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SShortly before 5pm in the UK, President-elect Joe Biden gave a press conference. The results of the trials were very promising, he said, but there was still a long way to go before a nationwide vaccination program could be implemented. So now it was more important than ever not to let our guard down and keep wearing masks. It was consistent, informative, and in less than five minutes Biden had told Americans almost everything they needed to know.
Boris Johnson likes to do things quite differently. Almost the second after Biden finished speaking, the Prime Minister emerged into the Downing Street meeting room, flanked by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam and Brigadier Joe Fossey, dressed in full camouflage clothing that had the reverse effect. to draw attention to himself. Perhaps a new form of anti-camouflage.
After some introductions, Boris went on one of his long walks. He really had nothing to say that couldn’t have been resolved in minutes, but consider that a press conference has not taken place unless it wasted the better part of an hour of everyone’s time.
Perhaps it was the thrill of having a real-life soldier alongside him, but Johnson’s explanation of the new vaccine was conveyed in a series of metaphors straight out of the movie Stagecoach. The arrows were in the quiver! The cavalry was on its way, the bugle call, presumably from Michael Gove, growing louder, but still a little further away. Having a prime minister who manages to trivialize something really important is getting extremely exhausting and it’s hard not to tune out moments after he starts a sentence. Too much for the great communicator.
Next up was the brigadier who is in charge of the massive tests in Liverpool and he looked uncomfortable throughout. “Two thousand soldiers have answered the call,” he said, giving the impression that the soldiers had had a say in their deployment rather than being told they were going to Liverpool for the next four weeks.
Then he took out a piece of plastic from his pocket. “You know what a swab is,” he continued. “Well this is the lateral flow that gives you a result in an hour.” And that was all he had to say. He didn’t seem entirely sure what lateral flow really was or how it worked, but he was just following orders. If he had had his way, he would have saved the taxpayer a return train ticket from Liverpool to London.
This time there was no slideshow, obviously number 10 has started to wonder if these are more problems than they are worth after recent events, so Van-Tam stayed to improvise at the vaccine trial. Even though he had no other information than Boris, the only thing he could do was repeat the fact that it was exciting, but we should not get carried away by the moment. Try to think of it as a penalty shootout, he said: Boris’s shitty analogies are as contagious as the coronavirus. We scored the first goal so we know that the goalkeeper can be beaten, but there was a long way to go before the match was won. No one seemed to have told Van-Tam that the expectation in a shootout was that the penalty taker would score.
Things continued in the same vein when questions came from the media. The Brigadier General tried to be as inconspicuous as possible (merging with the background was part of his SAS training) and therefore all he had to offer was that he was on the fourth day of his deployment, so it was hard to tell if things were going good or bad. Van-Tam desperately searched for new ways to say that vaccination trials were still at an early stage, but that things looked more hopeful for next year.
Try to think of yourself as if you were in a train station on a wet and windy night, he said, doing his best to channel his inner Fat Controller. You could see the train lights two miles away. Then the train entered the station and you didn’t know if the door was going to open. Next, he couldn’t even be sure if there would be enough seats for everyone. The UK had only ordered enough vaccines for about a third of the population, so unless more doses were hooked up, most people were going to miss them. It didn’t sound as hopeful as he’d suggested. But maybe that’s the way he tells them.
Meanwhile, Boris seemed relieved to receive only one question about the US presidential election. And that’s not even about whether he had talked to the president-elect (he hadn’t, as Biden has been too busy taking calls from Micronesia) or if he had any reaction to being called “a shapeshifting jerk” former Barack adviser. Obama Democrats have yet to forgive Boris for his comments about Obama’s partially Kenyan ancestry, which made him dislike the British empire.
“I congratulate the president-elect,” Johnson said, dodging the suggestion that he call Donald Trump to persuade him to throw in the towel. The United States and the United Kingdom have had a close relationship in the past and will certainly do so in the future. He had nothing to say about Brexit. Rather, it chose to accentuate the shared COP27 climate change goals. Or Cop26 as the rest of the world knows it.
