Travel chaos, U-turns and a cancelled Christmas: it's Boris Johnson's worst week
What bitter irony, what perfect symbolism, for Europe to slam its gates shut to us days before Britain was due anyway to self-isolate permanently with Brexit. As country after country bans British travellers for fear of the new Covid variant, the UK, high in deaths and economic damage, is world-beating only as Typhoid Mary.
If there were a God of vengeance, this new blight falling firstly on us might feel like divine punishment. For the superstitious, add in Monday’s celestial sign, the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn – the closest together the planets have been in 400 years – reprising the star of Bethlehem. A king bearing myrrh would be grimly appropriate.
Naturally Nigel Farage claims the French are using Covid to close ports as a weapon in end-stage Brexit negotiations. That’s absurd, since it harms congested Calais as much as Dover. But still the unlucky coincidence of these twin disasters has already set off panicbuying for fear of blockaded fresh fruit and vegetables.
Viruses mutate beyond control of governments, but this government has not mutated at all, learning no lessons in its dangerous mishandling of every aspect of the Covid-19 crisis. Events of the past week expose Boris Johnson and his cabinet at their very worst – ducking, diving and denying, until a screeching last-minute U-turn.
Touring TV studios this morning, the transport secretary Grant Shapps, with eye-popping untruth, claimed he had no idea, none at all, that there was a new variant, or how alarming it was, until Friday night’s Covid-O cabinet sub-committee meeting. In fact, Matt Hancock warned of it last Monday. As the health secretary told the House of Commons: “We have identified a new variant of coronavirus which may be associated with the faster spread in the south-east of England. Initial analysis suggests that this variant is growing faster than the existing variants.” He said there were already 1,000 cases.
In addition, last Tuesday the British Medical Journal and the Health Service Journal combined to warn against the planned five-day Christmas free-for-all, echoed by Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday. Hancock now admits the virus is “out of control”.
The country itself feels out of control, a driverless train under this cabinet. When that cabinet sub-committee was warned by its scientists that the new variant might be 70% more transmissible, and that a 66% rise of infections in London might soon overwhelm the NHS, our prime minister reportedly held out. He was, apparently, last to agree to the Christmas U-turn.
Johnson’s backbench opponents accuse him of having known it was inevitable even as he mocked Starmer’s warnings at PMQs. They say he delayed purely to wait for recess – to avoid a parliamentary explosion had he announced it to his MPs. A lockdown Christmas planned months ago would have been so much less painful for families whose hopes he pointlessly raised only to dash again.
Johnson makes this mayhem worse – instructing his negotiator for the EU, David Frost, chosen for rigid Brexitism, to drag out the process beyond the European parliament’s Sunday deadline. This is all optics – an attempt to appease Tory implacables by taking it down to the wire and beyond.
Yet a deal is all but done on everything that matters, according to Michael Gove. Except fish. The government has chosen the sea for the final battle, the most emotive yet least economically important. Harrods alone adds as much to the UK economy as fishing, according to the Financial Times.
Pause here a moment to consider what monumentally dishonest use the Brexiters make of the romance of coastal ports and fishing villages, whose 12,000 small boat fishermen are more precious for picturesque tourism than the value of their catch. True, the overall UK quota is historically unfair. But the greater injustice by far to our fishers is our own government’s allocation of quotas to large companies. Twothirds of the UK’s quota of fish goes to just three multinationals; boats under 10m long get just 4% though they account for 77% of fishers. A Greenpeace report found a quarter of Britain’s quota was owned by five families, all in the Sunday Times rich list.
What’s more, Britain is almost alone in allowing holders of the UK quota to sell it to foreign companies: so one Dutch ship, landing its fish in the Netherlands, had the right to catch 23% of the UK’s quota. British “slipper skippers” were allowed to put their feet up and live off the earnings from selling their quota to foreign companies. If concern for our small boat fishing fleet were really the impediment to a vital Brexit deal, the government should be getting tough on preventing this selloff. If Brexit was for protecting the little boats championed in a flotilla up the Thames ahead of the referendum, where’s the pledge to take the quota off the giant companies to give to them?
Whatever the deal, the Tory backbenchers’ Faragiste wing will fight on the beaches, as they do over Covid restrictions. Last year, Johnson saw fit to remove the whip from distinguished
pro-Europeans. So why not expel the current rebels if they vote against necessary Covid laws or the coming deal? Because Johnson is their creature, in hock to those who elevated him, and he fears the resurrection of Farage. Worse, the Tory grassroots would select future MPs of the same ilk if these were expelled.
Though challengers lurk, Johnson’s party will keep him while he still rides oddly high in the polls – neck and neck with Starmer’s Labour, despite Covid mismanagement, disreputable Covid contracts, and the bad Brexit on its way (even with a deal). Last week’s polling gave Johnson a vaccine bounce: if it rolls out effectively, euphoria may wipe away memory of this atrocious winter of maladministration. Yet this bad Brexit will slow-burn, year after year, as Johnson’s lasting legacy.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist