Introduction

By ‘Freedom Day’ on 19 July 2021, 129,007 people in the United Kingdom (UK) had lost their lives to the COVID-19 virus, representing the 7th-highest mortality rate per 100,000 of the population in the world (Johns Hopkins University 2021). The UK government’s responses to this acute crisis from March 2020 to July 2021 challenged many of the dominant assumptions about the role of government in public life. Therefore, the need to justify government actions became increasingly urgent, and, at the same time, the pandemic intensified narrative contestation at differing levels of governance (Flinders 2021, p. 497). Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the chief narrator of his government’s response to the pandemic. During 2020–2021 he offered a narrative in which the ‘British people’ occupied a central role. Johnson’s use of this narrative, and particularly the emphasis placed on the ‘British people’, is striking given the political fragmentation within and across the nations of the UK that was a notable feature of the decade of politics preceding the pandemic. In this article, we argue that Johnson’s COVID-19 narrative was informed by longer-term crises of British politics over the UK’s internal unity and its post-Brexit place in the world.

Rather than analyse narratives as a causal force in policy formation, this article focuses on narratives themselves as the key outcome of interest. More specifically, we argue that the narratives formulated by politicians for the purpose of advancing one particular policy often advance other policies and address other issues as well: what we call ‘fusion’—whereby one narrative is used to support other elements of policy—and ‘layering’—whereby one narrative provides justification for other policy decisions.

Typical analyses of politicians' narrative strategies focus on one narrative at a time (Shanahan et al 2018, 2013), rather than on how politicians may interweave narratives as they handle multiple policy crises. We suggest that, instead, researchers should be open to the possibility that policy narratives are a product of multiple political projects, imperatives, and crises that frame and shape both the narrative content, and how and when these narratives are used. To advance this argument, we analyse the narratives deployed by Boris Johnson in Parliament from March 2020 until ‘Freedom Day’ in July 2021, along with press conference statements for the same period, and illustrate the ‘fusion’ and ‘layering’ of his COVID-19 policy narrative with other narratives derived from the previous decade of British politics. In particular we analyse the pandemic narrative with regard to the two interrelated political dilemmas of the 2010s: how to leave one political union (the European Union) without disintegrating another (the UK).

The article is structured in three main sections. The first section analyses political narratives as the primary outcome of interest rather than as a causal force. It examines the fusion and layering of the Prime Minister’s narrative with pre- and co-existing narratives that were developed and deployed to justify other, mutually reinforcing, political projects or actions. The second section examines the Prime Minister’s (at times, impromptu) responses at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) and his (more scripted) narrative constructions during press conferences, as ‘a window into ideology’ (Finlayson and Martin 2008, p. 446), in this instance the ideas informing Conservative—or ‘Johnsonian’—statecraft. This statecraft had been put into sharp focus since 2014 by demands for Scottish independence, the variable support for Leave and Remain across the nations of the UK, and questions surrounding the status of Northern Ireland during and after withdrawal from the EU. The third and final section examines Johnson’s pandemic narrative in light of the UK’s geostrategic reorientation away from the EU. Building on the idea that narratives are shaped in relation to the broader politics that precede, and occur concurrently with, their deployment, we argue that the UK Prime Minister’s fusion and layering of the pandemic narrative in 2020–21 provided an opportunity to discursively reunite the UK and demonstrate that Brexit had been a success.

Fusion and layering in political narratives

According to Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman, narratives in the human sciences should be defined as ‘discourses with a clear sequential order that connect events in a meaningful way for a definite audience, and, thus, offer insights about the world and/or people’s experiences of it’ (Hinchman and Hinchman 1997, p. xvi). Narratives are sense-making actions. For politicians they form an important part in the post facto justification of decision-making. This political context for justification distinguishes political rhetoric from public reason—as understood by normative political theorists—because, as Ryan Walter and John Uhr have argued, ‘standards for deliberation are not taken to be grounded in the exercise of Rawlsian or other styles of philosophical discipline, but in the history and institutions of a nation’ (Walter and Uhr 2015, p. 250). This highlights the importance of the institutions that have been internalised by the actors. Vivien Schmidt developed the idea of ‘discursive institutionalism’ in which institutions are understood as ‘norms, frames and narratives that not only establish how actors conceptualise the world but also enable them to reconceptualize the world’ (Schmidt 2010, p. 13). As Schmidt argued, institutions are ‘simultaneously constraining structures and enabling constructs of meaning’, which have been internalised by ‘sentient (thinking and speaking) agents’ (Schmidt 2010, p. 4). In other words, as Richard Ashcroft and Mark Bevir argue, narratives are evidence in and of themselves, and ‘cannot simply be trumped by data gathered by more putatively “objective” approaches’ (Ashcroft and Bevir 2021, p. 119).

When building upon insights from historical institutionalism, discursive institutionalist approaches highlight a certain effect of what Dennis Grube has called ‘rhetorical path dependency’ (Grube 2016). Grube argues that words are ‘sticky’: that is to say that rhetorical choices have long-term consequences that may constrain actors into positions that become less tenable over time (Grube 2016, pp. 531–533). It is quite possible that narratives about UK (or more pointedly British) unity and Global Britain’s place in the world, ‘rhetorically entrapped’ Johnson into sticking with these ideas throughout the pandemic years, or that there was little capacity to fashion new narratives during the pandemic crisis. However, this article adds to the debate about the importance of words and discourses in politics by arguing that the narratives themselves might be the product of previous or concurrent political issues that have shaped the worldview—or conditioned the political choices—of the actor constructing and communicating the narrative. As Matthew Flinders notes, ‘the coronavirus crisis cannot be studied in isolation and should be more accurately conceived as being layered upon, or interwoven with, a complex patchwork of challenges’ (Flinders 2021, p. 492). In other words, narrative analysis should not occur in an isolated and decontextualised manner.

