‘The health of Boris is the health of the nation. We need you, Prime Minister, give it everything you’ve got’
How is Boris? For millions of people, that was our first thought upon waking yesterday. And our last thought before we fell asleep the night before. The prospect of losing our Prime Minister was profoundly shocking. “He won’t die, will he?” a friend texted at 11.18pm. “My heart will break.”
It’s rare for a politician to inspire such emotion, but Boris is loved – really loved – in a way that the metropolitan media class has never begun to understand. Hearing reporters and doctors on TV talking about the PM’S admission to the ICU at St Thomas’s Hospital, discussing the likely effect on his lungs and “other vital organs”, was horrible; the picture of naked vulnerability it painted so entirely at odds with our rambunctious hero barrelling into a room with a quizzical rub of that blond mop and a booming: “Hi, folks!”
Yet, make no mistake, the health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the nation itself. All 66 million of us are metaphorically pacing the hospital corridor, desperate for news.
Everything feels heavy with symbolism right now. How could it not? We find ourselves in the middle of a newly written Shakespearean tragedy, the ink barely dry before the next page turns. The Prime Minister has succumbed to a vicious virus which has laid siege to the country, suspending the life and liberty that no one values more than he does. Like a sleeper agent, Covid-19 infiltrated his system and, now that it’s activated, his MI5 is at risk of losing control. The only cure for it is rest – but Boris could not rest.
He should have rested, of course he should. He should have disappeared under the duvet for 10 days, like any normal person forced to surf Covid’s tidal fevers. Instead, he felt compelled to devote every last ounce of his energy to defeating the enemy within. “He doesn’t believe in being ill,” a friend said. We all know a man like that, don’t we?
If only there had been a woman by his side. She would have told him to get off the laptop and put down the phone, nagged him to keep up his fluids, forced zinc tablets down his throat and insisted that his health was far more important than the next Cobra meeting.
In a devastating irony, the person who should have played that vital role for Boris was herself stricken with corona and pregnant with their baby. You can imagine the anxiety and helplessness felt by Carrie Symonds. My heart goes out to her, it really does. She was obliged to self-isolate in the couple’s south London home, while her fiancé, the father of her unborn child, continued to work 15-hour days as he observed his own lonely quarantine in the Downing Street flat. It’s a nightmare that is being repeated up and down the country. Every day of this epidemic, people are separated from their loved ones, forbidden to visit them in intensive care or even to gather at their graveside. So sad, so unbearably cruel.
Last Thursday, you could see how ill Boris was when he stood on the steps of No 10 clapping for the NHS. His eyes were rheumy, his face bore the sickly
Boris is loved – really loved – in a way the metropolitan media has never understood
sheen of high temperature. What effort it must have taken him just to get dressed and get downstairs. But he knew that’s where the leader of our nation needed to be at that moment, so he gritted his teeth. (“I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.”) The British people count on him to be their galvaniser-in-chief. In the historic Battle of Corona, Boris has been i/c optimism, and it simply doesn’t feel the same when he’s not with us.
Whatever your politics, any fair person would have looked at the Prime Minister clapping that night and seen a man who cared. Weakened, yes, but utterly resolute. Sadly, fairness does not trouble the righteous minds of the battalion of Boris bashers, among whose ranks are found some of our most prominent broadcasters and journalists.
Carole Cadwalladr, columnist for The Observer, actually accused the Prime Minister of “hiding” when he followed the official advice and went into isolation. On Twitter, during the Clap for Carers, the comedian and Labour activist David Schneider wrote: “There’s something so symbolic about this man who lied his way to the top being condemned to applaud alone, like a confused, abandoned seal, during a crisis he’s completely unable to handle.”
Schneider’s despicable tweet got 16,000 likes from the same Leftists who congratulate themselves on their own moral superiority. With Boris’s life suddenly in danger, Schneider swiftly tried to distance himself from his own inhumanity (offering careersaving condolences, as did Cadwalladr) before conceding in a tweet to me: “I am ashamed.”
There are plenty in the media today who might say the same if they possessed any degree of selfknowledge. They should be deeply ashamed. Boris has been their punchbag since he steered the Leave campaign to victory in the June 2016 referendum and then had the effrontery to insist on its verdict being implemented. The man they brand as a lazy chancer eventually managed to pull off that heroic feat, first by getting himself elected leader of the
Conservative Party and then by delivering a historic election victory in December which saw Labour lose a quarter of its MPS. From the moment Boris launched his leadership campaign and Beth Rigby, Sky News’s political editor, stood up to sneer, “You brought shame on your party, Mr Johnson”, they have had it in for him.
The Boris-bashing has been as relentless as it has been ugly. When he dared to snatch a week with Carrie in Mustique over new year, after putting himself through three-and-a-half years of non-stop campaigning, there were snide stories about the cost of the villa they stayed in. Honestly, most of us were so delighted with him we would have clubbed together to pay for it ourselves.
No wonder the poor Prime Minister was physically exhausted and susceptible to the virus. No wonder he didn’t dare take any time off to get better with the jackals sniffing out any weakness that might bring him down. At a time of unprecedented national emergency, with a race-against-theclock to protect the NHS, the media might be expected to cut him a bit of slack – as they did for Gordon Brown during the 2008 banking crisis.
Not a bit of it. Even when they knew he was ill, the Boris-bashers gleefully magnified every error. To borrow some typically splendiferous invective from the man himself when he was Mayor of London, they are “shameless, protoplasmic, invertebrate jellies”.
At least, over the next few days, the media haters must hold their fire, and their tongues. They have no choice. It is unbelievably distressing for the country to think of its ebullient Prime Minister as a stricken figure in a critical-care bed. The vast majority will be holding their breath and praying he makes a full recovery. His health is our health; if he can defeat coronavirus, then so can we.
During this crucial chapter in our history, we need the narrator of our national story as never before.
One of the Prime Minister’s great heroes is Pericles, the general who ruled Athens in the fifth century BC. “It is right,” said Pericles, “to endure with resignation what the gods send, and to face one’s enemies with courage.” As I finish writing this, the latest news is that the Prime Minister is stable and breathing without assistance. He is facing his enemy with courage. Of course he is. (“I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.”)
Boris Johnson has always been larger than life; now we are counting on him to be bigger than death. We need you, Prime Minister – give it everything you’ve got. Come back to us, please.