On Wednesday It’ll all be over... just don’t predict when
OVER-PROMISE and underdeliver... It’s the phrase of the moment for members of Her Majesty’s not-so-loyal Opposition to describe Boris Johnson’s response to the coronavirus crisis. Having told us we could enjoy a five-day break from pandemic restrictions, his U-turn, on Saturday, has sent blood pressure soaring among Labour’s ranks. “I don’t think I have ever felt so angry with this Prime Minister,” fumed Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw.
Yet there is a long history among politicians of making promises that turn out to be a little bit short when it comes to delivery. In 1914, the popular view was that the First World War, which started in June, would be “over by Christmas...” There is little evidence politicians tried too hard to dissuade ordinary people of that prediction. More than 100 years later, getting a free-trade deal with the EU was going to be simplicity itself for Britain. Sometimes we get told what our leaders think we want to hear.
There is, after all, merit in providing people with hope, especially when things look bleak. How many films have tough guys wounded in the heat of battle urging the army medic: “Give it to me straight, Doc... Am I going to make it?” How many patients and doctors in real life conspire to put the best possible gloss on a hopeless diagnosis?
That’s not to say Boris was right to suggest, and not for the first time in this pandemic, that things would turn out better than they have; just that it is a human trait – and perhaps one that our current PM is particularly prone to – to try to put the best possible gloss on a bad situation.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. How on earth, we ask ourselves today, can people at the start of a bloody war of attrition, fought mainly in the rain-soaked trenches of northern Europe, have thought it would all be done-and-dusted in time for mince pies and plum pudding?
Yet, waving goodbye to loved ones off to the front line, it must have helped that many of them saw what lay ahead as a bit of adventure to fill in the months between the end of summer and the shortest day, before they returned, triumphant – of course – in time to decorate the tree.
If they had been given a more likely view of the future – that a majority would suffer horribly and probably lose their lives in four years of fighting, while those who made it home faced a further battle, with the Spanish flu pandemic – the sum of human misery would have been even greater. Hope is what keeps us going in such grim situations.
Promising a five-day Christmas get-together for up to three families in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic is not, perhaps, quite in the same league as urging the combatants and their families in a world war to look forward to swift victory. But the principle – that you have to show people a bit of positivity at times of crisis – holds good.
Boris dodges the questions at his press conferences when asked why people should trust him when he so often seems to make a pledge that he is simply unable to keep. He should be up front and tell us that he’s trying his best to maintain the morale of the nation.
The argument is that in fact he is doing the very opposite, that every setback makes us more depressed. A promise never made would be better than one made, then broken. But this government – in fact every government in every nation in the world affected by coronavirus – is walking a tightrope between protecting its citizens and, importantly, its healthcare system and attempting to make life bump along as normally as possible.
That’s why, in western Christian nations like ours – even ones who have turned the season into a very secular, commercial event – Christmas was so important. The only comfort Boris can take from the criticism now levelled at him for cancelling what he had originally promised, is that it comes from all sides. Those furious he ever gave us hope in the first place are just as angry as those who think he is being far too Draconian. My prediction now? It’ll all be over by... next Christmas.
Here’s hoping. In the meantime, have the best one that you can.
‘There is merit in providing people with hope when things look bleak’