In Episode 34 of his new book, author Julian Roup considers Boris Johnson’s fitness for steering Britain through Covid-19.
In case you missed Episode 33, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 8th May 2020
By Julian Roup
I wonder if I am missing something about the science behind the lifting of the lockdown. We have no vaccine, no magic bullet, so why are we even talking of letting people go out again freely? What about the warnings of a second wave of infection being worse than the first, as in the 1918 Flu Epidemic which killed 50 million people?
Today the UK infection rate is at 12%, so we need to be careful about any thought of an end of lockdown, says a scientist. We need to be ultra cautious. If herd immunity kicks in at 70% there is a lot of illness and death to go through yet. We are a long, long, way from any light at the end of tunnel, as I see it.
I see a Twitter comment that sums up my feelings about this. It says: ’The end of stay-at-home orders doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. It means they currently have room for you in ICU.’
But it is announced that from this Monday, May 11, rail services will resume, with up to 70 per cent of normal services running. What the hell?
Oliver Dowden, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, speaking on BBC Radio 4 at the crack of dawn, says Boris’s much-trumpeted speech on Sunday will announce ‘small and tentative steps’, not a blanket end to the stay home message.
And if there is any indication of infection rising as a result, we will turn back to lockdown.
British police chiefs have warned that the lockdown is slowly ebbing away, with some warning that any further loosening will make key aspects of it ‘unpoliceable’.
Several police chiefs told The Guardian that more people were going out by foot and road, and there were clear signs of people getting tired of lockdown. At least one force said it was scaling back part of its enforcement, for fear of losing public support.
The warnings come ahead of a long Bank Holiday weekend to mark VE Day, with the expected warm weather tempting people to go out after six weeks of restrictions.
West Yorkshire police assistant chief constable, Tim Kingsman, said: “At present, there has been no relaxation of the rules, so people shouldn’t be thinking about large gatherings such as street parties.”
Merseyside police said they would be stopping cars at random and that last weekend they had broken up several parties, with some people travelling from outside Merseyside to attend.
One chief constable in the South of England said his force expected to be busier than on New Year’s Eve, with almost half the calls from the public ‘snitching’ on people allegedly breaching the lockdown.
There are other voices accusing the Government of giving mixed messages about the end of lockdown. The Welsh and Scottish governments are critical of the government for ending the ‘stay home’ message. A major speech by Boris is being talked up for Sunday when he is going to speak about a ‘road map to the end of lockdown’.
I fear that Boris’s roadmap will look more like the driving of a drunk at the wheel, with violent swerves and drifting off at the curves. This is a man of whom it has been said he could not organize a piss-up in a brewery, and has to be surrounded by those capable of picking up the pieces, as like a bull in a china shop he wrecks everything in his path. His path to power is another zigzag roadmap which includes being fired from his job at The Times for fabricating two stories and for lying to Michael Howard, the Tory leader at the time, about his affair with Petronella Wyatt.
In November 2004, Boris Johnson was a shadow arts minister under Michael Howard, when it was reported in multiple tabloids that his years-long affair with The Spectator columnist had resulted in two terminated pregnancies.
Johnson publicly stated the allegations were untrue, calling them an ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’. When proof of the allegations was presented, Howard asked Johnson to resign, only for him to refuse, and therefore be fired for dishonesty for the second time in his career.
Then there was Boris’ catastrophic time at the Foreign Office, and a personal life that sounds like comic opera, but which is closer to tragedy for those hurt by him. His life has been described as ‘shambolic’.
With Boris at the wheel, God help Britain. He stands now amid the corpses of more than 30,000 people, and as yet nobody is calling for his removal. And this is the man who is going to outline the roadmap ahead? Am I missing something here? I would like to get out of the car if Boris is at the wheel. When are the British people going to pull him over and remove him forcibly from the driver’s seat?
Boris has been keen from the outset to paint the fight against coronavirus as a war. He should be VERY careful about this analogy, for when the dust has settled and the dead have been buried and we finally get back to some kind of ‘normal’, there is going to be a terrible reckoning to face, a forensic accounting, when this incompetent, insouciant, amateur Government undergoes a final analysis by historians and political thinkers for its performance during the pandemic. Boris may well be found to have been, in effect, utterly incompetent.
