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AAnother series of dizzying U-turns from the government’s self-driving car, surpassing the World Cup as the things Boris Johnson said on Sunday turned out not to be true on Monday. I’m sure you mean them when you say them, like wedding vows or the kind of nonsense one might insist on in a newspaper column. Johnson declared that timing was “pivotal”, and it certainly has. Again. Perhaps we should view the trait in a positive light. In a country that has spent the past few years digging deeper into entrenched positions, Boris Johnson may be the last human capable of changing his mind. Unfortunately, not in a competent way. I can’t believe honking the horn “debate me, you coward!” in a virus it has not worked.
By now, of course, you know the latest facts, because you live in them. That’s really the problem with all of this for the prime minister. People may vaguely notice.
Once again, we are doing something completely unavoidable too late, which means that it will have to be done much longer and much longer than it would have been if Johnson had shown some leadership and grabbed the nettle. No one should have any doubt that we are paying for their weakness and hesitation in lives, in the bitterest economic terms, and in vital freedoms that will end up being lost for greater stretches. It’s not that Boris Johnson can’t see corners, it’s that he can’t see two steps ahead of him.
What was he waiting for? Better news? Did you think that, having informed viewers of Andrew Marr on Sunday that things were bad and getting worse, but that he was not going to act, some kind of cosmic miracle was going to happen? Perhaps you expected a Downing Street aide to rush out of breath into your office Monday morning and say, “You will never believe this, the R rate has plummeted and we don’t need to do the hard thing after all! Wow, thank God for you. Bravo for having the lack of courage of your lack of convictions. That’s why they pay you a lot, even if you tell your friends that your salary is chicken food. ”
I’m afraid the Prime Minister’s response was even weirder. On Monday night, Johnson informed the nation that he had sent England’s primary school children back to school on Monday morning because “we know how important each day in education is to life chances. of the kids”. Well yes, but … DO ME A FAVOR. Sending 3 million kids back for a day of school, the first day of the trimester, where you really don’t do anything too significant other than mixing up all your germs and then taking them home to another long lockdown. Meanwhile, high schools that were supposed to be preparing a testing regimen on Sunday night were supposed to be preparing at least half a semester of remote learning programs by Monday night. Something that they had anticipated weeks ago but were threatened with legal action for taking the time to do it correctly. Interestingly, this also appears to be the way the Johnson administration treats public officials. PoliticsHome reported that Monday at the Department of Education a meeting of all the staff had taken place in which it was announced that the schools would not close and that the exams would continue.
But listen, it’s not the prime minister’s fault, the prime minister explained to the nation last night, it’s all down to this guy, New Variant, who got repeated name checks during his sober speech. So sober, in fact, that it was one that was clearly not entirely written by Johnson, in the manner of the occasional Donald Trump tweet that is clearly not written by Trump. Hours earlier, Johnson had warned of “tough, tough weeks” ahead. Maybe Jamie Redknapp is writing for him now.
Regardless, as Johnson literally pointed out, he would have gotten away with it had it not been for the pesky New Variation. In his words: “Our collective efforts were working and would have continued working.” Johnson assured the nation that there was “no question” about this. Which is a complete lie and useless.
Like many comically weak men, unsuitable ones presume that Johnson is an “alpha male.” Just two weekends ago, an aide to the prime minister gasped to the Sunday Times: “This is Boris’s world now. The rest of us just live in it. “To reuse Dean Martin’s famous line about Frank Sinatra to describe the prime minister is certainly audacious. Yet undoubtedly we all have to live in Johnson’s flawed psychology at the worst possible time for it. .
In fact (and it goes without saying), this terrible moment for the nation was not without personal vanity for the prime minister. I see that Johnson still found time for his personal Downing Street photographer to take pictures of him as he “prepared” to give this address. Are you familiar with this guy’s work? I really enjoy it – it costs the public: £ 100,000 a year – and recently marveled at a series of behind-the-scenes photos of Downing Street during the final days of the Brexit deal. Is it really half the frame busy with an out-of-focus Christmas tree and bottle of wine, and poorly lit Boris Johnson reading a sheet of paper in the background? Why yes it is. History! I think we all feel his hand on our shoulder. Certainly your finger on the lens.
The only part of Johnsoniana’s address to the nation last night was the part that I imagine we will hear the most. This is the section where he promised that “if things go well and with a good wind in our sails”, we will have vaccinated 13.2 million of the most vulnerable people in less than six weeks, in mid-February. These are the top four vaccine priority categories. I would literally love to see it. But in the book of forms, who among us doesn’t instinctively feel that we’ll revisit that promise in 40 days, only this time more in anger than pain?
So once again, “we are where we are”, as the strange motto of the time goes. And we are, for the third / fourth / twelfth time, where we were. The person who really needs to go back to the pandemic school is, of course, Boris Johnson. Has anyone learned less from a recurring situation? I feel like I have been very unfair to the goldfish in this space before. Our prime minister’s spirit animal is in fact a headless chicken. Moreover, Guinness World Records show that in the 1940s in Colorado, a farmer decapitated a chicken, and the headless creature survived and walked for 18 more months. So a year after handling the pandemic, Boris Johnson has everything to play for.
• Marina Hyde is a columnist for The Guardian
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