Seven days that changed Britain and the British – maybe forever
Have you ever known a week like it? Not unless you’re in your 80s you haven’t. You’d have to go back to 1939 and Chamberlain’s “This country is at war with Germany” to find seven days in which the life of the nation changed so drastically.
The nearest modern equivalent is the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when the communal stiff upper lip was swept away by a tsunami of emotion: but in scale, extent and ramifications that wasn’t remotely comparable to what we have now.
This time last week, more than 10million children were at school, you could take your leisure in all the usual establishments and social distancing was a sardonic punchline delivered with a self-conscious elbow bump.
Now those children are all at home, those establishments have all shut, supermarket shelves stretch as lone, level and bare as Ozymandias’s sands and we are giving each other the widest of berths.
A week may be a long time in politics, but in epidemiological terms it’s an aeon. It’s not just the spread of the virus that is exponential but also the speed of the changes it engenders.
Alterations to the social fabric that in normal circumstances would take decades have rushed through in days. Even in an age where the extraordinary has become ordinary – Leicester City, Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, Donald Trump – this has been of another magnitude altogether.
Storytellers like to talk of the classic three-act structure, and this week fell so perfectly into that category that any scriptwriter who penned it would have considered their job well done.
Act One came on Monday at the first of Boris Johnson’s daily press conferences, when he asked people to avoid all non-essential contact and travel. A U-turn from the previous determination to let life proceed as normally as possible, but still couched in the language of persuasion rather than order.
Act Two came on Wednesday, with the decision to close schools. The impact was huge, especially for the two year-groups who would now not be doing their exams.
But it was Act Three that was the real kicker, as all Act Threes should be.
Friday evening saw a shutdown of pubs, bars, clubs, restaurants, gyms, theatres and cinemas.
The decision went against the libertarian in Mr Johnson, but this was the moment when the medical emergency finally and definitively trumped the social, economic and political considerations.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak then announced the Government would pay up to 80 per cent of furloughed workers’ wages. This would have been remarkable for any chancellor, but for a Winchester-educated former hedge-fund manager representing the traditional party of free markets and small government, it beggared belief.
Coronavirus had done what Corbyn and John McDonnell could only dream of: it had turned Britain socialist.
So now what? For the moment, the spectre of Covid-19 hangs over everything: every thought, every action, every interaction.
We’ve all been through periods of heightened emotion – falling in love, the birth of a child, losing a job, the death of a loved one – during which it seems impossible to think of anything else, but uniquely now we are all going through such a period together.
Perhaps only nuclear war or alien invasion would simultaneously affect so many people so profoundly.
As for the future, all we know is that cases and deaths will continue to rise, that it will be a while before the effects of these measures filter through, and that the NHS will be stretched to capacity and very likely beyond.
We may yet be obliged to carry a document like the French do, with approved reasons for being out and about. People may chafe against restrictions, perhaps to the extent of summer riots.
Many analysts are bullish about the prospect of an economic recovery as dramatic and vertiginous as the fall has been, but only time will tell.
However those changes play out, this is the week they will have really begun.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a week like this: it will be a long time until we see one again.
Boris Starling is a novelist, screenwriter and journalist