A Prayer for Boris

IT’S QUIET DOWN our street, so quiet you’d think we’d had an overnight fall of snow. But it is nothing so jolly. It’s just lockdown.

Things are quiet, but tense. So much has suddenly been taken away from us. Work is discouraged or forbidden. Our familiar corner shops now seem like they are dangerous places to visit, where everyone wears masks and gloves. The council has chained the gate to our local park open so that no one need touch it.

But though cooped up, we are not cowed or crushed. Our sense of wry amusement has not left us yet and our cussed determination remains very much alive. We fight on.

Some people say the skies are clearer, some say the bird song is louder. I’m not sure about either of those, though I have observed that the ever-present smell of marijuana has lifted from our neighbourhood. Apparently, just as fear of missing out emptied our supermarket shelves of bread, pasta and toilet rolls, so drug dealers also experienced panic buying of the nation’s favourite highs. This, I assume, means that fewer people now have their hands on the stuff, and my nose tells me that those that have it are using it sparingly.

I write from the centre of London’s coronavirus hotspot, namely the borough of Southwark, though hotspot is something of an ironic title seeing as our boiler expired a few days ago. Under current conditions, there is no chance of anybody coming to replace it for at least two months. No strangers are allowed in the house, not to mention that, being a two-man job, it will be difficult for any installation team to stand two metres apart at all times.

Our lack of heating is one small side-effect of the ‘social distancing’ we are all doomed to implement for the coming months. ‘Social distancing’ is doubtless a good policy to stop the spread of infectious diseases, but it is nothing new for us. In England, we have been at it for centuries. Just try getting anywhere near a member of the royal family.

So the real novelty is not the separation of rich and poor, it’s the separation of poor and poor, which is something the poor seem to resent, and are unwilling to abandon lightly. The good weather at the weekend saw massive social gatherings in popular parks and seaside resorts. The government is annoyed and distressed, but also a little baffled as to what to do. As Tories, they profess to be reluctant to tell people what to do, but they have made all sorts of new rules that control minute details of our lives, leaving many of us uneasy that a few high-ups with large houses and nice gardens are telling people who have neither that they must boil indoors on a sunny day.

The government wants us all to stay in, and self-diagnose. If you feel ill, remain at home and ring the official virus helpline, we are told. Three weeks ago, I actually did that, because I had a dry cough and a raised temperature. I didn’t think it quite fitted the official description of Covid-19, but I teach in a university, and I didn’t want my students running for the door at my first cough.

So I dialled 111, and after two hours on hold I finally got through to a very serious lady who asked me a long list of questions. My answer was ‘no’ to almost all of them. Finally she announced that we had come to the last question.

“Of late, do you feel a little more confused than usual?”

“Confused”, I said, in a tone of outrage. “Of course I’m confused. The whole world has gone mad!” I paused for effect. Once you get the government’s attention, it’s very tempting to retain it for as long as possible. “And now we’re all mad and ill!” I felt my point was well made and I left it at that. The lady told me I was fit for work, so I carried on teaching, until the college closed down a few days later under government interdict.

Even before the Prime Minister’s alarming decline, a strange truce had already emerged across the political nation. We were enjoying an unaccustomed moment of national solidarity, symbolised by a rare address to the nation from our monarch

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That was the end of my life outside the house. Now every day seems much the same, and if it wasn’t for the helpful markings on my medication packs I might not know what day of the week it is. Another good argument for taking statins.

So we hunker down in our unaccustomedly cold house and wait. And wait. Do our rulers have a plan? Until a vaccine arrives, they can’t stop the spread of the disease without our active cooperation. So are they really protecting us, or governing, at all?
Ministers and senior health advisors talk of ‘strategy’, but improvisation seems rather more in evidence. The substance of the official plan seems to be to reassure us by making strings of promises. In other words, the government is doing what modern governments do—it is choosing to concentrate on the presentational rather than the operational.

The one fixed element of the government’s strategy is to hold a televised news conference every night during which ministers and officials tell us that everything will be all right in a week or so, that they are working ‘round the clock’, that they are doing ‘everything that they can’, and that efforts are being ‘ramped up’. The trouble is that they have been saying all this for weeks now, and the trick is beginning to wear thin. The latest news is that the 3.5 million antibody testing kits that the government promised would be here by now don’t actually work.

I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but we do have cause for concern. While official optimism remains unruffled, every day our radio phone-ins fill up with desperate health workers all over the country telling us they have no protection and insufficient supplies. All the while the government continues to tell us they have adequate numbers of ventilators, but the number varies. When one spokesman was asked to explain why he was claiming we had 12,000 ventilators, while everyone else who had bothered to count said that we had only 8,000, he insisted, in a dizzying display of obfuscation, that this was because several thousand ventilators are on order and are yet to arrive. In other words, anyone in authority can just make things up.