On one level, Johnson’s narrative promoting successes and deflecting failures during the 2020–2021 period is clearly about the COVID-19 crisis. However, by focusing on other elements of British politics alongside the pandemic, an analysis of Johnson’s narrative over this period suggests that there is more than the public justification of pandemic-related policy at stake. The consistent theme of the narrative—that the British people are unified and that the UK government’s approach to the pandemic was better than Europe’s—suggests that additional factors are shaping the narrative’s form and its political deployment. Situated analysis of the narrative reveals a clear discrepancy between the consistent invocation of the ‘British people’ and the increasingly fragmented reality of British politics and the political system during the 2010s. As Ashcroft and Bevir rightly note, ‘any invocation of a singular “national identity” is better understood as a normative claim about what identity should be, than as an empirical claim about what it is’ (Ashcroft and Bevir 2021, p. 11). Hence, we hypothesise that there may be additional reasons why Johnson deployed a narrative that emphasised British commonality and unity of purpose so prominently.

This has a further implication. Central to the employment of narratives by policymakers is also a process of ‘localisation’. Electorates tend to be more receptive to narratives that are ‘congruent’ with their pre-existing beliefs, cultural identities, and political views (Jones and McBeth 2010, p. 344; Shanahan et al. 2018). However, while much narrative-related research focuses on recipients’ passive reaction to certain narrative content (Husmann 2015; Lybecker et al. 2013), it is also important to stress that people often also ‘localise’ those narratives, inasmuch as they compare and contrast them (and sometimes integrate them) with their own pre-existing views about policy issues. Therefore, although policy actors develop their narratives in dynamic situations, such narratives are embedded in broader socio-political contexts—they are operating in what Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Pauline Schnapper describe as a context of ‘situated agency’ (Bevir et al. 2015, p. 6). In other words, narrators are actively aiming to adapt their narratives to their audience’s pre-existing beliefs, identities and norms (Lybecker et al. 2013; McBeth et al. 2014; Mintrom et al. 2021).

Recent research on the narratives generated to justify the UK government’s pandemic policy responses suggests that an analytical emphasis should be placed on the localisation of a narrative when seeking to explain public justification of policies (Mintrom et al. 2021). In other words, localisation may happen at various levels depending on which specific policy or crisis a politician is relating their narrative to. The fusion of different narratives and this layered process of localisation proceed hand in hand.

Our underlying argument is, therefore that the broader politics that precede (and occur concurrently with) the deployment of a narrative help to shape it: hence the narrative becomes the primary outcome of interest in our analysis and should not be decontextualised. Narrative analysis generally assumes that the narratives employed by politicians—or other actors in the case of the strategic narrative literature in International Relations (Miskimmon et al. 2013)—relate to the specific policy, policies or course of action that they are trying to defend and/or justify. Our analysis of Johnson’s COVID-19 narrative leads us to challenge this assumption. Instead, we argue that there may be a fusion and layering of narratives: ‘fusion’ in the sense of using COVID-19 narratives to advance other elements of policy, and ‘layering’ in the sense of using COVID-19 narratives as further proof of the benefit of previous policy choices. This is because politicians never speak or act in a vacuum; their policy decisions and responses to specific crises or policy issues always occur within a broader political context than the immediate policy issue alone. Hence when a politician is using a narrative to justify policy or decision X, she may actually (also) be providing a narrative to justify policy or decision Y, and/or to counter political development or crisis Z.

We illustrate this proposition in relation to Boris Johnson’s pandemic narrative by focusing on the two broad, if at times overlapping, phases in the UK’s response to COVID-19: the priority eventually given to lockdown and containment from March 2020 until July 2021, which was widely criticised; and the much more praised vaccine roll-out from February to July 2021. Despite these two distinct phases, the data gleaned from Boris Johnson’s scripted press conferences and unscripted, yet at times rehearsed, replies during PMQs show that the theme of his narrative—the British people and its common sense—remained remarkably consistent throughout many policy initiatives (notably the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme), instances of political turbulence (Dominic Cummings and the Barnard Castle affair; the resignation of the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock and, not least, the initial phases of the ‘Partygate’ scandal that formed the background to Boris Johnson’s resignations in 2022 and 2023) and personal circumstances (Johnson’s own hospitalisation due to COVID-19 in April 2020).

Yet, Johnson’s focus on Britain and the British people in the localisation of his pandemic narrative reveals an anomaly: at the outset of the pandemic the unity of the United Kingdom could not be taken for granted given the ongoing negotiations on the status of Northern Ireland and the Scottish government’s stated aim of holding another referendum on independence by 2023. Furthermore, the strength of feeling British and a common understanding of that identity throughout the four nations of the UK had changed and weakened since the 1990s, not least in England (Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021, p. 38). This rhetorical reference to the ‘British people’, at a time when one of the most notable features about British politics was its fragmentation, augment analyses that suggest that such rhetorical claims are part of a wider and somewhat novel political project playing out. In their analysis of interview data from Conservative MPs and discourse analysis of speeches and written responses to questions, Michael Kenny and Jack Sheldon identified what they called ‘hyper-Unionism’ amongst Conservative MPs (Kenny and Sheldon 2021, p. 966). If we draw upon Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes’ ‘traditions and dilemmas’ approach (Bevir and Rhodes 2006), which states that when faced with a dilemma, such as keeping the United Kingdom united whilst withdrawing from the European Union, we might expect Conservative MPs to draw upon pre-existing Conservative traditions such as ‘One Nation’ Toryism. However, Kenny and Sheldon’s research, supported by our own findings, is that one particular tradition was being strongly emphasised at the expense of others. Johnson’s COVID-19 narrative was fused with those of other political projects and statecraft. Specifically, this fusion relates to the need to keep the United Kingdom together on Anglo-Conservative terms and the need to make Brexit appear as a success. The means to do this was through the sense-making prevalent in the layering and fusion of Johnson’s narratives about COVID-19.