He did not prepare us for what was coming; he delayed and delayed, and gave the green light for mass gatherings including Cheltenham racing and Twickenham rugby; he had neither PPE nor ventilators in place; the huge NHS staff shortage (70,000 nurses alone) was the doing of his own and previous Tory Governments of which he was a minister; he allowed free movement in and out of our airports throughout this time. He was missing for five crucial COBRA crisis meetings when planning was underway to fight the fight to protect Britain. I don’t think history will be kind to him, for he will be found out at last for the dangerous, posturing clown that he is.
It is the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the end of WW2 in Europe, and the Government says celebrate at home with 1940s-themed tea parties. I get the sense that no one wishes to celebrate VE Day or anything else much. Maybe the very old who served in the armed forces would dearly love to, but they are locked up in total isolation in retirement homes. For those who sacrificed and are still alive, this second great public disruption of their lives must be a bitter pill, so close to the end.
It is a beautiful sunny day and people are keen to go out and sunbathe on this lovely bank holiday weekend. That is all they really want to do: to lie in the sun and not think too much about the mess we find ourselves in.
But what of the lonely in lockdown? I wonder how the millions of people living on their own in Britain are coping? Loneliness in Britain is another plague, though it is an under-reported one.
The number of people living alone has risen by a fifth over the last 20 years in what researchers deemed a ‘statistically significant increase’. It rose from 6.8m in 1999 to 8.2m in 2019, with the majority of this increase driven by the growth in the numbers of men – predominantly aged between 45 and 64 – living alone.
Quoting rafts of research, The Campaign to End Loneliness reports: “Loneliness, living alone and poor social connections are as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is worse for you than obesity. Lonely people are more likely to suffer from dementia, heart disease and depression. Loneliness is likely to increase your risk of death by 29%.”
Half a million older people go at least five or six days a week without seeing or speaking to anyone at all. Over half (51%) of all people aged 75 and over live alone, says the Office for National Statistics. Two-fifths of older people (about 3.9 million) say television is their main company.
I have known something of loneliness myself, and I know just how corrosive it can be. So, among the negative effects of the lockdown, the crisis of loneliness in Britain will not have been helped by it.
Doubtless there will be research in time that shows how the lonely coped during lockdown. Not well, I imagine. The economic cost of lockdown is plainly catastrophic for the country, but the long-term psychiatric costs to the population may be deeper and even more damaging in the long run. Time will tell.
For so many of us almost too busy to feel loneliness, this time of lockdown has brought an opportunity to reflect on our lives as no other time in the past decades. I hunt down the half-remembered poem that speaks best of this: ‘Leisure’, by William Henry Davies:
“What is life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?”
We have had weeks to stop and think, to stand and stare. What will this rumination bring to the life of the nation once we are back at work? Will it be just a bucolic dream, a national fantasy, or will some hard-edged change for the better come out of this time and space? To quote some management-speak, will we ‘think out of the box’, ‘go back to the drawing board’, and have some ‘blue sky thinking’?
I start my day, as ever, with coffee and toast and after writing furiously, I tape the next chapter of this book. Thank heavens for this project! It has been an absolute life saver and a joy. It has brought so many gifts, so many rewards, the sheer pleasure of writing about this weird time, learning the new discipline of podcasting, hearing from people who are hearing the podcasts or reading the book online, some of whom I have not heard from in 40 years or for longer; 50 years in the case of an old friend with whom I used to ride as a teenager.
It is fascinating to hear about your life a lifetime ago as seen by other people. In some strange way, they own a version of you that may be more real than that which you remember yourself. With my dodgy memory, that may well be the case!
From the living room, I hear the sound of Jan chanting her Buddhist daimoku, the way she starts each day without fail. It is a comforting sound, as I know she is chanting for my wellbeing, and that of her many friends and family. Buddhism for me feels like a step too far, having grown up with not one, but two religions, Judaism and Christianity: a third may strike God as sheer greed or indecisiveness. Who knows? For Jan, raised in the Church of England, Buddhism has become a mainstay of her life, and the end of lockdown when it comes, will bring with it a return to Buddhist meetings here at the cottage instead of on Zoom.
For me, it will mean a return to my own church, the woods and green rides of Ashdown Forest.
Click here for Episode 35.