POINTS OF DISORDER #2
Elect a lying, incompetent, lazy, narcissistic, egotistical, self-obsessed, thinskinned fantasist to run a country and it’s no surprise they flop in a crisis.
I mean the USA, not the UK – though I appreciate why you may have thought of the blond buffoon here instead of over there.
If Dipstick Donald, a President responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, wins again in November, he’ll Trump democracy – which Churchill thought the worst form of government except all the others.
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times...” The famous opening lines of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities apply to the coronavirus calamity as well as to the 1789 French Revolution.
One MP whispered that he knew families enjoying paid weeks at home in the sunshine while others nearby suffered terrible illness and mourned lost loved ones.
The disease is proving that every crisis is an opportunity for some people, however guiltily quiet they are about it.
SYMPATHY for Boris Johnson must not blind us to people dying with the virus because of his government’s mistakes.
The lionising of a Prime Minister thankfully released from hospital only adds insult to the terrible injury endured by families mourning lost loved ones.
Deputising Dominic Raab boasting his boss is “a fighter” was grotesquely insensitive: thousands of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters did not perish from lack of courage, yet some almost certainly died who could have been saved.
Justice and maintaining life demands that we scrutinise Johnson’s errors – with Britain’s toll of 10,612 deaths in hospitals alone a loss far greater than Germany’s less than 3,000 in a larger population, despite the coronavirus infecting both countries around the same moment.
The warning from one of the Government’s most senior scientific advisers, Jeremy Farrar, that the UK is likely to be among the European nations hit hardest, possibly even the worst – surpassing Italy, France or Spain – is a brutal condemnation of a Prime Minister slow to act.
Failing to prioritise tests, masks and ventilators cost lives, probably including NHS workers.
Johnson’s boast at the beginning on March 3 that he was shaking hands with everyone in a hospital, saying it had coronavirus patients, was the blasé recklessness of a politician more worried a lockdown might damage his popularity than doing what was right.
Let the PM order all evidence and minutes of Downing Street discussions and decisions be published immediately to let us decide if the three-week delay to March 23’s shuttering, or four weeks if we start the clock from late February when alarm bells blared, was genuinely based on scientific advice.
I have my doubts and suspect political back covering is under way as No 10 operatives blame civil servants and experts to save necks of some Conservatives.
Videos lauding the NHS from a PM recuperating in Chequers don’t get him off the hook. The bounce in broad public endorsement for the Government’s handling of the cataclysm – 61% approving despite 70% thinking testing levels are insufficient – is clinging to nurse for fear of something worse in the heat of a pandemic. I wish Johnson a full and swift recovery, as I do everyone else afflicted. I also wish to see him held accountable for his fatal blunders.