Last week, as the nation engaged in a coordinated applause for the NHS and its workers on the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic, there was, in the middle of a profound sense of community, a jarring moment: Boris Johnson emerged from No 10 and began clapping, along with Rishi Sunak. The prime minister punctuated his applause with awkward exclamations: “We’ll keep supporting you in any way we can.” At one point he turned to Sunak, “Isn’t that right, Rishi?” to which the chancellor replied, “Whatever you need, that’s what you’re going to get!” It all had the air of a friend who had habitually ignored you, then one day unexpectedly needed you, and so returned with empty gestures of affection.

Austerity has already claimed lives, but coronavirus deaths are not as easy to style out

And empty is what these gestures are when they come from the Conservative party, whose record and current performance suggest nothing close to “supporting in any way we can”. Frontline NHS staff do not have sufficient protective equipment or even access to coronavirus tests: they are merely instructed to self-isolate once their symptoms reach a certain threshold. And the reason so many NHS staff have to work extra hours with no pay is because they do not have the resources to do otherwise – something that many of us knew as we stood up and clapped and cheered for them as a nation. Those resources have been consistently and deliberately drained from the NHS since the Conservative-Liberal coalition came to power in 2010. From defunding nurse training to selling off parts of the NHS to private companies, the Tory party in power has hobbled the healthcare system’s ability to deal with the everyday, let alone the exceptional. Conservative MPs cheered the result of a parliamentary vote in 2017 that blocked a pay rise for nurses, of which there is a severe shortage in the NHS – 40,000 in England alone.

There is a phrase in Arabic that translates as: “They killed him, then walked at his funeral.” The current government has perfected this game, squeezing the NHS’s budget, slashing welfare, hacking at the public sector, severely restricting urgently needed immigrant labour, and then diverting the political fallout from those issues on to other targets. All while maintaining the fiction – amid scandals, resignations and botched policymaking – that a rightwing party of competent fiscally sensible grownups is the most rational choice.

This party of cool-headed responsibility has fielded a prime minister in crisis who seems ever more incompetent every passing day. Shifty, bored, he is deprived of his one trick: tickling an audience into the laughter he needs to compensate for his lack of substance. A few weeks after a jolly boast that he shook hands with coronavirus patients, the joke ended with him contracting the virus himself. So accustomed have we become to this government’s posturing that the deadpan presence of Sunak reading a financial support statement, with the customary (and minimal) amount of recognition of what we are going through as a nation, was seen by commentators as enough to anoint him a PM-in-waiting.

This is the natural conclusion for a party that has substituted culture for policy – a shift with dire consequences for the public’s ability to hold government to account for its performance. The Brexit referendum accelerated this. When politics is reduced to nothing but rhetoric about taking back control and getting Brexit done, the entire news complex also starts to function along those lines. Journalism spends less time scrutinising performance and concrete achievements, and more time covering the politics of division, or becoming divisive itself. And while the media and rightwing politicians and many newspapers fixated endlessly on immigration, Muslims, the liberal elite, the traitors in the judiciary and the citizen of nowhere, a pandemic was quietly making its way to us – to expose the way that our public health system, our labour rights and our consumer protections had all been gutted or neglected during this time.

But the link will not necessarily be made in voters’ minds. Austerity and the withdrawal of the state have gone on for so long that many have forgotten that it wasn’t always like this, and that it doesn’t always have to be. The Tory government itself pretends that it would love to help but its hands are tied: by open borders, by the EU, by the need to deal with the fiscal mess allegedly left by New Labour’s social spending (but not by the bailing out of the financial sector). Help can be wrested from the government by harassing it publicly on discrete single issues: free parking for NHS doctors, compensation for Windrush victims. And once the spotlight fades, the government’s fist tightens once again.

There is nothing inherently wrong with campaigning and governing by way of providing voters with a sort of currency of identity, but it cannot be everything. For this government, it is everything. That was made horrifyingly clear as stories begin to emerge of the chaos in Johnson’s unprepared ranks during their cobbling together of a response to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite warnings, the government, and Johnson, minimised the threat and defied the science, reaching for exceptionalism, for the optics of cheerfully shaking hands with the afflicted. But that isn’t the whole story. Johnson has the licence to clap an NHS his party has suffocated because the Conservatives have successfully created an ecosystem that fortifies them against the consequences of their mendacity and their failure.

In stable times the cost of that can be hidden. Austerity has already claimed lives; but, because of their speed and visibility, coronavirus deaths are not as easy to style out. We no longer know how to hold a government to account on the truly important matters of the day. The pandemic needs to be a wake-up call – or else the Conservative government will continue to kill us, then walk at our funeral.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist