If you looked under the bonnet of other governments would they be just as dysfunctional?

What a shambles. what a massive, all-round disastrous, expletives-undeleted, shambles. The recurrent theme of the seven-plus hours of testimony from the prime minister’s former chief adviser on Wednesday was that the way the UK is governed had proved totally unequal to coping with the mega-crisis of a pandemic.

“Over and over again”, said Dominic Cummings, it had been a case “very much of lions being led by donkeys.”

“When the public needed us most,” he said, “the government failed.”

Now you do not have to accept everything Cummings said to agree that the UK has not emerged well from the pandemic, at least not until the vaccines came along. Its per capita deaths from Covid-19 remain among the highest in the developed world. But I just wonder, if Cummings-style critics were to look under the bonnet of other governments around the same time, whether they might not find that they were as poorly governed, as inadequately led, even if their weaknesses manifested themselves in different ways.

First, let’s give the UK a small break. It is easy to condemn political leaders for their early inattention, their lack of precautions, their foolhardy proximity, even Boris Johnson’s hospital visit, where he may have tried, Diana-style, to deflect potential stigma, by shaking Covid-patients’s hands. Leave aside blame, though, and the fact that so many senior ministers and officials contracted the disease early on, meant that for a few crucial weeks, the government struggled to function at all.

Cummings gave a glimpse of the chaos last year at his “rose garden” press conference. It was less evident in his Commons committee testimony, except in his references to the prime minister “on his deathbed” and Dominic Raab suddenly having to step up. (Alongside this, the day when the US requested for the UK to bomb Iraq, the Covid crisis and Carrie Symonds’s dog were all vying for attention, it was essentially just another day in 21st-century government.)

But the fact remains: key officials, including the prime minister and the head of the civil service, were out of action. Yet there was a mechanism in place for delegation and the government staggered on – not particularly efficiently or well. But no one claimed authority out of the constitutional order – remember “I’m in charge” said Al Haig after Ronald Reagan was shot, or the recent strange interventions by mostly retired military officers in France.

To Dominic Cummings on the inside, the system might have looked pretty ropey; to a public shocked by the news that a relatively young and recently elected prime minister was in intensive care, it still looked just about under control. To that – modest – extent, the system still worked. It might not have done elsewhere.

And so to some of Cummings’s specific points, starting with the calibre of our politicians. At the last election, he said, we had a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. “I think any system which ends up giving a choice between two people like that ... is obviously a system that’s gone extremely, extremely badly wrong.”

Well, yes. But I give you exhibit A: Donald Trump, and exhibit B: Silvio Berlusconi, who still hovers around the sidelines of Italian politics. It is a rare country that has already installed a cool, calm, experienced politician with a science degree, such as Angela Merkel, when the pandemic hits. You are stuck with “the people’s” choice, which will probably not be the choice of the experts or the intellectuals – or, in a first-past-the-post electoral system, someone who must reconcile a coalition.

Trump had an electoral mandate (until he didn’t), as does Boris Johnson. Cummings suggested at one point that much of his energy went into trying to protect the country from Johnson’s failings. There were officials in the White House who said much the same thing. But messing with a democratic mandate is treacherous ground.

Much praise was lavished on Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, who indeed emerged as an adept and decisive crisis leader, but most countries are not New Zealand (small, far from others, and able to be sealed off); those advantages were rarely acknowledged. Nor should the alarm on Merkel’s face be forgotten, as she apologised for shutting down the country before Easter.

Cummings singled out Taiwan and South Korea as examples of competent government (as contrasted with our own), dismissing the idea that, either because of their political system or their national character, people in Asia were somehow more tolerant of curbs on their personal liberty than the British would be. The acceptance of “lockdowns” by Britons – as by Italians and other Europeans – he suggested, was evidence that “lockdowns” could, and should, have been imposed earlier.

What he did not broach, however, is how far selective quarantine – which was also applied in these countries and in Singapore – would be feasible even in a super-efficient UK (or in much of Europe and the US). If you have a virus which disproportionately affects those who are poor and/or from certain ethnic minorities, how do you pre-empt stigma and discrimination? How sensitive this is should be clear, most recently, from the local travel restrictions applied – without publicity, then un-applied – to areas affected by the “Indian variant”. Social harmony might require a little more flexibility in more heterogeneous countries. Competence might not be so simply defined.

And what of the UK’s governing class? I have a great deal of sympathy with Cummings’s view of the senior civil service, starting with the muddied lines of accountability. Why on earth, for instance, should Amber Rudd have been expected to resign as home secretary for “misleading” MPs with wrong information given to her by her officials (who were merely transferred)? How come so few senior civil servants lose their jobs for scandalously botched work in what is largely a closed hierarchy?

It has to be said that such traits are not unique to government. The risk of “groupthink”, the so-called “Peter principle” according to which people rise to their “level of incompetence”, the way the talents of some of the best languish unused, are all characteristics of big organisations – including, as the Martin Bashir case and many others have shown, the BBC. The difference might be that in government and at a time of major national crisis, the consequences can be many times greater and more costly in lives than might be in commercial life.

But does anyone else do government service any better? The US, with more political appointees, may have sharper decision-making, but risks less esprit de corps. Germany’s equivalent seems solid, if unimaginative. The French senior civil service is no less of a caste than our own, and perhaps even more narrowly drawn – to the point where President Macron is now disbanding ENA (the Ecole Nationale d’Administration) to widen and modernise government service.

In many other parts of Europe, government service offers feather-bedded employment largely reserved for the sons and daughters of the well-connected. Across the US and Europe, one gauge of relative success during the pandemic seems to have been proximity: federated state and city governments have come into their own, but they have also, especially in the US, produced failure as well as success.

There are two respects, though, in which – it seems to me – the UK falls down badly on international comparisons. The first is a pervasive sense of superiority in relation to our own institutions. One of these is the NHS – whose poor infection controls, it emerged this week, could have accounted for many additional Covid deaths. But the civil service is another. It still likes to think of itself as a global “Rolls Royce”, even as its “impartiality” and its preference – in practice, if not in theory – for “generalists” leave it stuck in an old mould.

And the second – which is related – is a distinct lack of curiosity about how other countries do things and what we might learn. The pandemic, coupled with modern communications, has offered a unique opportunity to draw from international experience almost in real-time. But precedents, good and bad, have largely gone unheeded. Might condescension towards Italy, for instance, help to explain why the UK failed to take the pandemic seriously at the start? Did we not know about Germany’s success, and Sweden’s failure, with infections in care homes? Should we not have done?

If the UK has been let down by its government, however, especially in the early stages of the pandemic, there has been one saving grace. My own observation of emergencies here and elsewhere suggests that the UK is distinguished by an unusual degree of resilience, of slowness to panic, of general civic compliance and individual responsibility that puts its government – and not just this one – to shame. It may be scant consolation to conclude that, without this, the consequences of the pandemic for this country could have been even worse.