2020 heroes & zeroes
DESCRIBING how bad this year has been is like telling you that the Prime Minister doesn’t always tell us the truth.
It’s too obvious, depressing and pointless. But it wasn’t all bad. Honest.
Stuck at home for months on end we remembered who the family were – and enjoyed seeing some of them reunite their hands with soap.
There was less pollution, we opened books again, walked the dog more, spoke to strangers in the street as we stood on the doorstep clapping our wonderful carers, and none of us suffered from FOMO. As there was literally nothing to miss out on.
So let’s give an uplifting elbow bump to the heroes, and a hefty fist bump to the zeroes, of 2020...
BEST LAUGH
Boris Johnson nominating Chris Grayling to be chair of the intelligence and security committee raised a chuckle.
As did Nigel Farage legging it to Kent’s beaches with binoculars hoping to find migrants drowning in dinghies to pretend he was still relevant.
But nothing captured the collective howls of cynicism towards the clowns in charge better than the James Atherton pub, in New Brighton, putting a sign above the door featuring the heads of Dominic Cummings, Matt Hancock and
Boris Johnson inside the instrument rung to call last orders. And renaming itself The Three Bellends.
MOST TASTELESS ACT
Taking bronze is the PureGym trainer, who launched a “12 Years A Slave” workout to coincide with Black History Month under the slogan “Slavery was hard and so is this”.
In silver position we have the poster for the Government’s “re- skilling” campaign, showing a ballet dancer alongside the words “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber”, as countless thousands of creative people saw their lives crushed by insufficient lockdown subsidies.
But the winner for two vile interventions is Victorian undertaker Jacob
Rees-Mogg, who accused the people who died in Grenfell Tower of lacking “common sense” and told Unicef it should be “ashamed” for donating funds to feed hungry kids in Britain.
BEST WOMAN
In third place we have Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who bravely battled for justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s child abuse victims and called Prince Andrew a “toad”.
Runner-up is the magnificent Dolly Parton, who made us love her even more, by donating a million dollars to assist with the development of the Moderna vaccine.
But this year there can only be one winner: The Unknown NHS worker. For anyone shouting “sexist”, I’d point out 77% of the 1.2 million people who work in the NHS are women. So all you hundreds of thousands of surgeons, nurses, doctors, GPs, cleaners, receptionists etc, take a bow.
BEST MAN
Third place goes to Joe Biden. For making the world a safer place and giving us all a much-needed lift by seeing off the supercallousfragileracistsexistlyingPOTUS, Trump.
Runner- up is Captain Sir Tom Moore, the centenarian walker who raised over £30million for the NHS.
But the winner had to be Marcus Rashford. Not just because his fight to end child hunger, driven with such eloquence and passion, proved so successful. But because he forced Boris Johnson into not one, but two humiliating U-turns on feeding our poorest kids. What an incredible young man.
BIGGEST VILLAIN
The lovely Jim Davidson takes third place for telling dance group Diversity they should do a routine based on black men mugging people.
Joint runners-up are all of those high-profile businessmen whose first instinct when lockdown came was to protect their wealth at all costs: Wetherspoon boss Tim Martin, Richard Branson, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Mike Ashley, Philip Green, Rick Stein and Gordon Ramsay.
But no one could touch the arrogant pile of demented self-love that was Dominic Cummings.