A poignant reminder that good leaders are few and far between
LAST Thursday morning, as I caught up with the day’s news at my desk, the dogs began maniacally to bark and, seconds later, I heard an oncoming deep-throttled roar that, from black and white movies of Saturday afternoons long ago, I recognised instantly.
It couldn’t be – but it was. The Spitfire, its belly proclaiming THANK U NHS, whooshed into view over Morningside, made a long delirious loop over the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, looped again, and then growled perkily away to Fife.
I learned that Spitfire PL983 would spend all that day buzzing many of Scotland’s major hospitals, and I hope it cheered everyone up as much as it cheered me – a living, fitting link between our present Covid woe and our last, universally experienced national ordeal.
Through June, July and into August we had all, I think, dared to hope that, one baby step at a time, we were inching back to normality. We could once more eat out, enjoy a pint, entertain visitors.
Supermarket queues disappeared, for weeks on end, no one in Scotland died of Covid-19 and, at last our children could return to school. I even snatched a week’s holiday in Ireland – but, as I thundered home through Galloway early this month, one already sensed that the tide had bleakly turned.
It will probably emerge that it was the return of young people to higher education that threw kindling on the fire. For weeks one has passed strapping youths unloading vans outside tenements; seen mums stuffing vast amounts of clothing and effects into the car; even witnessed two merry youths strutting through Morningside carrying a sofa.
On the scale, almost, of a demobilising army, lads and lasses who never knew the 20th century have been free-ranging throughout the United Kingdom. And theirs is a generation unusually tactile, apt to stay up till all hours in huggy, germy environments, and loads of them are now honking with Covid – many, probably, asymptomatic and wholly unaware they have it, but still doing their useful bit for herd immunity.
MANY older people, too, have grown weary of compliance with social distancing; cut corners, taken their eye off the ball. And thus, as the R number rose implacably, the leaden fist of government has thumped again.
Our liberties have been further curtailed. Pubs and restaurants must now close earlier, cinemas and theatres and concert halls will not shortly reopen and – in Scotland – we can no longer visit other people in their homes.
Draconian penalties have been devised and the very Army, we are assured, is on standby to secure obedience.
There will not, after all, be a return to normality. This is going to be the new normal, at least till March next year and – perhaps – for long after that, till we are permanently in a world of deserted office blocks, eerily quiet city centres, steamed-up glasses on bemasked Tesco faces and where everyone has forgotten how to knot a tie.
I am not in the mood to rail against our rulers, however tempting it may be to howl at this or that as an armchair epidemiologist and with all the benefit of hindsight.
Every western government has struggled to get to grips with the virus and, given population density, one of the world’s busiest airports and the massed London commute, it was never going to end well.
For all the point-and-shriek at Boris Johnson – largely from people who were slamming him long before someone in Wuhan nipped out for bat and chips – Scotland and Ireland made just the same mistakes and even lands far away, such as Singapore or New Zealand, found they had crowed victory too soon over Covid.
But, in some respects, things are very different since we first fell into bewildered lockdown back in March.
For one thing, we now know a great deal more about our enemy and have become much better at treating it. It soon dawned on doctors that only in extremis should patients be put on ventilators.
Steroids such as dexamethasone have significantly reduced deaths in intensive care and, in any event, the vast majority who catch Covid-19 will experience only a mild illness. The mortality rate, in any event, is far lower than was widely feared in March.
For another, we are far better prepared, with ample hospital capacity, seasoned doctors and nurses and plenty of personal protective equipment. And there is also tantalising evidence that coronavirus is becoming less dangerous.
But we now face a long winter in a very different political context than our fearful, biddable spring. Confidence in government ministers and their medical and scientific advisers has slumped.
We are much more resistant to lockdown, much more aware of the ongoing erosion of our economy, the profound suffering of the elderly and isolated and what has been little short of trauma for the teenagers.
AND most of us are beginning to realise that the dramatic measures this week decreed will at best pause the virus and we will have to learn to live with it – as we do with seasonal flu, which, last winter, killed 25 children in England alone. Covid-19 has killed but five British children, all of whom were profoundly unwell before infection.
In this context it is hard to understand why Nicola Sturgeon has now forbidden us to enter each other’s houses – save, perhaps, that she wanted to go one virtue-signalling further step than the PM.
As colleagues have pointed out, we remain at liberty (within the ‘rule of six’) to meet up in cafes, restaurants and pubs, frequented daily by far more people than our homes, where the chance of catching something nasty is self-evidently much greater.
One must also ask, too, why so rigid a policy has been slammed on all Scotland and all at once. In huge swathes of the countryside, coronavirus is simply not in circulation.
And, given that Sturgeon is likely to renew this decree every three weeks, Christmas is going to be a markedly bleaker experience for Scots than for families just over the Border, who can within the rule of six continue to entertain in their own homes.
The English, one feels, would simply not put up with this; and it is uncomfortable to be reminded how much more dangerously biddable Scots have long been, especially in a political order that, at any given time, has always been overwhelmingly dominated by a single political party.
But, as slogans change, as rules grow ever-more contradictory and infection rates continue to yo-yo, the point will surely come when it dawns on everyone that those in power over us simply do not know what they are doing – and that activity is no substitute for achievement