Marina Hyde is ace.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/12/civic-duty-prime-minister-boris-johnson-coronavirus
Though it majors in killing, coronavirus certainly enjoys a sideways glance at inequality. In April, we discovered that the British TV show Holby City owned only one fewer working ventilator than the African country Liberia. On Sunday, construction and manufacturing workers were told to get back to work by a man who skived off five consecutive Cobra meetings during a wildly mushrooming global epidemic. Five! Boris Johnson couldn’t even be bothered to turn up and grip the government’s crucial early response to a deadly virus – are we supposed to believe he’d be rushing back to finish a loft extension out of civic duty? He’s not even prime minister out of civic duty.
Still, that’s showbiz. You miss one universal credit meeting and your benefits are stopped; you miss five Cobra meetings and you get to address the nation on its working responsibilities from a drawing room so vast you’d need a hansom cab to traverse it. (When are we de-furloughing the hansom cabbies? I don’t care if they are dead and from the 19th century: that’s hardly a bar to this government assessing them as fit for work.)
As for Johnson’s Sunday address, it was taped in advance, which at least spared people his involuntary smirk as they were apparently being told to trudge into work in 12 hours’ time. In fact, for a man who prides himself on his public speaking – he also regards his hair as winsome – Johnson is increasingly a pre-record artiste. Unlike Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin, Boris Johnson is not what you’d call a one-take performer. There’s a strong sense that a performing seal could nail it quicker, and with marginally less alarming flipper gestures. His live appearances on Monday cast Johnson as the hapless waiter of public health. Word salad! I have a word salad! Did someone order the word salad? In Johnson’s hands a Q&A becomes a Q&FA. You’re getting nothing from this guy.
It doesn’t help, of course, that the public doesn’t like his new stuff. As you’ll be aware, the government has changed its central message with all the silky skills of me DJing. “Right, well, you’ve had enough of that one …” [horrendous needle scratch] “… let’s see what you think of this, which I like to think of as a medley of six kinds of music … Hang on, where are you all off to?” I suppose the worry with the government is that they will end up floor-clearing in a rather more permanent way.
Anyway: “Stay alert, control the virus, save lives.” Though the slogan reads like it was produced by an off-brand smartphone left running overnight in a Ukrainian bot farm, some of the detail feels even more random. Take the plan to require international arrivals to the UK to quarantine for 14 days, which will start not even now, but at some unspecified point, soonish. This feels not so much like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, as allowing the horse to bolt, then turning to your wife a couple of months later and saying, “Tell you what might look nice: a stable. Let’s get some plans drawn up. I feel like a door might be an idea? We could put it over there – where that horse we used to have used to be.” Perhaps it’s something to do with Johnson’s heavily foregrounded insistence on not rushing things, which also means we keep having to hear the phrase “baby steps” from a man who tends not to stick around to see them.
Then again, absurdities are everywhere. As of Tuesday’s breakfast shows, it became clear that we have reached the stage of Edwina Currie turning up to deliver lectures on how to impart information during a public health crisis. I mean really, who better, short of exhuming Ronald Reagan? (Although he says just as much about Aids today as he did when it mattered.)
In the end, no matter how wheedlingly Johnson appeals to the “common sense of the British people”, it’s hard to escape the sense that he’s ruling carelessly on workers who don’t get to ask, “What’s my motivation?” Their part in the war effort, and all that. And yet, without underplaying the strategic importance of whatever white elephant luxury apartment complex any labourers are currently working on, there’s a chance they’re wondering whether they really are as key to the war effort as the guy running the entire war.
If only Johnson had gone “back to work”, as it were, in February, instead of repairing to Chequers to sort out his divorce/remarriage/endless drama cycle. The government was told from multiple quarters that they would be playing a doomed game of catch-up if they didn’t act fast in February and early March, when – had we wished to learn them – the lessons of other countries were already becoming available. Failure to do so has got us where we are – a place where we have tanked the economy AND STILL notched up the highest death toll in Europe, and the second highest recorded in the world. If you give us some stools, we’ll fall between them. It is mid-May. You now cannot optimise for both safety and the economy. Yet they would in much greater part have gone together had we acted more quickly.
This, alas, is the dramatically ironic way that time works in the coronavirus era. An action you did or didn’t do doesn’t have immediate consequences, but you reap its harvest on a lag. If you made a mistake several weeks ago, it doesn’t show up at first, but the consequences are most surely in the post. Odd that Johnson didn’t reflexively understand this concept, given his extensive experience with both ancient Greek tragedy and unplanned pregnancy.
He does cut a faintly tragic figure now, released each morning by his handlers into St James’s Park with a mug and told to do his business, then snuffle about until he finds the photographer. “We will be governed entirely by the science,” he kept gibbering on Monday. We will be governed entirely by you, more’s the pity.
It all comes back to the idea of public service, on which the prime minister is also failing to play catch-up. You wouldn’t find a single friend of Johnson’s who would begin to pretend he got into politics out of some commitment to public service, or even the vaguest set of ideas about how things should be run. A certain amount of egotism comes as standard, of course, for holders of his office. But whatever people on all sides thought about a huge range of previous prime ministers, there was at least an element of public duty to them, however disagreeably to some they might have chosen to express it. To even suggest it of Johnson would be screamingly absurd and everyone knows it. There is literally nothing there except personal ambition – and we’re all condemned to live within his limitations in a situation where they’re at their very deadliest.