Fusing the COVID-19 narrative with the unity of the United Kingdom

The emergent narrative of the UK government’s response to the pandemic in the first half of 2020 drew heavily on temporal explanations that situated the virus politically, socially and historically. Such (at times inconsistent) constructions had great political utility, allowing the government to ‘explain, justify and defend vital moments in the UK’s efforts to manage the crisis’ (Jarvis 2022, p. 25). Our article similarly stresses the importance of narratives. However, it examines their impact in the form of statecraft, and the ways in which the Prime Minister’s words sought to overcome divisions within the UK body politic by narrating the UK government’s efforts as a national (in this case ‘British’) struggle that proved the value of leaving the European Union and preserving the unity of the United Kingdom—or at least the Conservatives’ interpretation of the Union during the 2010–2021 period.

Johnson’s pandemic narrative was fused with rhetorical attempts to re-unify a fractured sense of British nationality and overcome threats to the UK’s territorial integrity. Two months into the pandemic, Boris Johnson told MPs that

…one of the most remarkable things about this crisis has been the way that the whole country has come together to deal with it. There has been a spirit of unity and sharing that we have not seen for a very long time (Hansard, vol. 676, 13 May 2020).

The temporal construction of this claim (‘a very long time’) also leaves considerable latitude for the audience’s interpretation. Victoria Honeyman has shown how Boris Johnson’s public image and persona were linked with Britain’s ‘glorious’ past by his supporters in the pro-Brexit press—a persona he then adopted after his time as Foreign Secretary had come to an end in 2018 (Honeyman 2023, p. 41). Given Johnson’s public persona, it could be taken as an oblique reference to the notion of unity that is an important part of Britain’s Second World War mythology. Johnson drew freely upon wartime analogies—including oblique Churchillian references. Speaking at the outset of the pandemic when the challenge ahead was unclear Johnson continued to locate the pandemic historically, stating that ‘I know that as they have in the past so many times, the people of this country will rise to that challenge’ (Johnson, press conference, 23 March 2020). Speaking just after his release from hospital—and when it seemed that the initial challenge had been met—Johnson praised national unity in another oblique reference to the War, claiming that ‘this country came together in a way few of us have seen in our lifetimes’ (Johnson, press release, 30 April 2020), and followed up with some Churchill-inspired rhetoric about sunlit uplands:

We have come through the peak; or rather we’ve come under what could have been a vast peak as though we’ve been going through some huge alpine tunnel. And we can now see the sunlight and pasture ahead of us (Johnson, press conference, 30 April 2020).

These oblique or overt wartime references were more evident in his press conferences than in PMQs. Messages and rhetoric in press conferences were designed for a broad, public audience that was focused on such public communication in a way that differed qualitatively from non-crisis politics.

If the temporality of the claim made on 13 May 2020 is sufficiently vague to mean different things to different people in different parts of the UK—but is contained within themes of an Anglo-Conservative view of Britain’s past—the same is true for the geography of the claim (‘the whole country’). This could mean England or the United Kingdom given Johnson’s overlapping competences during the pandemic. Illustrating this merging of localities in official messaging (‘United Kingdom’, ‘the country’, ‘England’), in January 2021 Johnson told a press conference that

Since the pandemic began last year, the whole United Kingdom has been engaged in a great national effort to fight Covid… With most of the country already under extreme measures, it is clear that we need to do more, together, to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out. In England, we must therefore go into a national lockdown which is tough enough to contain this variant (Johnson, [press conference] 4 January 2021).

He continued his explanation and closed on the persistent theme of the narrative—the British people: ‘You should follow the new rules from now, and they will become law in the early hours of Wednesday morning… The weeks ahead will be the hardest yet but I really do believe that we are entering the last phase of the struggle. Because with every jab that goes into our arms, we are tilting the odds against Covid and in favour of the British people' (Johnson, 4 January 2021).

These claims about the unity of the British people stand out because dis-unity within the United Kingdom had been a novel feature of British politics since the Conservative Party came to power, initially in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, in 2010. The 2010s were a decade of turbulence in British politics due to significant voter dealignment and realignments, and subsequent volatile support for mainstream parties. This was evident at the 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, and was made visible through the cross-party realignments of the Scottish and EU referendums in 2014 and 2016 (Ford et al., 2021). The Brexit referendum of 2016 was both the expression of, and accelerator for, significant identity-based electoral realignments that had an impact in the 2017 and, especially, 2019 general elections (Sobolewska and Ford 2020, p. 2). The latter election in particular seemed to underscore a series of long-term shifts amongst voters that ultimately benefited the Conservatives, at that stage united behind a Johnson government claiming to ‘Get Brexit Done’ and keep a Corbyn-led Labour Party out of power (Curtice et al. 2021, p. 488). Conservative gains in 2019 in formerly Labour-held seats in the North-east and Midlands of England were seemingly confirmed by the results of the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021. Yet, at the same time, the Chesham and Amersham and Shropshire North by-election results 1 month later suggested that ‘Conservative Remainers’ were not as committed to Johnson’s Conservative Party, especially its tone and tactics, as they had been to previous leaders’ stewardship of the party. Shifting allegiances still shaped the electoral landscape after Brexit during the pandemic.

