With Johnson driving, it doesn’t feel like we’ve reached the end of the Covid line
Sixteen months ago we probably would have rolled our eyes at being told to take “personal responsibility” by Boris Johnson, a man who doesn’t even take personal responsibility for an unspecified number of his own kids. But that was then, and these days we just have to let it wash over us like a waterfall in a shampoo advert.
There was certainly a powerful cascade of it all on Monday, as the prime minister explained that it was now or never for opening up. Faced with that false opposition, who wouldn’t pick “now”? I am hugely into “now” as the moment where it all goes away, and we return to a prelapsarian world where the government that got pretty much all of it wrong, pretty much all the way through, simply gets out of our lives. The only nagging worry, I suppose, is the possibility that the government that got pretty much all of it wrong is getting this bit of it wrong too, and that that means they’re going to be right up in our business again come the autumn.
Not that I don’t want my hot firebreak summer. I’m afraid I’m the personality type that hears the government’s new buzz phrase “summer firebreak” and reflexively thinks: right, I need to have THE best summer firebreak possible. I want to be drinking Summer Firebreaks; I want to tear the summer firebreak pants out of it. And when it all goes tits up and I’m staring down the barrel of autumn restrictions/civic mutiny, I’m going to write an elegiac song about how amazing it all was now it’s gone, probably called Summer Firebreak. A bit like Don Henley’s Boys of Summer, but with even more Wayfarers.
Wherever you stand on my summer firebreak dreams – you may well be absolutely tutting at them – I suspect I am not entirely alone in the sentiment. Which made it even more absurd to hear Johnson solemnly intoning: “This is not a moment to get demob happy.” Oh come on. Have you ever met people? Especially English people, the people to whom your supposedly sobering statements apply? This is a bit like the time last September, when boffins and Dido Harding alike were seemingly blindsided by the wholly predictable explosion in testing demand once schools and universities returned.
Why are they like this? Why are they constantly surprised by the real world?
Anyway, Monday evening’s big announcement took place in Downing Street’s £2.9m briefing room, which has since its very inception felt like a doomed way of raising the tone of what’s going on inside it. For a gambler with Johnson’s Covid success rate, it’s like putting on a tuxedo to go down the bookies and blowing the housekeeping. Needless to say, the room remains otherwise empty. Once journalists can turn up in person to this facility after 19 July, I imagine there suddenly won’t be any more press conferences, in an eerie instance of Jungian synchronicity. Likewise, the return of full parliamentary democracy – suspended to the huge detriment of absolutely everyone bar the government – will take place just three days before parliament dissolves for summer recess. Funny how scrutiny keeps working out. Luckily, the government keeps promising this 19 July date is “a terminus”, so there is no way it’ll all get shut down again soon after they return for autumn.
And yet, IS it a terminus? With the exception of a very small number of weirdos who seem to subconsciously enjoy the dreary drama of the Covid era, we all obviously hope so. But the answer, at best, seems “unlikely”. Either way, and even after all his broken pandemic promises thus far, there is something mesmerising about Johnson’s inability to tell the unvarnished truth about that at this stage. The prime minister simply cannot be straight with people that this is a gamble. Despite all his earlier overpromising and underdelivering, he is still wanging on about a terminus and irreversibility – still writing cheques he might well not be able to cash. Johnson likes being a hostage to fortune so much I think he has Stockholm syndrome.
For me, the most troubling part of the press conference was the moment the chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance declined to directly answer a sensible question about what the modelling on hospitalisations and deaths showed. Johnson, of course, was far too cowardly to take up the baton and answer either. But why? Why are we not allowed to know the answer to that now? Why is that data secret, until at least next week? You can’t tell people to take responsibility then demonstrate that you think them too stupid or whatever to have all the available information to do so. But the government’s official policy is clearly obscurantist – asked again on Tuesday morning about what the modelling showed, Sajid Javid would only say: “We have a number of models we look at internally.”
Presumably one of their favourite models to look at is entitled “Unmasked Ball”, because the bizarre decision to start some destructive row about maskwearing must be also rooted in some sort of perceived positive outcome for them. I fear the damage here has already been done, but it really needn’t have been like this. Unfortunately, this is an administration that always tends toward over-emotionalism when being simply matter-of-fact would do.
As for the notion that power is about to be voluntarily surrendered by the government, and humbly handed back to the people … that feels a little too convenient, in such exceptional circumstances. Johnson can go on about personal responsibility all he likes, but he’s going to have to take some himself. What unfolds over the next few weeks and months must be on the leader, not the people he leads. Individuals can only do so much, and the problem has never been with people’s lack of belief in things the prime minister said. People wanted to believe Johnson’s promise we would “flatten the curve” in 12 weeks; people wanted to believe it would be “back to normal by Christmas”; people wanted to believe Christmas would be “saved” by Johnson; people wanted to believe jabs meant we could be back to normal by Easter; and people quite understandably now want to believe his promise all this is “irreversible” and that 19
July is a “terminus”. So that’s what he tells them.
And so it is that there are masses of normal people – who quite understandably don’t spend half their lives being extremely online about politics – who now think that 19 July is absolutely a terminus. Quite how they’ll react down the line if it turns out not to be is anyone’s guess. I do wonder if it might not have been better, even for Johnson’s own political fortunes, to at least warn people that the terminus might not turn out to be the terminus at all.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist