Boris Johnson is supposed to be keen on ‘fixing’ things – so why is he breaking the country?

The quickest way to deal with the shortage of tanker drivers, it seems obvious, is to get more people into the cab and moving idle tankers to empty petrol stations. There is no quicker way of doing that than to call in the military. In crisis after civilian crisis over the years – flood relief, providing minimum cover during fire strikes, administering Covid vaccines – the forces have been there for the nation. They are the Anadin to the pain of national emergencies – nothing acts faster.

This obvious solution to their headaches did not, until now, seem to appeal to ministers, who thought, inexplicably, that their appeals for calm would be sufficient to defuse the fuel crisis. Were those pleas to ever have had any chance of success they wells have needed the public to trust the word of the government. Experience has taught them otherwise. George Eustice and Kwasi Kwarteng said there were no plans to use the soldiers, even though Mr Eustice conceded that there were always civil contingency plans. Anyway, it appears another U-turn has been ignominiously executed.

Deploying the army is a step that no government should take casually, not least because the armed forces have a day job to do, but when the need is great and the role appropriate, then they certainly have a part to play. Even if there are only a few of them, using military drivers would help, and we are told by ministers that the shortage of drivers is comparatively slight. The troops will be prepared to go out in a few days. The nation will be thankful by the tankful.

It is bad, on the other hand, for Boris Johnson and his team, recently revamped to present a fresh face of efficient competence to the country. What the political professionals call “the optics” are embarrassing. The sight of men and women in khaki unloading the fuel the nation needs to function will be a most potent image of political and national failure – and used and recycled endlessly against those responsible for the mess, like the pictures of the rubbish piled high in Leicester Square during the last winter of discontent in 1978-79, or, indeed, the chaotic television footage of the retreat from Kabul. Presentationally, troops at the pumps is a PR disaster precisely because it reinforces the image and reality of a government that is so poor at governing, exceeding even the worst dithering and delays of the May administration. It is also an outward and visible sign that Brexit may not be living up to the boosterish hype, to put it mildly.

Already, the government’s poll ratings are sliding, and the prime minister’s scant reputation for competence has been eroded still further. In Brighton there are a few signs of life sprouting in the unpromising soil of the contemporary Labour Party. You might think that ministers would have been acting on the crisis and taking control of events rather than just telling people, ludicrously, that there’s no shortage of fuel (even if technically correct) and asking worried people not to fill their empty tanks up. It was a pathetic response of an administration in a Narnia-scale escape from reality.

There is much debate about blame for this crisis. That is how it should be. The media, Covid, Brexit, panic buying, poor pay and conditions, leaks from meetings in Whitehall… all can be plonked into the basket for the national balloon debate. It won’t be of much immediate use, however, for those queuing up at the filling stations worried about getting the children to school and themselves to work. What they want, to borrow a phrase from a more heroic era, is “action this day”. Relaxing testing rules, making drivers work harder, a few foreign worker visas, and allowing companies to collaborate – none were going to be enough. In truth, even sending a modest number of troops into the crisis probably won’t solve it. All people want from the prime minister is a tankful of petrol or diesel. Wasn’t he supposed to be good at getting stuff done?