This volatility within the electorate also boosted support for, and at times the influence of, minor parties, further complicating statecraft in the UK. The Lib Dems secured enough seats in 2010 to become the junior partner in a Conservative-led government, which was one of the main reasons for their electoral collapse in 2015. This loss of seats in 2015 was compounded by the party’s explicitly anti-Brexit stance in 2019, notwithstanding support gained from Remain-voting Conservatives in the south-east of England. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), and the related-but-distinct Brexit Party, used their successes as protest votes in elections to the European Parliament between 2009 and 2019 to push Conservative policy towards Brexit. In Northern Ireland, the 2017 election seemingly handed significant power to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Westminster, although that advantage was squandered during the 2017–2019 parliament (Henderson et al. 2021, p. 445). Furthermore, Sinn Féin increased its influence when Northern Ireland’s position within the UK was weakened as a result of the DUP’s response to the UK government’s Brexit negotiations. Even in Wales, opinion polls showed that support for independence grew from around 20% to about 33% during the 2016–2021 period, although this did not translate into seats for Plaid Cymru in the Senedd Cymru or at Westminster (Institute for Government 2021).

Most importantly, Scottish nationalism became the key driver of disintegration in the UK during this period. The asymmetrically-devolved nature of the British state permitted the entrenchment of secessionist nationalism in Scotland, at least until the failure of Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership in the 2022–2023 period. This was evident not only during the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, but also as a result of the Holyrood elections 2011, 2016 and 2021. As with the voter alignments and realignments associated with the Brexit vote of 2016, the (unsuccessful) independence referendum of 2014 led to realignments that generated increased support for the secessionist Scottish National Party (SNP), which became the third-largest party at Westminster after 2015. As a result of the 2021 Holyrood elections, and in light of Brexit, the SNP aimed for a second referendum on independence, although the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 effectively stymied this initiative for the pro-independence parties in Scotland.

The overall effect of these political developments in the UK has been significant. What we understand as ‘British politics’, which traditionally rested heavily on the two-party system that was a major ‘British’ institution, has been replaced with an ‘asymmetrically devolved’ system in which, since 2010, different parties have governed the four nations of the UK, with metropolitan mayoralties further complicating the landscape of UK governance. This changing terrain has resulted in the need for narrative adaptation to justify Conservative statecraft (Heppell 2014, p. 8).

Survey data on Britishness and national identities have also shown that the political realignment noted above is not a passing anomaly. Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford outline the way in which identity politics, and especially the two referendums of 2014 and 2016, had a destabilising effect on political identification amongst voters, although in different ways in Scotland and other parts of the Union (Sobolewska and Ford 2020, pp. 250–283). Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones reveal that a feeling of Britishness declined across the United Kingdom—particularly in England—between 1992 and 2016 (Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021, p. 39). This shift, most pronounced in the late 1990s but stabilising thereafter, was also revealed by NatCen data (Curtice 2018,p. 250).

In this light, Johnson’s evocation of the ‘British people’ as the main theme of the pandemic narrative could be seen not so much as a reflection of socio-political reality but rather as an attempt to bring a unitary—and Conservative—idea of the British people back to the forefront of public imagination. In this sense, it could be considered as an instance of Kenny and Sheldon’s concept of ‘hyper-unionism’ (Kenny and Sheldon 2021, p. 966): an attempt to re-centralise the United Kingdom in ways that are based upon a Conservative, Anglo-British understanding of the Union. It also reinforces Ashcroft and Bevir’s notion that invocations of national identity should be considered normative claims as to what that identity should be, rather than reflections of political realities (Ashcroft and Bevir 2021, p. 119).

‘Hyper-unionism’ is not a term that Johnson or Conservative MPs would use to describe themselves. Indeed, as part of the post-Brexit ‘levelling-up’ strategy, Johnson located his actions in a different Conservative tradition: One Nation Conservatism. As he argued in May 2020, ‘[t]his Government—this One Nation Conservative Government—are [sic] determined to invest more in our NHS than at any time in modern memory’ (Hansard, vol. 676, 20 May 2020). Kenny and Sheldon correctly argue that what is distinctive and notable about this newest expression of Anglo-British Unionism amongst Conservative Westminster MPs ‘is the apparent imperative to articulate and emphasise [the] pro-Union sentiment that it references, and the growing anxiety about threats to the UK’s territorial integrity to which this is linked’ (Kenny and Sheldon 2021, p. 967). The Englishness of hyper-unionism is implicit rather than explicit (notwithstanding the Johnson government’s belated endorsement of the England football team during the latter stages of the Euro 2020 championship, support that was not extended to the Wales and Scotland teams). Nevertheless, it fits a pre-existing pattern of using ‘British’ rhetoric to mask more complex socio-political realities driving the politics of nationality and nationalism in the UK (Aughey 2016, p. 353), a context in which Johnson’s pandemic narrative was firmly embedded.

