Doctors and nurses are dying for lack of equipment. Is Johnson up to this?

Thomas Harvey was a family man, a father of seven, but in his last moments he was forced apart from them.

The 57-year-old nurse, who had been self-isolating at home with coronavirus symptoms, was found by paramedics who broke down a bathroom door to reach him, but sadly he could not be saved. It is impossible to know where exactly he was infected. But Harvey, the fifth NHS worker to die during this outbreak, reportedly told his wife he had been treating patients at Goodmayes hospital in Ilford equipped only with “a flimsy apron, and no mask”. He had devoted his life to the NHS, his daughter Tamira said and she felt he had been let down.

The more stories emerge of doctors improvising masks from snorkels and nurses using bin liners for aprons, as they struggle not only to protect themselves but avoid spreading infection to other patients, the clearer a nation’s moral duty to those on the frontline becomes. A global pandemic is not a war, and military metaphors can be overdone. But the lesson of history is that governments are not forgiven for sending their people defenceless into the trenches, metaphorical or literal, and that’s why historical parallels with the events of 1915 may be instructive.

Less than a year into the first world war, reports began surfacing of British troops forced to attack heavily defended German positions armed only with shrapnel shells after stocks of more modern shells ran out. What the Daily Mail called “The Tragedy of the Shells” triggered a backlash on the home front from which Herbert Asquith’s administration never recovered. Although a shortage of shells wasn’t the only reason troops were struggling, fury at the failure of military and political strategists to anticipate the intensity of the fighting and gear up munitions production in response became a rallying point. The shell scandal helped trigger the formation of a cross-party national government, with David Lloyd George serving initially as its munitions minister before ultimately moving into Downing Street himself.

Now, a century on, a tragedy not of shells but of masks and gowns and diagnostic testing looms, arguably exacerbated by a failure to anticipate how many people would be hospitalised with this virus. For Asquith, read a fledgling Conservative administration now under serious attack from the rightwing press for the first time; for that emergency national government, a question mark hanging over Labour’s brand new leader.

Until now, both the opposition and the unions have trodden a carefully constructive line through this epidemic. The TUC pitched in with the Treasury to ensure the rescue package for small businesses and the self-employed was comprehensive. Past Labour leaders chipped in where they hoped to help – Gordon Brown offering lessons learned from the 2008 banking crash, and Tony Blair pushing the case for testing and refocusing his institute’s work on coronavirus in Africa. The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, has wisely sought not to exploit this crisis for cheap political reasons. But now that doctors and nurses are dying, the public mood is hardening. The TUC and unions representing care workers have called the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) a “crisis within a crisis”, warning that staff shouldn’t have to work in unsafe conditions. The imminent coronation of a new Labour leader, meanwhile, brings functioning opposition back just as the gap between government promises and reality is widening.

Nightly Downing Street press conferences revolve endlessly around the same questions: why aren’t staff getting PPE, and why is Germany testing 10 times as many people as Britain? (The two are related – staff who aren’t shielded are more likely to contract and spread infection, multiplying the need for testing). A Dunkirk-style armada of small ships, from scientific research institutes to veterinary testing labs, has been clamouring to help with processing tests for a while but Public Health England (the public sector body overseeing tests for infectious disease) has reportedly been reluctant to cede control. Arguments behind the scenes have centred on the risks of using an untried network versus the risks of failing to test in time, with the latter argument weighing heavily on the health secretary, Matt Hancock. Meanwhile medical staff face impossible dilemmas when masks and gloves run out: do they carry on helping patients anyway, or stop because it’s unsafe?

Ministers say they’ve dispatched 390m pieces of PPE in only three weeks but that’s meaningless without knowing exactly how much is needed (one New York hospital alone recently estimated that it would shortly be getting through 70,000 disposable masks a day). British hospitals are scrounging goggles from school chemistry labs and snapping up plastic visors made by volunteers on 3D printers, but the problem isn’t just supply, it’s distribution to the right people at the right time, across a jumble of private social care providers as well as the NHS. Over all this hangs the original failure to predict the pattern of this virus, leaving ministers racing to catch up with an outbreak not originally expected to peak until May.

Ministers complain that China concealed the true severity of the outbreak, meaning they only got reliable data once the virus hit Italy, yet that doesn’t wholly explain why so many western governments responded differently. Why did we become the outliers, priding ourselves on having a smarter solution than everyone else? Is that really nothing to do with the personalities at the top of Downing Street?

Boris Johnson was exactly the right leader for a Conservative party desperate to win a majority – that much became blindingly obvious in December – and he won it because many voters clearly thought him the right person to deliver Brexit. But Brexit isn’t the defining issue in British politics any more, and handling a deadly epidemic demands a cautious leader excelling at logistics and detail.

Related: UK hospitals being sent untested coronavirus protection, say medics

Back in 1915, the solution to a nation losing faith in its leader mid-crisis was a national government of all the talents, an idea often dismissed these days either as a soppy centrist fantasy or a means of stifling dissent by absorbing critics inside the tent. Right now it still feels like a stretch, when the idea of an emergency cross-party administration didn’t get off the ground even at the height of paralysis over Brexit.

But the departure of Jeremy Corbyn, a figure so polarising that some of his own MPs didn’t trust him with power, is a pivotal moment nonetheless. For the first time in years, Labour might have found a leader that erstwhile Tory voters wouldn’t be terrified to see in Downing Street. At the very least, some gesture of humility and willingness to listen to different viewpoints is now required from Johnson as he emerges from self-isolation. It’s still a lovely thing to come out on our doorsteps and clap for NHS workers. But we do it these days knowing that all the heartfelt gratitude in the world is not, by itself, anything like enough.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist