ritain’s prime minister is looking ever more like an Old Etonian Donald Trump. A premiership that began with sacked ministers, party purges and vacuous slogans has continued in the same vein. Revelations in the Sunday Times of No 10 during Johnson’s illness are alarming. With a prime minister locked in his bedroom, his absentee aide Dominic Cummings manoeuvred the ousting of the head of the civil service, Sir Mark Sedwill, leaving the office in the care of a press secretary, Lee Cain. The war on Covid-19 was delegated to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, a paralysed NHS and scientists publicly feuding over dud data. Since Johnson’s return the signs have not been good. He unwisely insists on taking press conferences at which he stutters and just repeats Cummings’ slogans, such as stay alert, save lives, build, build, build. Last Thursday, the contrast was stark between Johnson’s mumbling about “keeping safe” and the clear, crisp responses of his chancellor, Rishi Sunak. The partnership with “the science” has also collapsed. The government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, has openly distanced himself from Johnson’s plea for the nation to return to work, asserting he could see “absolutely no reason” for it. There spoke a man with a safe job. The British constitution famously rests on convention. This requires a compact between politicians working as a cabinet and a quasi-independent civil service. Last year Johnson cleared his cabinet of its most able members, leaving him exposed and “presidential”. Come the crisis, he was at the mercy of disputatious scientists and a clearly demoralised civil service. His refusal to engage the UK’s local government in any shape or form astonished foreign observers. Every aspect of the crisis has found a government wanting in competence. The emptying of NHS hospitals, care home protection, PPE procurement, testing and tracing and lockdown discipline have all delivered the worst pandemic performance of any major western government. Even data on weekly deaths is now thought unreliable. It seems likely that Tudor bills of mortality would have been more trustworthy. It is hard not to sympathise with Johnson over his year in office, dicing with death and turbulence in his private life. But the country must be led. The gossip – which is all we have to go on – is of emptiness in Downing Street. The prime minister is a determined centralist in thrall to a tactless and obsessive aide, Cummings, whose skill seems limited to writing slogans in triplicate. The UK’s battered economy now urgently requires a compromise trade agreement with the EU this autumn. Johnson in his head must know that. But the talk is that Downing Street simply lacks the diplomatic competence to reach such a deal in the weeks available. Just as Trump blindsides his officials, so does Johnson. The odds are that Britain will stumble on and crash blindly into a trade wall with Europe in December.