Why Boris needs to listen to the Ladies’ Tea Party
You must admit The Great Pause has created some unlikely lawbreakers. Three grandmothers I know have been meeting up once a week for tea and a nice chat in the back garden. Fit and active in their 70s, they weighed up the perils of the coronavirus against the benefit of fresh air and friendship. (Loneliness is not listed as a cause of death, but it can be an absolute killer.) Two of the three are retired doctors and they make sure to stay well apart.
Long before the Prime Minister gave his statement easing lockdown measures on Sunday night, many Britons, like the Ladies’ Tea Party, had done some qualitative easing of their own. While Boris continues to thunder about “the most vicious threat this country has faced in my lifetime”, many have looked at the relatively minor risks and drawn their own conclusions.
In a recent poll, 29 per cent admitted to breaking lockdown rules. Boys and young men (and libidinous mathematical modellers called Neil…) are the most likely to breach lockdown. According to a study by Sheffield University, half of young men have met up with friends (compared with a quarter of girls the same age).
Could this youthful masculine insouciance possibly be related to the fact that if you’re a boy, especially one in a big city, you are more likely to have your life ended by a knife than by Covid-19? Personally, I didn’t have any problem with the clarity of the PM’S statement on Sunday; it was meant to be a broad outline of a new phase, the fine detail would follow. What I objected to was the failure to lay off the “It’s the end of civilisation as we know it” nonsense.
Here was the PM’S opportunity to present Covid as a nasty disease which had tragically taken the lives of over 30,000 of our fellow citizens – a bloody gash in the national psyche, no doubt – but which, in all honesty, poses little threat to most of the population who will either have it mildly or remain asymptomatic.
Boris could have broken the good news that, according to Oxford University, coronavirus is no longer an epidemic in the UK. Just 0.24 per cent of adults – that’s 136,000 people – currently have the virus. Transmission in the community is very low, with most new cases coming from care homes and hospitals.
He could have gone on to say that, while we must continue to shelter the most vulnerable and maintain sensible hygiene measures, it really is safe to go to work and to take the kids to school. Not just safe, but vital if we are to preserve jobs and spare the country an economic depression that will cause infinitely more suffering.
It would have taken moral courage to tell a frightened populace that their fears are out of all proportion to the actual risk and it’s time to start living again. Boris ducked it. This was not his Finest Hour – it was a disappointing 13 minutes.
The performance revealed a startling lack of emotional intelligence (EQ). If you tell 29million viewers that they must “go to work if you can”, you don’t have schools as an afterthought. Schools will have been foremost in the minds of all parents watching and wondering: “How on earth can I go to work if the kids are still at home?”
The so-called “quad” – Sunak, Raab, Hancock, Gove – seem to think of work purely as work. It isn’t. Work is people. Do our leaders really not understand how people think or how they live?
And what of the frankly laughable proposition that people will be able to see one parent out of doors, but not both? Don’t go expecting logic – we’re living in the Age of Anti-reason.
Under the new rules, people can see their boss, but they can’t see their dad/ grandchild/girlfriend? Trust me, that is going to infuriate pretty much everyone.
What happened is some pointyhead at Sage did the maths and worked out that if an individual sees just one extra person outside their own household, that will stop R (the reinfection rate) going up too much.
What pointy-heads can’t compute is that if you drive to, say, Nottingham from London to see your mum and dad, a non-pointy-headed person is not going to just invite their mother out the front for a chat and then drive home again. Being human, and possessed of the full complement of unscientific feelings, they will end up seeing both parents, whether together or separately.
I actually have huge sympathy for the Prime Minister as he tries to pull off this “supremely difficult balancing act” of suppressing the virus while coaxing the country back to life.
To make a tricky situation even worse, Boris’s enemies, still smarting from their Brexit defeat, have no qualms about using a national crisis as a proxy war.
The Ladies’ Tea Party are big Boris fans, but they worry that his own mortal brush with Covid has made him ultra-cautious. They were prepared to go along with “flattening the sombrero” and saving the NHS from being overwhelmed.
Now that’s done, they fear the PM seems hell-bent on waiting until Covid is eradicated, no matter if it fundamentally damages our way of life.
The Ladies’ Tea Party see the harm this is doing to youngsters. They cannot support for much longer a lockdown which starts to do more harm than good.
As he tries to chart a course out of this crisis, the Prime Minister really should include some women in his inner circle. It would save him from a lot of basic errors. An ability to calculate the R rate is not much use if you have zero EQ. I have a number for the Ladies’ Tea Party if he needs it.
This was not Boris’s Finest Hour – it was a disappointing 13 minutes