One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party
We’ve reached the point in the lockdown where idiocy has become something of an Olympic sport.
Let’s take this week’s King of the Idiots, Stanley Johnson, father of our beloved and besieged prime minister. As Boris Johnson was moved out of intensive care, his old dad came out and said that he’d “nearly taken one for the team” and that his son’s illness had “got the whole country to realise this is a serious thing”. (By the way, he said all this from the Johnson family’s second home on Exmoor, where he’d gone for Easter. So his son should probably be having him arrested for non- essential travel this weekend. Or he should at least lose his job, like Scottish CMO Catherine Calderwood. Oh wait – he doesn’t have a job.)
First off, the only thing Johnson would “take for the team” would be the kitty for the drinks after five-a-sides. Which he’d then pocket before buggering off home early.
And secondly, no Stan, you daft old half-wit fatherer of that blond turd in a suit. It didn’t make us realise it was serious. Because those of us with IQs over 80 already knew that. Because we could read newspapers and watch TV and see tens of thousands of people dying in other countries, we were able to say: “Mmmm. This looks pretty serious.”
The only people who weren’t taking it seriously three weeks ago were total, utter fools. Fools like… Stanley Johnson.
In an interview on March 17, when people were already dying all across the UK, Boris’s dad said: “Of course I’ll still go to the pub if I need to go to the pub.” Obviously this was AFTER his son’s government had advised people not to visit pubs and restaurants. But Stanley’s 79 and a member of two unique groups: those old enough to be really at risk from the virus and those daft enough to think the problem is all a load of old rubbish.
It literally took his own son almost dying to convince old Stan that this was a real thing. What else will he have to learn from harsh, bitter experience before he accepts it is real? Sticking your face in a fire is a bad idea? Don’t eat the yellow snow? It’s best to take your trousers and pants down before you go to the toilet? A nation waits with bated breath.
But the Tory party being the Tory party – basically now a Jeffrey Archer novel rewritten by someone with ADD and Tourette’s – Stanley Johnson’s statement wasn’t even close to the most outrageous
example of idiocy this week: step forward Dominic Raab, who gave his first interview as acting PM sweating bullets and staring with such crazed intensity that he looked like a man who had just finished burying a body under his patio when the police rang the doorbell.
On Thursday, Raab managed to say, with a straight face, that “we now know who the key workers really are”. That’s the same Dominic Raab who recently voted against a pay rise for nurses and who wrote a book called Britannia Unchained, in which he described British workers as being “among the worst idlers in the world”.
Like Stanley Johnson, it took his friend almost dying and the entire country being on lockdown for this clown to realise: “Oh, wait a minute, it seems that doctors and nurses and the people who work in supermarkets are actually kind of essential to society. Wow. Who knew?” Again, all of us knew, mate.
But Boris Johnson didn’t die. I’m writing this on Friday morning so who knows what will unfold over the next 48 hours but, if I was a gambling man – which I am – I’d be willing to bet that Johnson will emerge victorious from hospital over the Easter weekend and that the sub-editors on the right-wing press will go into hyper-drive with headlines about “HE IS RISEN” and ‘EASTER MIRACLE” and all the rest of that guff.
Johnson will be presented as a hero, rather than what he is…
Someone who just a few weeks ago was listening to an adviser who was telling him about “herd immunity” and saying: “Who cares if a few old people die?”
Someone who was boasting about going around hospitals and shaking hands long after we knew this kind of behaviour was dangerously stupid.
Someone who dithered and delayed for three weeks and consequently put the UK on course to have the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe.
And we don’t call people like that heroes, do we? We call them what they are. Idiots.
Those of us with IQs over 80 already knew this was serious