Johnson’s narrative initially focused on a central pillar of British pride, the National Health Service (NHS). Linking the NHS and other issues had paid political dividends for Johnson in the recent past. Linking Brexit to supposed financial gains for the NHS had benefited the Leave campaign in 2016 and such a linkage with the NHS was made again by Johnson, and his strategic adviser Dominic Cummings (another veteran of the Brexit referendum), in the early stages of the pandemic response. Even before his own hospitalisation in April 2020, Johnson told Parliament: ‘I do indeed recognise the amazing dedication and commitment of NHS and social care staff who have been at the forefront of this pandemic and who have borne the brunt of it, personally in many cases’ (Hansard, 671, 17 March 2020). Eventually, making the NHS a central element of the pandemic response narrative resulted in the succinct ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ public information campaign that linked this totemic ‘British’ institution with the government's actions and policies.

This too was an effort to rhetorically mask and contain national divisions within the UK, divisions in policy implementation and delivery that the health-driven pandemic response illuminated and that starkly illustrated the devolved nature of the UK. ‘Whatever the defects of the Labour Government in Wales’, Johnson argued in May 2020, ‘my experience is that we have been working very well together across all the four nations and will continue to do so’ (Hansard, vol. 676: 13 May 2020). The following week, Johnson told the Commons that ‘[p]erhaps I can just say that I continue to be very happy with the level of cooperation, in spite of what we sometimes hear in this Chamber, between the Governments of all four nations, particularly Scotland’ (Hansard, vol. 676, 20 May 2020).

Differing responses designed to control the spread of the virus revealed the asymmetrically devolved nature of the UK and hence required greater rhetorical calls for unity in the Prime Minister’s narrative. Echoing Theresa May’s assertion that following the vote to leave the EU one of her government’s main priorities was to keep the UK united (May 2016), Johnson asserted in reply to a question from a Welsh MP that his (UK) government had done ‘more to protect businesses around the whole of the country [than devolved administrations], including in Wales. I said that we are proceeding as one UK, and we are’ (Hansard, vol. 677, 20 June 2020). In the face of further questions from Scottish and Welsh MPs, Johnson used the opportunity to remind the Commons of his government’s position at the apex of the devolved Union and to link his narrative to an issue of elite and even popular English grievance: the ‘Barnett Formula’ that allocated the distribution of public finances to the four nations of the UK—at England’s expense according to critics (Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021, p. 61):

It is, of course, up to the Welsh Government to spend money properly, but the hon. Lady [Jessica Morden, Labour] should be in no doubt that this Government continues to commit sums to help all the devolved Administrations. As I think our friends from the SNP will know, the UK Exchequer has already contributed £3.7 billion extra in Barnett consequentials for Scotland alone (Hansard, vol. 677, 20 June 2020).

British unity came under strain again as the second wave of the virus took hold in the autumn of 2020 and Johnson’s government came under criticism for its prevarication over imposing a second lockdown. The location of health competencies shaped these divisions in significant ways, something Johnson noted when he said that ‘[w]hile these levels specifically apply to England, we continue to work closely with the devolved Administrations to tackle this virus across the whole United Kingdom’ (Hansard, vol. 682, 12 October 2020). To overcome this deepening division of the UK into its constituent national components, Johnson quickly invoked the spirit of unity once again: ‘The ways that we cooperate are much more significant than the differences between us’ (Hansard, vol. 682, 12 October 2020). As the infection and death rates climbed sharply in late 2020, Johnson linked the (unspecified) nation and country to language with inflections of wartime collective endeavours: ‘It is not the end of our national struggle against coronavirus… That is why it is important that the package of moderately tough measures that the House voted for last night—the tiering system—is followed across the country, because that is how we will continue to beat the virus’ (Hansard, vol. 685, 2 December 2020). These ‘moderately tough measures’ reflected the government’s ideological reticence to curtail freedoms, thereby devolving responsibility onto the re-invoked British people. This was a policy vacuum that the British people and their common sense were implored to fill: ‘I understand my hon. Friend’s point about people’s behaviour after leaving the pub. That is why it is vital that everybody shows common sense and follows the guidance’ (Hansard, vol. 682, 12 October 2020). Johnson’s invocation of the British people could be viewed not just as a means of devolving responsibility but also as an attempt to recreate a unitary idea of the British people, after a decade of national fragmentation, an important element in Conservative hyper-Unionism.

The underlying imperative driving the narrative of British unity and fusing it with the pandemic narrative was revealed in the lead up to the Holyrood elections of 2021 and the likelihood of an SNP government committed to a second referendum on Scottish independence. Having recently returned from a visit to Northern Ireland, whose status in the UK had been weakened as a result of the British government’s negotiations over the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, Johnson faced questions from the SNP. In response, Johnson used the pandemic as a chance to dismiss SNP demands for independence as irresponsible sources of division:

I think what the people of Scotland need and deserve is a Government who tackle the problems of education in Scotland, a Government who address themselves to fighting crime and drug addiction in Scotland, and a Government who can wean themselves off their addiction to constitutional change and constitutional argument, because they seem, in the middle of a pandemic when the country is trying to move forward together, to be obsessed with nothing else—nothing else—but breaking up the country and a reckless referendum (Hansard, vol. 671, 17 March 2021).

Johnson was no stranger to reckless referendums, a recklessness that had paid political dividends before the pandemic. In this part of the narrative, Johnson sought to link his government’s responses to the pandemic with popular British (in this case meaning UK-wide) institutions, notably the Army, besides the National Health Service (even though health was a devolved area of competence). In January 2021, Johnson fused the pandemic narrative with a narrative about the unity of the UK through its institutions, telling the Commons that

…it has been one of the few consolations of this pandemic to see the way the country has come together to fight it, particularly to see the way that great national institutions—great UK institutions—such as the British Army have been absolutely indispensable in Wales, in Scotland and around the whole of the UK in fighting this pandemic. I know that it is appreciated across the whole of the UK (Hansard, vol. 688, 27 January 2021).

