We all pay for callous Tory egos

Boris Johnson said last month: “I’m pretty confident to absolutely confident, this Christmas will be considerably better than last Christmas.” That’s half-right, to be fair to the PM, but it was a pretty low bar considering last Christmas was totally cancelled.

Of course the picture has changed since then, but if he’d truly wanted a proper Christmas this year he could have done a lot of things differently.

For a long time now, a government that pledged to “follow the science” has done quite the reverse.

When warned about the dangers of reopening too early, the risks, they chose to ease off.

Sure, there will have been economic, social, a host of other reasons we’re not party to.

But now we’re seeing the results.

Those masks we told you you could do without – slip ’em back on, will you?

The Christmas parties we said were OK? Well, not so much now. And Christmas dinner? Get stuck into your turkey and all that – but, you know, leave the windows open.

The messages from this government made us feel like the worst was over, that we were safe again. But we’re not.

The NHS is at breaking point. Just listen to the doctors, the nurses, the ambulance drivers. It’s a crisis. The howls of anguish from the front line have fallen on deaf ears.

EXHAUSTED

Speak to the nurses, the doctors, the ambulance drivers, who have not had any respite for the last two years. This is not a normal winter.

“We thought we’d climbed the mountains,” said one nurse. “But we have to keep climbing.”

They are exhausted. We all are. Sick and tired of the mixed messaging, the broken promises.

But that’s the way Downing Street has treated us. This is a grown-up country. We can tolerate hard truths. We can take pain. It’s part of our nature to buckle down and get through it. Throw it at us and we’ll take it. We’ll come back.

A grown-up conversation with a grown-up country would have gone: Christmas is too risky. Things have changed. We’re sorry but we need to think again.

This lot haven’t done that. They’ve inched us towards stricter measures, almost as if they think we’re too stupid to notice, too tired to care.

You can see it in the parties they have, their callous attitude to our suffering.

The parties show their true colours.

This is a set of people who are above the rules, who think that the hardships we have to go through are just for us. Not for them.

Who in a position of power, a position of responsibility, could look at the pain the country was going through, all those deaths, those shattered families and think: Let’s do a quiz. Let’s get the caterers in.

It’s an attitude, a sense of entitlement that pervades the current government.

We’re going to pay a price for their arrogance. Tougher measures, shut-down pubs, maybe – God help us – another lockdown.

Fine. We’ll pay this time, but Mr Johnson and his crew must realise that one day soon it will be his turn to pay.

Election time. Can’t come soon enough.