Judge PM on vaccine, not decor
JI’VE been trying hard to care about what Boris Johnson said in the heat of a furious debate about lockdown, or who loaned him the money to decorate the Downing Street flat in gold wallpaper, but somehow I can’t give a stuff.
It’s almost amusing to see our top political panjandrums quivering with anger every night on the TV news. I thought Robert Peston was going to have a seizure when he told Mary Nightingale he had witnesses to prove Boris said he’d let the bodies pile high rather than impose another lockdown.
But this attempt to make a mountain out of what in more normal times might pass as diverting tittletattle seems thunderously inappropriate in the middle of a real global crisis.
This isn’t to say I don’t find Boris intensely irritating. He’s a big shambling mess with a chaotic private life and questionable morals, all of which spills out into public life and detracts from his main job, which is getting us through this nightmare.
But shambolic as he is, and unlikely as it is, he seems to be doing just that. Every organisation I’ve worked for has had its Prince of Darkness, an arrogant so and so consumed with ambition who’ll throw anyone under a bus to make himself look good.
Dominic Cummings is Boris’s black-hearted avenger, but do we really care if the PM shouted hyperbolic nonsense in a rage about lockdown? It was a private meeting and feelings ran high. Most of us have had intemperate discussions that we’d hate to be made public.
What I’m feeling today is relief and thanks that my two eldest sons have been called for their first jab, and desperately hopeful this horrible virus will be well under control by June 21, as promised, so my youngest boy can at last get married with a joyful party.
And I’m hugely sorry and anxious about poor India, and grateful beyond measure that our country has pulled together so magnificently with its wonderful vaccination programme.
And I’d bet the farm most people agree that’s more important than Carrie’s aversion to John Lewis furniture.
RACTRESS Tuppence Middleton deserves huge congratulations for this week’s fascinating BBC Radio 4 programme on obsessive compulsive disorder, from which she herself suffers. It was honest, revealing, and fascinating. If ever Tuppence gets tired of treading the boards, a future as a documentary-maker awaits.