Quote: Uncle Rico "
The real question though was not whether they would "have done any worse than Johnson and his pals", I probably think that they wouldn't despite their obvious failings, as others would have (hopefully) risen to the challenge although looking at the current state of the Labour Party it's a small pool Starmer Ashworth Nandy and being reactive is sometimes easier than forward planning .... but whether the NHS and the country would be better prepared the forward planning bit then again I'd say probably not.'"
A Corbyn government would have likely made a shambles of this. Corbyn himself was a poor leader, indecisive, disorganised, the way he and his inner circle managed the Labour Remain campaign during the referendum and his first Shadow Cabinet (and the Parliamentary party in general) was complete chaos, mixed messages, lack of communication. The only thing Corbyn was good at was campaigning in rallies. If they had been in office now we'd have Barry Gardiner and Richard Burgon doing those daily press conferences just slagging off the last decade of Tory government.
In crisis management the premium is on competence not who is good at political campaigning or controlling the message. The recent PMs who would have been best in this situation are Gordon Brown and Theresa May. Neither were good at politics but I think either of them would have acted more quickly when this started to break, they took issues of threats and security very seriously. This would have been on their radar as a massive priority from the moment it first came about in China, they'd have been poring over every source of intelligence back in January/February, not focusing on whether Big Ben should bong for Brexit or building a bridge across the Irish sea like Boris who is naturally more carefree. Cameron was a bit like Boris too so he wouldn't have been great.
There's also a lack of talent in the current Cabinet because Boris purged the party of opponents and he just used Ministerial posts to reward his supporters in the leadership campaign. Rishi Sunak seems like a bright guy but some of the others are rabbits in the headlights.
In a crisis situation like this the kind of Ministers who would be good would be Oliver Letwin, William Hague and David Willetts from the Tories, and Hilary Benn and Andrew Adonis from Labour. They would all be good at dealing with complexity and could take the politics out of it and work with the scientific community and the food suppliers, medical equipment manufacturers to get a path forward.