Responding to a criticism that Scottish businesses had not received enough support, and linking the pandemic narrative to the NHS, Johnson said: ‘I am delighted to say, the whole of the UK has benefited massively from the natural strength of the UK economy and the ability of the UK Treasury to make these commitments, and the mere fact that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and every part of the United Kingdom has received the vaccine is entirely thanks to our national NHS’ (Hansard, vol. 686, 6 January 2021). The fact that Johnson characterised the NHS as a ‘national’ institution (despite ‘National’ being part of its name) reveals the assumption that the UK, Britain and Britishness represented an ideal superior to sub-state nationalisms. Characteristically, England was not mentioned explicitly, simultaneously obscuring and revealing the Anglo-British Conservative hyper-unionism that framed Conservative statecraft. This effect was produced by repeatedly resorting to a standard Unionist characterisation of SNP policy and ideology as a ‘narrow nationalist position’ (Hansard, vol. 686, 6 January 2021), and between January and May 2021 consistently misnaming the SNP as the Scottish Nationalist Party (as opposed to the Scottish National Party) in an apparent attempt to discredit the party in government at Holyrood.

Importantly, in Johnson’s narrative, Scottish ‘nationalism’ (as opposed to Johnson’s own implicit Anglo-British nationalism) remained outside the bounds of common sense. Speaking in the lead-up to the Holyrood elections of 2021, the Prime Minister urged the Scottish people to ‘reject the SNP—a Scottish nationalist party’ because

…it is failing the people of Scotland, failing to deliver on education, failing on crime and failing on the economy. I hope very much that the people of Scotland will go for common sense. Instead of endlessly going on about constitutional issues and endlessly campaigning for a referendum, which is the last thing the people of this country need right now, I think people want a Government who focus on the issues that matter to them, including a fantastic international education scheme like Turing (Hansard, vol. 690, 10 March 2021).

This linkage between the unity of the United Kingdom and its strategic reorientation away from the EU—in this case the Turing replacement for the Erasmus scheme of EU-wide tertiary education mobility support—leads us to the second constitutive element of the pandemic narrative, Global Britain.

Layering the COVID-19 narrative with Global Britain

The second imperative that contributed to the layering and fusion of Johnson’s pandemic narrative related to the withdrawal of the UK from the EU. The hyper-unionism of Brexit-era Conservative statecraft linked rhetoric concerning anxieties about the integrity of the UK with rhetoric that compared the UK favourably to European countries and the EU to consolidate the electoral coalition forged during Brexit. Johnson told the House on 13 May 2020 that ‘I do not think that a lot of people in this country want to see the Brexit argument reopened. They want to see it settled, they want to see it done’ (Hansard, vol. 676, 13 May 2020). However, the COVID-19 narrative could not avoid the immediate past and the UK’s unfolding strategic reorientation. Given the historical significance of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, Johnson’s pandemic narrative should be understood in its immediate historic context. As such, elements of the construction of Johnson’s pandemic narrative can be seen as a product of the layering required to justify the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and the new geostrategic alignments of the post-Brexit era.

Johnson’s leadership was intimately bound with the UK’s attempt to leave the EU and we should expect the formation of a pandemic narrative to reflect this crucible of his prime ministerial career. He was witness to, and indeed in some ways the author of, the fact that his predecessor lost hegemony over the political arguments for Brexit (Marlow-Stevens and Hayton 2021, p. 14). The politics of Brexit paved the way for Johnson’s assumption of leadership of the Conservative Party and the consolidation of his government in office after the general election of 2019. Johnson’s declaration for Leave in February 2016, his time as Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, his open challenge for leadership after the 2019 EP elections, and his successful leadership of the Conservative general election campaign in 2019 meant that his leadership was formed entirely in the context of getting the UK out of the EU and the strategic realignments required for that change. Indeed, Johnson’s leadership was so bound up with Brexit that his (admittedly biased) former advisor, Dominic Cummings, even suggested that Johnson could be disposed of as leader once the 2019 election was won (BBC News 2021). This strong linkage between Johnson and Brexit was the source of nervousness amongst newly elected MPs in ‘red wall’ seats when the ‘Partygate’ scandal broke in early 2022.

Noting the linkage between national identity and the international order (Vucetic 2021, p. 201), Johnson’s pandemic narrative could, therefore, be interpreted in light of a fusion with the ‘Global Britain’ narrative that preceded and accompanied Brexit and was part of the alternative vision for the UK outside of the EU, layered upon justifications for the success of withdrawal. The origins of the ‘Global Britain’ narrative predated Brexit and was originally a part of the Cameron government’s Eurosceptic repositioning of the UK towards what the Foreign Secretary William Hague described as ‘traditional allies and emerging economies’ outside of the EU (Hague, 2013). As early as 2012, emerging leaders on the Eurosceptic right of the Conservative Party co-authored a small but influential pamphlet titled Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity. Four of the five authors held office in the Johnson government: Dominic Raab (former Foreign Secretary), Priti Patel (Home Secretary), Liz Truss (Foreign Secretary and former Secretary of State for International Trade), and Kwasi Kwarteng (Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). Truss and Kwarteng briefly held the offices of Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer respectively in September–October 2022.

