It’s the Christmas season.  Let’s make a list.

British prime ministers that served since 2000. 

Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair.

Taoisigh during that 21-year period. 

Micheàl Martin, Leo Varadkar, Enda Kenny, Brian Cowen, Bertie Ahern

US Presidents.

Joe Biden. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. George W. Bush. Bill Clinton.

In theory, in each of the jurisdictions, the job represents the top rung of the career ladder. But pick any one of the 15 individuals, look at their time in charge and ask would they consider it an uninterrupted period of blissful happiness? 

Or is it more likely that they occasionally wake in the middle of the night, troubled by flashbacks from a time when they were in the hot seat?

Is success a hospital pass? Partly due to the changed nature of communications and information flow, like never before, has power become a poisoned chalice?

*****

There are the obvious truths. Nobody is forced to take the top job. You reap what you sow.

As an exercise in understanding, attempt to step into the shoes of one of the leaders, on centre stage – Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, currently swaying in the wind.

Last Tuesday, December 8th, should have been one of the rare good days for him. It was the first anniversary of the morning that Britain genuinely offered hope and inspiration to the wider world – the delivery of the first Covid 19 jab.

Whether deliberate or a fortunate coincidence, the recipient of that vaccine a year ago, Margaret Keenan, was the perfect ambassador. She is a native of Belcoo, Co. Fermanagh, who had moved from Northern Ireland to Coventry for work. 

A week before her 91st birthday, she was applauded by staff in the local University hospital after nurse May Parsons gave her the Pfizer injection.

A year on, instead of Boris bouncing on to centre stage to milk the plaudits for the UK’s vaccination policy, he found himself sliding towards the wall. 

A new Covid variant, Omicron, has surfaced. It may be spreading more rapidly than any of the previous versions.  As a result, Boris and his government are rolling out the unpopular restrictions that had been dispatched to the dustbin.  If the blowback worsens, the underwriting of vulnerable sections of the economy may have to resume, financed by yet more borrowings. 

The most personal embarrassment in the long list of woes, is how the nation, Conservative party included, is fixated by the details of a gathering at Downing Street a year ago, that Boris and his colleagues assured them never took place.

On so many fronts, problems are surfacing. On Tuesday, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee heard excruciating details of the British government’s botched handling of the Afghan evacuation. 150,000 terrified citizens applied for support because of their links to Britain but fewer than 5 per cent received any assistance.

40 pages of detailed whistle blower testimony were supplied by a 25-year-old civil servant, Raphael Marshall, who has since left his employment as a desk officer in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. 

He told of inadequate staffing at the department’s crisis centre and an unwillingness among personnel to work beyond normal office hours. He said the process of choosing who could get on a flight was arbitrary and thousands of emails with pleas for help went unread.

The top civil servant, Sir Philip Barton, came before the committee. He was asked about his decision to continue his holiday for 11 days after Kabul fell to the Taliban. A chastened Sir Philip told the MP inquisitors that he had reflected a lot and confessed that “if I had my time over again, I would have come back from my leave earlier than I did.”

The television news reports, detailing Raphael Marshall’s evidence to the committee, used archive footage of the August scenes at Kabul airport to illustrate the story.  The material featured the thousands of despairing children, women and men failing to get on board the departing planes.

The British government’s media team sought to counteract the impact of the damning evidence, presented to the committee. The former Foreign Secretary, Dominic Rabb, who was reshuffled out of his job after the debacle, described the whistle blower as a “relatively junior desk officer.” 

Within hours, another civil servant, this one currently employed in the Foreign Office, came forward to BBC’s Newsnight on an anonymous basis, to corroborate the evidence and add further detail to it.

As the accounts of the Foreign Office policy nightmare in Afghanistan were tumbling out, elsewhere in London, another government department was in severe public difficulties. The Grenfell Tower inquiry is investigating the circumstances of the fire which killed 72 people and destroyed a 24-storey residential block in June 2017. On Tuesday, counsel for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, made an unambiguous apology for “past failures.”

