Lightbulb moment has flicked a switch on Johnson’s reign
IN the midst of this week’s orgy of lies and loathing around Partygate I had a lightbulb moment.
It came upon hearing the date – November 13, 2020 – when Boris Johnson was pictured knocking back booze at a leaving do with empty bottles and food strewn across a table.
Because that was one of the most anxious weeks of my life, alone in an almost deserted cancer ward in the Royal Liverpool Hospital waiting for, then recovering from, an operation to remove a tumour.
The Royal was treating a surge of Covid patients meaning nobody was allowed to bring me into the hospital or visit after the surgery. Still dazed from being floored by the dreaded C-word, I felt fearful and lonely.
As did the only other man in the ward who was having a cancerous kidney removed. He was older than me and seemed confused and forlorn.
The stress being suffered by staff on the frontline of this war against a relentless killer was visible. They knew
that NHS colleagues were contracting Covid and dying. They knew ICU staff in another part of the building were holding iPads to the faces of patients taking their last breaths so loved ones back home could say their tearful goodbyes.
They knew they were going through the same heart-wrenching, mentally exhausting process day after day, with no respite, and no end in sight.
I was discharged and the following day– November
13, 2020 – close family and friends asked if they could bring some drinks round to my house to lift my spirits.
We told them it was out of the question. Not just because it was against the lockdown rules but because of what I’d seen in hospital. It would have been a betrayal of all who were putting their lives on the line to risk spreading the disease and sending more people into intensive care.
Covid had put Boris Johnson into intensive care. He, too, had witnessed the Herculean efforts of NHS staff and when he left he thanked them for their immense “courage and devotion” saying he would remember them for the rest of his life.
Yet there he was, months later, time and again, allowing everyone to break the rules in his house. Letting them bring in suitcases of booze and karaoke machines, and get so drunk they’d fight and vomit and abuse the low-paid workers who cleaned up their mess. That’s how much he remembered and respected those hospital workers.
The worst thing about this shameful episode is not that he broke his own rules and misled Parliament. That’s a given with Johnson.
It’s that he wilfully spat in the eye of all those people of “courage and devotion” who fought to keep him alive, meaning every subsequent statement he gave in support of them was an insult and a lie. That’s why most of us can’t do what his cheerleaders want, and “move on”. That’s why the fallout from Partygate will eventually bring him down. Because the sight of him carousing, while others suffered, was a lightbulb moment for millions of British people.
They will never forgive a leader who approved a poster of a hospitalised woman that said, “Look her in the eyes and tell her you never bend the rules.”
Then bent those rules to his bent heart’s content.
‘‘ NHS fought to keep him alive, then he went off and spat in their eye