The link between liberty, free trade, and exit from the EU formed much of what became known as ‘Global Britain’ in the wake of the 2016 referendum. For Daniel Hannan, one of the key figures of the Leave campaign and an advisor to the re-established Board of Trade, leaving the EU meant a chance to realign the UK with its ‘true friends in the Anglosphere’ (Hannan, 2015). Such visions were accompanied by a sense of grandeur. Responding to the surprise of the vote to leave in 2016, Grant Schapps (former co-chair of the Conservative Party) spoke of the need to recapture the ‘swashbuckling spirit’ of Britain’s 19th free trade heyday once it was out of the EU (Schapps 2016).

Although it might be argued that all leaders will promote their nation’s successes and exaggerate its place in the world, the narrative of a ‘world-beating’ Global Britain gained extra urgency, nurtured as a legitimising response to the geostrategic realignment away from the EU and towards a trading disposition based on multilateral free trade agreements (although the EU already had these with third countries) and a return to ‘East of Suez’ military deployments following the ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ of the Integrated Review of 2021 (HM Government 2021). These included the (initial) strategic review of the UK’s defence forces and the announcement of the UK–Australia FTA in 2021. Most importantly, when claiming success, especially for the vaccine roll-out, Johnson made such claims in comparison with ‘Europe combined’, suggesting that even when Europe acted in concert it could not match the UK’s achievements. In January 2021 he told the British public through his press conferences that ‘Yesterday alone, we vaccinated around a quarter of a million people in England, and that is still far more than any other country in Europe’ (Johnson, 15 January 2021). The notion of Britain as a ‘world-beater’ entered the pandemic narrative when the test-and-trace element of containing the pandemic was failing in 2020 but also when the vaccine roll-out gained traction in late 2020 and early 2021. Johnson told the House that ‘we have one of the fastest vaccine roll-outs anywhere in the world—certainly the fastest in Europe. It would not have been possible if we had stayed in the European Medicines Agency’ (Hansard, vol. 697, 16 June 2021).

When, as noted above, Johnson spoke to Parliament in May 2020 of the ‘spirit of unity and sharing that we have not seen for a very long time’ (Hansard, vol 676, 13 May 2020), it was an oblique reference to the memory of the Second World War, which is remembered (despite the tensions the conflict produced) as a period of British unity in the face of an external, existential threat (Rose 2003, p. 29). Johnson is a well-known admirer of Winston Churchill and authored a (self-referential) biography of the wartime Prime Minister in 2014 (Johnson, 2014). Early pandemic narratives focused on wartime continuities, particularly in support for the centenarian Captain Tom Moore's well-publicised and popular attempt to raise money during the first lockdown. At times the Prime Minister’s rhetoric echoed recruitment drives from the First World War: ‘all politicians will be asked what they did, and what we did collaboratively, working together for the people of our country, to beat this virus’ (Hansard, vol. 688, 27 January 2021). The most self-conscious linkage between Global Britain and the Second World War came after the G7 summit in June 2021:

Together with the G7, the countries represented at Carbis Bay comprise a ‘Democratic XI’—free nations living on five continents, spanning different faiths and cultures, but united by a shared belief in liberty, democracy and human rights. Those ideals were encapsulated in the Atlantic Charter agreed by Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt in 1941, when Britain was the only surviving democracy in Europe and the very existence of our freedom was in peril. The courage and valour of millions of people ensured that our ideals survived and flourished, and 80 years on, President Biden and I met within sight of HMS Prince of Wales, the Royal Navy’s newest aircraft carrier and the linear successor and we agreed a New Atlantic Charter, encompassing the full breadth of British and American cooperation in science and technology, trade and global security (Hansard, vol. 697, 16 June 2021).

Brexit and Global Britain were interlinked political projects with free trade a central aspect of the elite-level support for both. They also fed into the new constellations of domestic English politics because so-called ‘Lidl Conservatives’, notably the then Secretary for International Trade Liz Truss, believed that FTAs would reduce costs to the consumer for everyday expenses in the lower socio-economic ‘red wall’ seats that swung to the Conservatives in 2019 and secure these voters' allegiance. Speaking after the in-principle agreement with Australia for an FTA, Johnson made this linkage explicit: ‘This is exactly how global Britain will help to generate jobs and opportunities at home and level up our whole United Kingdom. Our agreement with Australia is a vital step towards the even greater prize of the UK joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a $9 trillion free trade area embracing the fastest growing economies of the world’ (Hansard, vol. 697, 16 June 2021). Furthermore, emphasising local concerns in the narrative, Johnson replied to a question from Marco Longhi, a new Conservative MP in a formerly Labour ‘red wall’ seat, that ‘the people of Dudley North and the rest of the country will benefit massively from a new age of cooperation between our democracies’ (Hansard, vol. 697, 16 June 2021).

Such issue linkage was an important part of the production of the Prime Minister’s overall pandemic narrative. Speaking on the fifth anniversary of the vote to leave the European Union, Johnson told Parliament that Brexit

…allowed us to take back control of the issues that matter to the people of the United Kingdom. It has given us the freedom to establish eight freeports across the country, driving new investment; to develop the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe; to protect and invest in jobs and renewal across every part of the UK; to control our immigration system, and to sign an historic trade deal with Australia. It will allow us to shape a better future for our people (Hansard, vol. 697, 23 June 2021).

