Well I feel a lot better, don’t you? No. Not really. The government and an increasingly compliant media are framing the return to work today of Boris Johnson as some kind of measure of relief if not an out-and-out saviour. You can almost hear them collectively exhale at the prospect of their beloved leader returning to lead the ongoing effort to eliminate coronavirus. Personally, I feel more secure now that Johnson is back in situ in the same way I would if you told me that Kyle Walker was organising a party for one of my elderly relatives.
The narrative that he has ‘taken one for the team’ after recovering from coronavirus is as sickening as it is false. First because he had previously boasted about shaking the hands of coronavirus patients and was therefore at least partly culpable for his own predicament, but also because it implies that those who do not recover somehow lack the requisite level of good old English bulldog spirit. Far too often we apply this narrative to illness, as if the outcome somehow depends on the will of the victim to just bloody well get up and go on living and not on other factors like human biology and absolute dumb inexplicable luck.
Even if you are naive enough to view Johnson’s recovery as heroic there is still very little evidence that his return will have a positive impact on the situation. As well as the arrogant, oafish handshaking in which he engaged Johnson spent two weeks away on holiday at a time when much of Europe was starting to enter the most dangerous phase of the pandemic. The bit when shit got real. Johnson missed no fewer than five Cobra meetings before the UK was finally locked down on March 23. That delay has translated to more than 20,000 deaths related to coronavirus in hospitals alone. Thousands more are thought to have died in care homes. To put that into context the government’s scientific advisors told us that if we could keep our overall death toll under 20,000 it would be ‘a good result’. We have failed to do that. The final tally could be double that figure.
The government have consistently claimed that their decisions were guided by the science. They have stated publicly that it is not problematic nor even unusual for a sitting Prime Minister to miss out on Cobra meetings. As if they are entirely voluntary and ultimately inconsequential like my failure to turn up for more than one shorthand session in three years of a journalism degree. Yet they will also tell you that it is absolutely necessary for Johnson’s closest advisor and vile architect of Brexit Dominic Cummings to be present at meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Let that sink in as absolute weapons on Twitter sometimes say. Prime Minister at Cobra meetings - optional. Spin doctor and political influencer at science think-tank gatherings - essential. Just who is running this country? Perhaps that question isn’t so easy to answer when you consider that there were people expecting the Queen to announce some game-changing policy when she made a televised speech recently.
Though it happened way too late the government did finally start to get things right in terms of tackling the pandemic. Social distancing is working in as far as infections and hospitalisations are now decreasing, even if the death tolls announced at the daily briefings are still horrific. Lockdown has worked to that extent but hapless supply teacher Dominic Raab was right when he told us yesterday that now isn’t the right time to be relaxing the lockdown measures. There is a debate to be had. The people who would have us locked down for two years are just as dangerous and batshit crazy as those who go round licking shelves in Tesco. But measures need to be relaxed gradually with proper thought and consideration at every stage.
The right, driven to distraction at the thought of an economic crash, have been pushing for some relaxation of measures for weeks. They argue that the damage it is causing economically will lead to more death and destruction of lives than the virus itself ever could. They suggest that we should just shield what they call ‘the vulnerable’ so that the rest of us can go back to life as we know it. What they fail to understand is that we have moved on from the belief that only the elderly or the sick are at risk from the very worst effects. We haven’t yet established what it is that makes coronavirus lethal to some people but a mild inconvenience to others. Until we do we need some form of lockdown or social distancing until a sophisticated and effective programme of contact tracing is established or a vaccine is available.
Yet you can see where this is going politically. Johnson’s return coincides with the important improvements we have seen in the statistics on infections. If lockdown measures are relaxed within the next few weeks it will be Johnson who is presented as the saviour. The poor old rudderless UK bumbling along, failing palpably to control infections, acquire PPE or ventilators until Johnson rides in on his white horse and lo.....light appears at the end of the tunnel. The man is conceited and deluded enough to believe that his return has made all the difference and so are his idiot public. Voting for his party’s debilitating cuts to public services over the last decade yet absolving themselves of any responsibility for that dismal choice by clapping every Thursday night until their hands sting like a Portuguese Man O’ War. Even then some of his disciples can’t manage to show their appreciation for the NHS without breaching the very social distancing rules that their exalted leader announced before his enforced quarantine.
Johnson and his government have done too little too late. They are not heroes saving the day. They are only now doing what is and has been required of them for months. Those who feel they are in an impossible predicament and therefore not accountable forget that when you put yourself forward for the highest office in the land you have to accept your accountability. It is not all weekends at Chequers, multiple mistresses and hiding in fridges. That Johnson and his followers don’t accept that is evidence of how unsuitable he is for the role.
To finish and with due apologies I’m going to borrow, slightly embellish and eventually strangle an analogy from a friend of mine on Twitter. He pointed out that Johnson’s return at this juncture is like Ray Wilkins’ return to the England side after the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Wilkins has been sent off in a group game with Morocco which ended goalless. In his absence England breezed past Paraguay in their next game, free from the constraints of Wilkins’ crab-like horizontal but impotent distribution. They then went toe-to-toe with Argentina in an epic quarter-final which is infamous for both the genius and the villainy of Diego Maradona. Johnson is Wilkins, a man who some feel we cannot do without but in whose absence we are perhaps more likely to progress. The problem is that the government doesn’t have a squad as strong as the one Bobby Robson had featuring Peter Beardsley, Trevor Steven or Glenn Hoddle. Though it does have plenty of Hoddle-esque enemies of the disabled. The virus is more powerful and more villainous than even the great Diego. But all we have to throw into the game when Johnson is not around is Raab and Health Secretary Matt Hancock. Essentially we have Steve Hodge and Terry Fenwick.
Perhaps that’s why Johnson’s return is being pitched as a blessed relief.
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