We all need true villains and heroes
but which one is Boris?
Courts in small towns are where journalists’ careers were forged back in the heyday of the local paper. It’s where you learned the only thing that mattered was getting it right. Especially names. spell a name incorrectly and you were dead meat.
It’s also where you learned about the warp and the weft of a small town. I started out on the Penarth times. Penarth was a genteel little place, but the Wednesday morning court session was where you discovered its squalid underbelly. Actually, not very squalid. the most common offence was urinating in a public place. And in Penarth in the 1950s you did it at your peril.
the defence was always the same: ‘sorry, your worship, I got caught short after a few pints and there weren’t no public toilets.’
And the penalty was always the same, too. Fined five shillings (25p in new money) and warned not to do it again.
I reflected on those innocent days when Andrew Banks came up before the beak this week for that very offence. the difference was that he’d committed it not in some dark alley when a bored PC happened to be patrolling, but in the centre of London in front of an army of cameramen, police officers and protesters. And standing next to a memorial to a murdered police officer — though it’s doubtful Banks was even aware of that. He said he’d drunk 16 pints of lager the night before and hadn’t slept.
the other big difference was that his penalty was not a fine but a jail sentence of two weeks. A fine is a fine. A jail sentence is a life-changing event. Whether it was proportionate to the offence is questionable.
the protesters who tore down Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and threw it into the harbour faced no charges. the police did not even intervene. the woman who tried setting fire to the union flag in London was not arrested.
But Banks lacked the eloquence of a middle-class protester. He had no media advisers. He’d gone to London with a gang of football louts to ‘protect’ statues from being torn down, but apparently didn’t even know which statues.
HE was confronted by his father, who recognised him in the photograph splashed across the news, and duly handed himself in at the police station. From then on, Banks was the perfect target for an outraged nation.
We do outrage well. Almost as well as we do adulation.
In his play the Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht has a character exclaim: ‘unhappy the land that has no heroes!’ Why? Perhaps because it reassures us that there is good in the world and hope even in our darkest hours.
And also that by elevating people to the status of heroes and praising them, we somehow share in their projected virtue. Didn’t we all feel a little better about ourselves this week hearing Dame Vera Lynn reflecting so movingly and modestly about her wonderful life?
the polar opposite to the pathetic figure of Andrew Banks has been the Manchester united star Marcus rashford. He took up the cause of poor schoolchildren and forced the Government into a spectacularly embarrassing u-turn. Because of his campaign, their parents will now be given meal vouchers and rashford is at the top of a list of designated Covid heroes. Also on the list: Captain tom, who earned a knighthood for walking around his garden at the age of 100 and raising a staggering £30 million for NHs charities.
the NHs workers and care home staff we applauded every thursday night for risking their lives caring for virus victims.
All those we did not applaud who kept the country running: the bin men and the postmen and women and, yes, the police officers who turned a judicious blind eye to those who dared leave their homes for exercise twice a day.
More interesting, perhaps, is why we also need villains. that list is long, too.
the teaching union leaders who blocked the opening of schools with potentially disastrous effects on millions of children with parents who can’t afford private tuition or even computers.
And those teachers who found a myriad excuses not to give the help they need to children trying to learn at home.
Church leaders who could so easily have found a way of helping worshippers spend a few minutes in some of their many consecrated buildings.
the idiots who celebrated their freedom to spend a day on a sunny beach or park by leaving disgusting amounts of rubbish in their wake.
AND, of course, the men and women who have caused so much unnecessary suffering and so many needless deaths over the past four months. And have condemned the nation to an economic future in which we’ll be lucky to find a job paying enough to put a crust on the table.
I refer, of course, to our political leaders. they, surely, are the greatest villains of all.
But now that we are perhaps at the beginning of the end of the crisis — the Covid alert level was reduced yesterday — what exactly is the charge against them?
Incompetence? Certainly. We could have told them right from the start that they were getting it wrong. or at least that’s what we claim now.
I hardly need to list the evidence. the third highest number of recorded coronavirus deaths in the world. Leaving it too late to order the lockdown. the disgraceful shortage of equipment to protect our medical staff. the scandal of the care homes. the botched reopening of schools. the idiotic travel quarantine. the endless dithering over the (probably pointless) two-metre rule. And the latest: the collapse of Britain’s so-called ‘world-beating’ tracking system, so important if the virus returns with a vengeance come winter.
the only thing world-beating about it was the arrogant assumption that NHs tech experts knew more than Apple.
If there is a second wave, we can direct our fury at this pantomime of politics with all its gaffes. And Boris Johnson, with all our doubts about his moral character, makes the perfect pantomime villain. And yet. Whisper it quietly, but are we being just a shade unfair to the politicians, asking the impossible of them and then turning them into villains when they fail?
of course, many things could have been done better, but must we not share some of the blame? We want liberty and convenience and endless furloughed summer holidays while also demanding that the Government eliminates risk entirely. It can’t be done.
In that Brecht play after the line about the land that has no heroes, another character replies: ‘No. unhappy the land that needs heroes.’
Japan has done far better than us in the pandemic largely because its people are so submissive to instructions from their government, but I know where I’d prefer to live.