Jason Beer QC told the Inquiry, chaired by a retired judge, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, “The department is deeply sorry for its past failures in relation to its oversight of the system that regulated safety in the construction and refurbishment of high-rise buildings.  It also deeply regrets past failures in relation to the superintendence of the building control bodies.”

Michael Gove is now the Minister with responsibility for Levelling Up and Housing. It is highly likely that he had sight of the apology before it was issued. 

There are tens of thousands of leaseholders in the UK, living in flats built with similar construction methods and back stories to what happened in Grenfell Towers. 

London’s Metropolitan Police Service is investigating possible criminal manslaughter and corporate manslaughter charges in relation to the fire. It is likely to delay handing the evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service until the Inquiry has ended.  

In November Mr Johnson and his government had the satisfaction of hosting a Climate Change Summit in Glasgow which brought international attention to Britain and did not end in failure. Then on Wednesday night, he had no choice but to accept the resignation of an important aide during that successful Summit, Allegra Stratton, because of her role in the Downing Street, Christmas party controversy.

Ms Stratton, a former Guardian, BBC and ITV journalist, is friends with Mr Johnson’s wife, Carrie Symonds. She is godmother to the children of the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. As the close up and personal section of the melodrama unfolds, from a distance, former Johnson friend, Dominic Cummings watches on, with unique insight and eyesight, tweeting finger at the ready, in score-settling mode.

To the north, south, east and west, the appalling vista expands. 

A public health system, once the envy of the world, now creaking.

No credible plan and no robust formula to fund long-term residential care and home support services for the elderly and disabled. Pressure to address the issue of migrants after 27 people drowned in the English Channel in the deadliest crossing on record. 

A major review underway into Child Safeguarding Practice after the death of a 6-year-old who had 130 bruises on his body, leading to the conviction of his stepmother for murder and his father for manslaughter.

The promise to provide improved transport infrastructure to the English Midlands and North scaled back for cost reasons.

During Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday, Boris Johnson, sought to get his apology in first. Opposition leaders were lining up to taunt him over the Downing Street party that never took place. The Conservative party whip was in overdrive before the session began, making sure colleagues set aside their own reservations to turn up in numbers for their leader in his hour of need.

When the DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson sought to toss into the debate the Northern Ireland protocol, it barely registered on the Prime Minister’s consciousness. Brexit was indeed the issue that brought him to power but these days, indeed these hours, Boris Johnson has more pressing problems requiring attention if he is to survive.

Thursday was probably worse than Wednesday. The prime minister and his wife welcomed their new daughter into the world. On BBC’s Radio Four, traditionally a trusted source of perspective, one journalist wondered was it the prime minister’s 7th or 8th child and then moved swiftly on to focus on the latest inconsistencies in the account of party gatherings, Covid restrictions and Downing Street accommodation renovations.

Boris Johnson is an extreme example. Because he gives the impression that he may have an on-off relationship with truth, he is not someone to readily attract sympathy or understanding.

His precarious situation was captured so vividly a fortnight ago when he stood floundering at a podium, struggling for words and thoughts.

His main attraction for many of his colleagues is how somehow, through a mixture of self-belief, bombast and bluster, he could win the support of a majority of the electorate.

If that magic evaporates, he is goosed. 

His priority now must be to make it to Christmas and hope that he can regroup during the calmer holiday news cycle. 

*****

The Boris Johnson crisis offers an insight into the lives of those we entrust with the authority to govern. Leaders must live with reality that dealing with trouble is an unavoidable consequence of responsibility. 

In Dáil Éireann are those fronting the Coalition government approaching year end with a spring in their step and energy in the tank? Mica blocks, a national housing crisis, building materials inflation, growing national debt  – one small example of the challenge to do what is fair, affordable and responsible.

On the other side of the Atlantic, now that he is President, does Joe Biden give the impression of someone who is comfortable in the job he coveted for most of his working life? 

For now, much of it his own doing, Boris is the high-profile leader at most risk. But widening the lens, it is easy to conclude that the best part of power may be the journey to it.