In the choppy waters of public conversation, rulers have recently attracted much attention as they have bobbed along on its surface. This is not unusual, but in these months the attention has been more frenetic and perhaps harder to read. Whether it be Trump, Johnson, Andrews, Ardern, Berejiklian or Pope Francis, there have been unusual eddies about them that merit reflection.
Nothing useful can be said about Donald Trump, of course. He has always been a rip that takes everything and everyone reasonable out to sea and leaves them to drown.
Daniel Andrews, who has recently held his hundredth press conference on the coronavirus, is a more interesting case. TV watchers have been his Parliament, and scientific advisers his Cabinet. He is enduring. He has been professionally worked over by a hostile Murdoch Press and spokespersons for business groups, attacked by people impatient at restrictive measures imposed to deal with the virus, and left bleeding from the evidence of government mistakes and mismanagement of quarantine. He should be dead in the water and food for the sharks that pursue him.
Despite all this and despite popular weariness at the restrictions, popular support for him and for the lockdown he has presided over remains steady. Even more remarkable has been the popular response to journalists from hostile outlets who question him aggressively. The tidal flow of resentment that is social media has turned on the journalists and not on the premier, much to their discomfort. Whether or not Andrews survives the continuing economic and social pain brought by COVID-19, the level of his support and its passion are surprising.
In this context, too, we might mention Pope Francis whose reach and style of engagement with people have been much crimped by the coronavirus, and whose critics wanting more or fewer changes within the Catholic Church have multiplied. Yet he has also retained his popularity, and some of his critics have complained that they themselves are attacked by people who would normally be their allies. The currents here, too, are fluky.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand Jacinda Ardern has swum serenely towards election victory, unassailable when her success in suppressing the coronavirus and in responding to the murder of Muslim New Zealanders by a right wing terrorist. She is another ruler who carries the people with her.
Finally, Gladys Berejiklian seems to have survived the evidence that she had been in an intimate relationship with a former member of