Covid-19, for all its tragic health and economic impacts, will affect many areas of British life that are ripe for change. Pandemics, along with wars and economic depressions, have been the status quo’s greatest disruptors in history.

British government has long been unfit for purpose, as it was in 1939. The second world war created modern British government, which galvanised the massive economic and societal change to propel the country to victory, and then drove through, under Clement Attlee, the most profound postwar social revolution that the country has seen.

The handling of the coronavirus has been far from all bad. The response of the Treasury and HMRC in devising the recovery package so quickly was a highlight. So too has the palpable reliance on medics and scientists at the daily No 10 press conferences.

A committee of inquiry into how we’ve dealt with the outbreak is nevertheless likely to focus on three signal failings. Government, as most elsewhere, was insufficiently prepared, despite repeated warnings of a pandemic. Had the government planned ahead, it would have known better what decisions to take, and would not have made up so much policy on the wing. It would have built up stocks for testing, had enough personal protective equipment in warehouses, and ensured it had sufficient ventilators. It would have been able to press a button on a playlist to tell it exactly what to do with businesses, schools, universities, transport, food and social care.

But government had prepared itself for the wrong war. As former civil servant Alex Thomas, of the Institute for Government, said, “government had planned for an influenza outbreak. But coronavirus is very different to flu, and required a quite different response.”

Second, coordination between government departments early on was poor, and the policy response confused, until discipline was established by the daily press conferences. It worked well as long as Boris Johnson was driving policy from the front, and his chief strategist Dominic Cummings was in command.

The problem with centralising so much power into No 10 over the past 25 years has been that, when No 10 is not driving policy, nobody else does. With Johnson and Cummings both taken down by Covid-19, a power vacuum resulted, with unseemly briefings and counter-briefings from figures in and around No 10. Most commentators concentrated on the absence of Johnson: but as big a hole was left by Cummings, who has provided the strategy and cohesion of the entire Johnson premiership from day one.

Third, the exit strategy needed much greater clarity, for all the difficulty of achieving it with the evidence still evolving. An extension to the lockdown is expected to be announced on Thursday, but Labour leader Keir Starmer is right to press for more detail to allow households and businesses to plan. Some, such as health secretary Matt Hancock and Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, want to see a slower pace in the easing of the lockdown, while economic ministers, chancellor Rishi Sunak and business secretary Alok Sharma, favour an earlier return to work. The suspicion is that the struggle for influence between battling ministers could be more important than the hard science in deciding issues of major national importance.

The school term starts next week. Home-schooling will be the biggest educational experiment in the history of education, with little or no research to guide us about what works. We need to hear the voice of education secretary Gavin Williamson as part of the exit strategy, reassuring and guiding parents and teachers on how to do their best in what for many will be an intimidating experience.

Government needs to improve significantly after this crisis is over. In this at least, Cummings is right. But his principal target is wrong. The civil service is far less at fault than are the politicians. So how can we have a government fit for purpose as we approach the mid 21st century?

Ministerial leadership has been generally not good enough for many years. The giants of the Attlee, Wilson and Thatcher governments are nowhere to be seen. Too many top ministers know little about how to run their departments, which is why they blame their officials. They need to see the period as shadow ministers in opposition as vital training, when they are taught, perhaps by the Institute for Government, about how to be a minister. Special advisers often know little about their specialist area, are brought in for personal or ideological reasons, and can do immense damage. Iain Mansfield, a former official and specialist in higher education, is an exception at the Department for Education. More like him are needed.

Specialists and experts need to be embedded far more at the heart of every government department. That was the great lesson of the second world war. Universities, the intellectual powerhouses of the country, should be plundered for their top scientists, medics, technicians and economists. Every department should have a historian – another lesson from the crisis. Governments can arrive ignorant of the past, so repeat the same mistakes.

Power needs to flow back from Downing Street into Whitehall departments, above all to the Foreign Office, which has been progressively disempowered by No 10 since the 1980s. The epartments for International Trade and International Development could both be reabsorbed by the FCO. We need new Departments for Youth, which has been shamefully neglected, and a Department for Wellbeing or Happiness, to prioritise quality of life as opposed to the 20th century’s obsession with quantity.

A Department for the Future is long overdue. Whitehall needs to reflect the world of the 21st century, not the last one. Above all, long-term thinking needs to be at the heart of government, which has been chronically unable to think beyond the next general election. Plans for AI, infrastructure projects, the future of work and, yes, pandemics need to be the priority.