing his sunny face. “We need him back to cheer us all up,” says one senior Conservative. That wish is way too premature. The next phase of this crisis will bring with it exceptionally hard decisions, ones that have been waiting on his reappearance because no one was properly empowered to substitute for him during his absence. These choices are too fiendish to be hidden behind a deceiving mask of bogus optimism. The arguments boiling up within the cabinet about rival versions of an “exit strategy” cannot be contained behind closed doors for any longer. The prime minister faces a host of complicated choices about when and how to ease the lockdown that all add up to one giant decision. Is the aim to maximise the repression of the disease at an ever-escalating cost to the economy and with rising deaths from other causes? Or does he choose to experiment with a more permissive relaxation of the restrictions at the risk of a resurgence in infection, leading to the much-dreaded second wave? To magnify the challenge, the scientists are candid that there is much that they still do not fully comprehend about the virus. There are no easy outcomes here, none that can be compressed into simple three-word slogans. All paths are perilous and the decision about which to take will have to be made without completely reliable information. Some leaders are trying to navigate their way through this hellish maze by treating their citizens like adults and levelling with them about the uncertainties and the competing risks. By doing so, they hope to garner public consent and understanding. Angela Merkel is the standout example of this type of leadership in Europe. True leadership is not about concealing the hard nature of the choices confronting the nation. True leadership requires honesty about them. One of the first things Boris Johnson has to decide when he returns to Number 10 is whether to start being frank with the country about the horribly difficult decisions that lie before us. His personal experience with the disease will guarantee him an audience, but the skills required for leading this conversation are not those of the entertainer. • Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer