The Atlantic: New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet. “They may even think, Well, I don’t quite understand why [the government] did that, but I know she’s got our back. There’s a high level of trust and confidence in her because of that empathy.” (Empathissus isn’t that dude who fell in love with his own reflection.)

+ “He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.” A big (paywalled) exposé tracks Boris Johnson’s failure to take the virus seriously (at least before he got it). Axios has some outtakes.

+ As bad as some leaders have been, only one has trashed and defunded WHO as one of his strategies to deflect blame. Like most of these deflections, this one is based on lies. WaPo: “More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at [WHO] on coronavirus … and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration.”