Boris Johnson is still hiding as disaster strikes, we wouldn't have let Corbyn get away

Britain is facing a global pandemic. The markets behaved like a roller coaster driven by a drunk. Trade negotiations with the EU are in deep trouble and the head of the Interior Ministry is taking him to labor court after a brutal information campaign against him. Yet Prime Minister Corbyn spent the weekend in an apartment of thanks and favor and could only wonder how much he loved NHS staff at a press conference. Today, the Morning Chronicle speaks for the nation and says that too much is too much. The Prime Minister must either roll up his sleeves and lead the nation, or give way to someone who can.

Imagine, imagine, a different result from the fateful elections of last year. Imagine, in the privacy of the polling station, people who think of Boris Johnson and tremble before putting an X in the box against the name of the candidate representing the other worst option.

Now imagine Prime Minister Corbyn facing the situation that Britain is currently watching. Do you think he could get away with what Johnson has? Seriously?

The fictitious preamble to the leader of the first page of the Morning chronicle, my imaginary right-hand diary, is just a little taste of what it would get.

As for his allies, imagine the Daily Mirror, arguably Labor's most reliable press ally, recounting a new addition to the Corbyn clan at Downing Street as his splash instead of the unprecedented public resignation of the top Home Office official … as the Telegraph fact.

I know I know. Corbyns a little long in the tooth for this kind of thing. But what about a grandchild who moves in?

Prime Minister, you are supposed to rule the country. Now is not the time for little feet on Downing Street, columnists reportedly said.

Or something like that.

It is not an attempt to wage old battles, nor to advance the false account of certain Corbynistas that the defeat of their heroes was entirely the fault of the "meejas".

The reason I want you to imagine for a moment that history has gone the other way is because it is instructive. It shows the disturbing lack of control and the challenges facing the current occupant of # 10.

Can you imagine that almost any leader is doing as lightly as our part-time Prime Minister has done recently?

It's not that hard to see Theresa May opening her newspapers in the morning and thinking, "Seriously? Seriously? Does all this happen?"

The UK was sailing in rough waters before the microbe everyone is talking about crossed the species barrier somewhere in China.

Living here now, I think I was starting to understand what a maritime skipper must feel when he hears the guy reading the Radio four navigation forecast storm force wind warning at Dogger, Forties, Fisher and Viking. Is it just me, or his cut tones and his supernatural calm feel so slightly inappropriate when you start to imagine what people sailing in these areas have to go through when there is a real bad guy on the way?

I guess one consolation coming from the Prime Ministers' lack of engagement with his audience is that it relieves the plight of those of us whose teeth are panicked by these lead tones.

But if I appreciate the gesture of its media managers, in the midst of a national and international crisis, a country is rather supposed to hear its leaders. And a country is entitled to expect actions and responses rather than half-assed platitude and clumsy amateurism.

Maybe someone should send Johnson and his people a copy of King's speech or something. The context of war should appeal to them given the way they fetishize a conflict in which none of them has ever fought.

This could offer them some kind of example.

At the moment, Johnson seems to behave like Madonna in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when she was too tall as a star to give interviews, popping up for the occasional performance and offering occasional treats to the columnist for gossip.

Corbyn and his masters could never, never have gotten away with it. And they shouldn't either. He and they would have rightly been kicked.

Johnson is surely one.