Here in the chilly house we have a strategy too. We are doing all we can to ramp up our games of Scrabble, with the eventual aim of me actually winning one. We fully expect to have achieved this by next week.

But all these petty concerns paled into insignificance after the sensational news that our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had been admitted to intensive care at St Thomas’ Hospital, with breathing difficulties associated with coronavirus. This knocked out the driving force of the government, and left a mass of questions unanswered about leadership and decision-making. But across the political spectrum, the whole country suddenly seemed genuinely fearful for his life, and even his fiercest critics rallied to wish him well.

Yet, even before the Prime Minister’s alarming decline, a strange truce had already emerged across the political nation. There was a general recognition of the need to get behind our leaders, as behoves us in a time of crisis, and we were enjoying an unaccustomed moment of national solidarity, symbolised by a rare address to the nation from our monarch. Sixty-eight years into the job, she shared her wisdom and experience with us, evoking the wartime spirit that prevailed when she made her first broadcast, as a teenager, in the dark days of 1940. She even quoted ‘We’ll Meet Again’, Vera Lynn’s classic song of yearning and separation, first heard in 1939.

There is also a new leader of the Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer, who has publicly committed himself and his party to constructive purposes. ‘No opposition for opposition’s sake,’ he has promised.

But sadly, all this goodwill and unanimity is unlikely to last. At least two nasty rows are bound to spill over as soon as our acute sense of crisis subsides.

First, there is the issue of when to come out of lockdown. There is already a substantial lobby, mostly on the right of politics, which believes that the whole thing is an overreaction, and that the price of fighting the virus is not worth paying. Hawks say that we are only saving people who would die soon anyway, and at too high a cost to the healthy, wealth-generating sectors of society.

Lobby journalists report that exactly this argument is already raging within the government, with the Department of Health and Social Care facing up to the Treasury. Health officials want more spending on everything in order to save lives; the Treasury has to count the cost to the wider economy and is resisting open-ended funding, especially as they have already promised to ‘do whatever it takes’ to prop up employment in the country. Bean counters have noticed that saving lives, especially of the elderly and chronically sick, is of little benefit to the national balance sheet, whereas preserving active and successful businesses is. Expect this dispute to sharpen as we enter June. There will be blood on the carpets of Whitehall, and quite possibly the whole issue will be politicised on a party basis, as those on the left argue for saving lives and those on the right defend wealth.

The second issue is that unkillable vampire—Brexit. Brexit has risen from the grave because all the virus-driven disruptions to public life have forced the negotiations over our new trading arrangements with the European Union (EU) to be suspended. We were supposed to have broad agreement by late June, in order to allow time for ratification at all the necessary levels within both Britain and the EU. That is not going to happen now, so the deadline for the UK to leave the EU—currently written into law—either guarantees that we leave without a deal, or that a postponement is necessary to allow time for terms to be agreed.

Sadly, all this goodwill and unanimity is unlikely to last. At least two nasty rows are bound to spill over as soon as our acute sense of crisis subsides

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Of course, hardline Brexiteers are delighted with the prospect of a ‘no deal’ exit, which is what most of them have always wanted. So they are now crying foul over the whole virus lockdown and claim that it is a wicked Remainer plot to subvert Brexit. Boris Johnson himself has refused even to contemplate delaying our scheduled departure on December 31st, 2020. But then again, Boris and Brexit deadlines don’t have the happiest of histories.

We have probably lost three months or so, and commonsense would suggest that something like this period should be added back into the process next year. But moving the deadline requires a vote of the House of Commons, which the Prime Minister might find tricky, and how long should the extension be? Again, look to June for blows to be exchanged in earnest.

The news of Boris Johnson is encouraging. His condition has stabilised; he fights on. But concerns remain. As yet, he has not been put on a ventilator, but he may yet emerge weakened, which could have wide political ramifications.

All this will eventually pass, though it will leave us with a national experience much like the two World Wars. Everyone will have suffered in some way, or will know someone who has experienced loss, or whose life has been disrupted by malign fate. My daughter has had to postpone her wedding for a year, and the official interment of my late brother’s ashes has had to be cancelled indefinitely. Currently, the UK property market is suspended, stranding my extended family with three sales and one purchase on hold till further notice.

Most poignantly, my mother-in-law died last week, and we were not permitted to visit her in hospital during her last days. Nor are we allowed to attend her funeral.

Strange times. Cruel times.

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About The Author

Roderick Matthews

Roderick Matthews specialises in Indian history. He is the author of Jinnah vs Gandhi and Mountbatten and the Partition of British India