Julian Roup – The health or wealth tug o’ war Ep21

In Episode 21 of his new book author Julian Roup listens to Boris Johnson promise that Covid-19 is being “wrestled to the floor”.

In case you missed Episode 20, click here.

Life in a Time of Plague

Sussex, 27th April 2020

By Julian Roup

Health or wealth? This is now the question – life for all of us or economic death for Britain. This is the burning question, now that the hospitals have proved themselves able to cope with the worst of the pandemic and the curve of new infections has flattened. With light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a dim one, the country’s business community is bestirring itself.

I wake up early this Monday, uneasy, and for the first time anxious, because I can hear the tug o’ war on this issue of health versus wealth. The voices of commerce and finance are beginning to speak up louder about reopening the country for work, business and pleasure. What is the point of lockdown and furlough, they ask, if when people go back to their jobs they find no companies to work for?

But if lockdown is lifted, what are the chances of a second wave of infection, worse than the first? This is the conundrum facing Boris and his cabinet. Boris Johnson, our absentee Prime Minister, is returning to work today, April 27th, after his three-week absence from the UK cockpit and his brush with death. On Friday, Boris had a three-hour catch up session with his cabinet.

First thing this morning, in good time for the lunchtime news, Boris appeared on the steps of Number 10 Downing Street to make a statement. There will be no let-up on lockdown yet, he said, speaking with something of his old energy and brio. “We are now beginning to turn the tide” on the disease. But, he added, he refused to “throw away” the public’s “effort and sacrifice” and relax the lockdown too soon.

He apologised for being “away from my desk for much longer than I would’ve liked” and thanked his colleagues who stood in for him – as well as the public for their “sheer grit and guts”.

He said he understood concerns from business-owners who were impatient to end the lockdown. But ending it too soon could lead to a second spike in cases and cause more deaths, “economic disaster” and restrictions being reintroduced, he said. “I ask you to contain your impatience.”

He said there were “real signs now that we are passing through the peak” – including fewer hospital admissions and fewer Covid-19 patients in intensive care.

And comparing the outbreak to someone being attacked, Boris said: “If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger – which I can tell you from personal experience, it is – then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor.”

The sad truth is that had Boris got his act together earlier, even a week earlier, thousands would be alive today who are dead. And the life and death struggle of “wrestling to the floor” this desperately dangerous enemy would not have required so much muscle. Boris has been as much of a problem to continued life in Britain, as the virus itself. In him, Covid-19 found a complacent opponent.

He goes on to say that the UK has “so far collectively shielded our NHS” and “flattened the peak” – but he could not yet say when or which restrictions would be lifted to ease lockdown.

Indeed our citizenry have behaved impeccably on the whole, led by a government that must face a tribunal at the end of this catastrophe, which has every indication of ending with Britain shown to have paid a most terrible and unnecessary price.

Meanwhile, Italy is starting a phased reopening and New Zealand announces that it has halted the public spread of Covid-19 infection. Spain has let its children out on the streets as long as they stay within a kilometre of home and are accompanied by an adult. Some form of ‘normal’ life is returning to Europe, slowly, painfully, with grandmother’s footsteps.

London’s underground system is running 95% empty – the 5% are NHS staff and essential workers, I suppose. The BBC interview a young woman travelling alone, who says she is off to the country to look after her mother, who is suffering from the painful condition known as fibromyalgia.

James Dart, a Guardian journalist and commentator, offers the following comment – words that pithily sum it all up for me.

“For four years we allowed the hard Right to peddle the ludicrous myth that the UK was in some way superior, exceptional, unique. They told us it was the EU that was holding us back. They made unsubstantiated claim after unsubstantiated claim about power and control.

“They unleashed demons by using nationalistic, populist language, dividing communities and dragging politics further into the gutter. They mercilessly and shamefully went after all who dared to oppose them, and on occasion, they weaponised racism and bigotry to court the far right.”

