General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

THIS IS TAKEN FROM THE NEW YORK Times In early March, Mr. Johnson suggested that the best course of action would be for Britain to “take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.” This, he explained, would create a sort of “herd immunity” that would protect the population as a whole.

Um, maybe. But not without killing untold numbers of people first. The plan was quickly recognized as bonkers and scrapped, and Mr. Johnson moved to embrace a more conventional path of containment and social distancing.

Policy planning aside, Mr. Johnson’s use of the bully pulpit has been an abject disaster. “The best thing you can do is to wash your hands with soap and hot water while singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice,” he said at a March 3 news conference. “We should all basically just go about our normal daily lives,” he urged, before chuckling about how he had been running around shaking hands willy-nilly. This prompted a cheeky scribe for The Guardian to call the prime minister “the U.K.’s own super-spreader.”

Such macho swagger would be hilarious if the repercussions weren’t so lethal. Who knows how many people Mr. Johnson infected with his blithe ignorance, including potentially his fiancée.