The heartbreak behind this saving lives policy
Well, that was a much better speech, Prime Minister. Not easy to stoke the adrenalin and give it some welly when you’re talking to yourself instead of an audience, but you pulled it off. Having given his scientific minders, Whitty and Vallance – the anti-chuckle Brothers – the slip, Boris was even able to inject some teasing self-mockery into what should have been a triumphant address to the Conservative Party conference.
After pinpointing the “common underlying condition” which caused him to have such a bad bout of Covid – “My friends, I was too fat!” – he said that he had shed 26 pounds. It nicely teed up the next gag. Losing so much adipose tissue, the PM said, made him better able to “search for the hero inside yourself ”.
That mischievous reference to the M People song was truer than perhaps he knew. The hero who drove Brexit through a Remainer parliament like a British Lions behemoth, then delivered a storming, socialist-slaying general election victory, has not been much in evidence lately. And that’s putting it mildly. The wan, shifty husk of a fellow who has announced the most draconian curbs on our liberties, while remaining deaf to scientists who say lockdown is a society-destroying strategy, seems like a Boris doppelganger driven mad by his own fears.
The Tory faithful are not just furious with their leader, they are positively adulterous – ready to run off with any Tom, Lawrence or Nigel in protest. In the latest Conservative Home poll of party members, Johnson got a net satisfaction rating of -10.3. The PM came 24th out of 25 Cabinet members. Only Private Pike, our dunce of an Education Secretary, scored worse.
From hero to less than zero in 10 months. It’s the stuff of classical tragedy. Those unimaginably dire figures for one of our best-loved communicators give some sense of the anger caused by the fact that the Conservatives, traditionally the party of the family and business, are causing immense harm to both in pursuit of an ultimately futile zero-covid strategy.
For all his fluorescent follies, at least President Trump is bold enough to level with the American people, explaining that they need to keep Covid-19 in proportion. We must, as Trump says, learn to live with it.
Far from echoing Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s recent injunction to “live without fear”, the PM used his keynote speech to tell the British people that their kettle will soon by powered by great gusts of offshore wind. Hardly our main concern as the tsunami of four million unemployed thunders towards us. How can Boris talk of “not contenting ourselves with a repair job,” when the worst is yet to come?
At such a time, we need our Prime Minister to be Alexander the Great, not Windy Miller.
A personal hero of Boris’s once wrote: “Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.”
How right Churchill was. And how we wish the grand old man were still with us to stick Professor Neil Ferguson’s little model in his cigar cutter.
I have had thousands of emails from the “plain man” (and woman) who knows where it hurts. Grandparents like Sandy who is upset that he and his wife are instructed to wear masks to collect their grandchildren from school so the two little girls emerge to “a sea of zombies”. (Totally unnecessary when you can’t catch Covid outside.)
And here’s Carolyn, a wedding organiser, who last year had a business turning over £600,000 but now, because she works in a region where three people are infected in every 100,000 (“that’s 27 people in our whole county”) is tearfully laying off staff who did so much to make things Covid-secure. “Boris Johnson wiped out four months’ work in a five-minute announcement.”
I beg you to start listening to the plain man who knows where it hurts. Here’s Robert, Prime Minister, explaining what your life-saving measures mean for him and his wife.
“Josephine and myself have recently celebrated our diamond anniversary, from teenage sweethearts to 83-yearold sweethearts. Sadly, my wife is incarcerated in a very expensive nursing home, paid for by our lifetime of careful saving. She is suffering from dementia, and the love of my life I have not been able to hold in my arms since March. As each day passes, our connection becomes more tenuous, as she fails to connect with me on Facetime and I am no longer able to see her even in an outside location.
“All I ask is to be able to be with her, to take care of the little personal things that I know she needs. All I crave is that Josephine and I should be able to share at least some of the precious time left together, and this administration is preventing us from doing so. It will not easily be forgiven.”
Will you cry for Robert and Josephine, Prime Minister? I believe you would because you are a kind person. And what is happening to them, and to thousands of elderly people like them, is the opposite of kind. To keep 83-year-old sweethearts apart in order to save their lives is unimaginably cruel. What is the point of saving lives if you lose all vestiges of humanity?
We can’t go on like this. You have lost weight, Prime Minister, but not, I hope, heart and soul. Start by excluding children from the Rule of Six, lift the stupid curfew, give small businesses a fighting chance, let the young mingle and the old choose to die in one another’s arms if that is their wish. There is still time to turn things around. Just search for the hero inside yourself.
We can’t go on like this. You have lost weight, Prime Minister, but not, I hope, heart and soul