The vaccine roll-out across the UK was largely seen as a success, making it important for Johnson to link this success to the uncertain future of Brexit and the novelty of the UK’s position outside of the EU. Thus, a trope emerged that counterfactually linked vaccines, the Opposition, and membership of EU agencies and was designed to exploit internal tensions amongst the Labour electorate on Brexit. ‘When the right hon. and learned Gentleman [Sir Keir Starmer] criticises this Government for wanting to keep our borders open’, Johnson argued, ‘just remember that he voted 43 times in the last 5 years to ensure that our border controls were kept in the hands of Brussels’ (Hansard, vol. 697, 16 June 2021). Johnson also reminded his audience in June 2020: ‘Never let it be forgotten that if we had followed the advice of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, [the UK vaccine roll-out] would not be possible because it was under his proposals that we would have stayed in the European Medicines Agency and been unable to deliver the vaccine roll-out at all’ (Hansard, vol. 698, 30 June). He returned to this theme in February 2021, stating that membership of the European Medicines Agency ‘would have made a vaccine roll-out of this speed impossible’ (Hansard, vol. 689: 22 February). This line of Parliamentary attack was made eight times out of the ten statements Johnson made from the Dispatch Box from 19 May to 19 July 2021.

More commonly, the repetition of the comparison with ‘Europe combined’ was a consistent feature of Johnson's explanation of the relative success of the testing and vaccination rates. ‘The UK has made a huge amount of progress’, he said on 13 May 2020. ‘We now test more than virtually any other country in Europe’ (Hansard, vol. 676: 13 May 2020), a point he reiterated one week later when he told the House that ‘we are absolutely confident that we will be able to increase our testing, not just in care homes but across the whole of the community… this country is now testing more than virtually any other country in Europe’ (Hansard, vol. 676: 20 May 2020); and again in January 2021 when he closed a press conference by noting that ‘again I want to thank you—the British public—for coming forward to be vaccinated in the numbers that you have—still greater than all the countries of Europe put together’ (Johnson, 5 January 2021).

Johnson returned to the comparison again the following month: ‘this country is now testing roughly twice as many people per head of population as any other European country’ (Hansard, vol. 677: 23 June 2020). The theme continued after the 2020 summer recess when the PM told the House that ‘this country continues to test more people and conduct more tests than any other country in Europe’ (Hansard, vol. 682: 12 October 2020). This was an attempt to deflect criticism from the rising death toll in the winter of 2020–2021 and played into the belief that the UK was better off out of the EU when compared to EU’s pandemic response, which included the initial lack of ‘solidarity’, its slow vaccine roll-out across member states, and the dispute over the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine supply. The narrative line continued right to the end of the survey period when Johnson told the house (again) that ‘if we had followed the hon. Gentleman’s [Starmer’s] precepts—he campaigned vehemently to stay in the European Union—we would not have achieved the fastest vaccine roll-out of any European country or vaccinated a higher proportion than any European population’ (Hansard, vol. 699, 14 July 2021).

This use of comparison was reserved not only for testing rates but also for economic support measures that overturned decades of Conservative economic orthodoxy. On the UK’s government ‘furlough’ job support scheme, Johnson stressed that ‘the Chancellor’s latest job support scheme, at 67%, is highly competitive with those of all other European countries’ (Hansard, vol. 682: 12 October 2020). At the first PMQs of 2021 he reiterated that ‘[w]e have already vaccinated more people in this country than the rest of Europe combined’ (Hansard, 6 January 2021). The moral of this narrative was a simple one: the pandemic showed that the UK was better off out of the EU than in it, illustrating the layering of different narratives in Boris Johnson’s pandemic narrative justifying a past policy decision.

Conclusion

Before drawing some general conclusions about narratives that this case study illustrates, it should be noted that there is an implicit assumption that Johnson’s choice of pandemic narrative was intentional, strategic and rational. However, any subsequent analyses should be open to the possibility that his (and, more generally, any policymaker's) choice of narrative may be the result of various types of cognitive biases (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). While there is certainly a great deal of agency in the ways that politicians and other stakeholders might intentionally package and present policy information using narratives, they often face diverse pressures within broader advocacy coalitions (Peterson 2018). Distinct narrative elements, along with diverse strategies and policy beliefs within such a coalition, affect narrative cohesion and the subsequent policy outcomes, in addition to the forms of narrative path dependency noted above.

This opens up two possibilities with regard to the argument in this article: on the one hand, that this fusion and layering of narratives was a deliberate tactic on Johnson's part to feed into his larger policy narrative about the unity of the UK and post-Brexit Britain’s place in the world; or on the other hand, this was not a deliberate choice but came from Johnson's unstated and implicit experiences, beliefs and values. It is impossible to say conclusively which, or to what degree, either of these is correct. However, what can be said is that politicians do not focus on narrative strategies one at a time, divorced from each other: narratives often become fused and layered. This is important because typical research on policy actors' narrative strategies focuses on one narrative and/or policy area at a time, rather than how politicians may interweave narratives as they handle multiple policy crises.

This narrative fusion (using one narrative to advance other areas of policy) and layering (using one narrative to justify past policy decisions) are evident in Jonson’s pandemic response between March 2020 and July 2021. The politics of Brexit revealed a UK that was already divided along national lines which required an adaptation and recalibration of Conservative statecraft narratives. The pandemic narrative developed by the Prime Minister provided an opportunity to re-invoke the idea of a unified British people; to rhetorically and discursively re-centralise the UK and attempt to prove that Brexit and the concomitant strategic reorientation towards ‘Global Britain’ were a success; and to consolidate the political gains of the 2016–2019 period.

The underlying argument of this article is that the broader politics that precede—and occur concurrently with—the deployment of a narrative help to shape it. The narrative should not be taken as something created in the absence of additional political or strategic forces shaping the choice of words and their deployment for political effect. Thus, the narrative itself can be a product of multiple political crises and projects that frame and shape the narrative as it is deployed in support of the justification of contentious policies, political outcomes, and strategic reorientations.