“As we pass the 20,000-death mark, remember that it is these same people who failed to act on the findings of the 2016 Cygnus Report, or the more urgent 2019 warnings, or their January and February head start. They lamented Italy, but did nothing.

“Remember that it is these same people who spent those months peacocking in front of their base, talking up Big Ben bongs, skipping COBRA meetings, and holidaying abroad.

“Remember that it is these people who lied to the British people about their *political* decision not to work with the EU on procuring life-saving ventilators.

“Remember that it is these people who have utterly failed to show that the UK is in any way a leader in the modern world, allowing its people to die, failing to work with its allies and failing to stand up to the lunacy of Donald Trump. How can any nation claim to be a leader, or exceptional, or superior whilst it lets its doctors and nurses go to work in bin bags?

“These are extremists; wolves in wolves clothing, nonchalantly parading their cluelessness, their heartlessness, and their deluded sense of Old World entitlement to the world without a care in the world.

“If you’re not seething, then I’m sorry to say it, but you’re part of the problem.”  Well said James, I and thousands of others are with you on this!

In the FT, the UK’s Office of National Statistics offers dire figures: “…the true death toll from Covid-19 in the UK is now 41,000, which is 600 per million citizens, the highest death toll in the world.” Well done, Boris, you and your mates have played a blinder.

A client has been in touch to ask if I would like to do more work in Africa. When this horror lifts, I look forward to flying south. I allow myself to dream a little and think of the parts of Africa I would like to revisit besides South Africa, and I am instantly transported to the sea facing terrace of the Polana Hotel in Maputo, capital of Mozambique.

Some 50 years ago, I sat down to one of the greatest meals of my life in the restaurant on that terrace – huge local prawns caught offshore that day, grilled with butter and garlic, a glass of ice cold Vinho Verde and a small hot freshly baked loaf of bread. Sheer heaven. The memory of that meal, taken amid the floral smells of a tropical night and the scents worn by exotically-dressed women eating out with their white-suited men, lives on in my mind and I would love to revisit that part of Africa, so damaged by war since my memorable meal at the Polana.

And then serendipity strikes. It’s a telephone call from the owner of a safari park some 300 miles south of the Polana Hotel. He wants help selling the place. He thinks it will be years before tourists return in sufficient numbers to make it a viable concern again. So now he wants to sell it as an environmentally unspoiled bolthole for a billionaire with interest in nature and Africa. I ask him to outline his offer and promise to get it to some property people I know in London with wealthy Chinese and Russian clients, one of whom has just paid £200m for Britain’s most expensive house, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. The asking price for the safari park is a snip for what is undoubtedly something akin to the Garden of Eden.

My horse Callum’s current carer, Georgie, texts me to say that Milord is now in his summer pasture in front of our cottage. So by looking out of the window I can keep an eye on him and with my binoculars I can see the very whites of his eyes under his flymask.

The birdbath in the garden, which I cleaned out yesterday and refilled, has been discovered by the avian community today and they are putting it to good use, the weather still sunny and warm.

I mow the lawn one more time and afterwards sit on the steamer chair under the umbrella – my summer office – admiring the stripes on the grass. Gus lies in front of me, looking back at me lazily from time to time, counting the minutes to lunch and the chance of scraps. I look closely at him, as his neck seems to have disappeared and his head enters his shoulders directly. Maybe no scraps today!

The swallows are in a mating frenzy, the noise from them in the stables and over the garden is a high-pitched joy. They rocket in and out of the open top half of the stable doors like F18 jets launching and landing on an aircraft carrier. You’d think, after flying 6,000 miles long haul with no beef chicken or veg options, they’d be bloody exhausted, but no, it’s Viagra City here at the top of the garden. Reminds me a bit of Fourth Beach Clifton in Cape Town, half century ago, with the smell of coconut oil and pheromones rising from the oiled teenage torsos, the ice-cold Atlantic doing nothing to calm the sexual frisson one little bit.

Click here for Episode 22

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