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LSeeing the positive side of the prime minister, he had no more credibility to lose. As a general rule of thumb, you can guarantee that from everything Boris Johnson says, it will turn out to be the opposite.
As with Brexit, the same goes for the coronavirus. In March, he insisted that the virus would be defeated in 12 weeks. That went well. In July, Boris promised that the country would return to normal by Christmas. Nobody is putting money into it now.
In his statement to the Commons about the latest national shutdown, Johnson insisted that the virus would be defeated in March. He did not say in what year.
It’s hard to know which is more puzzling: the fact that we have a prime minister who is incompetent and unable to distinguish between fact and fiction; or that there are so many Conservative MPs who are constantly baffled by the failings of their leader. I would have thought that by now he would have been bitten 203 times, 204 times shy. But no.
They continue to make him goof off, albeit increasingly moody; as if they are as surprised as anyone that Johnson has not kept his promises and each time they insist that he is now in a final warning. Something has to change, they warn. But it never does.
Johnson was in the Commons to give the statement he had already been forced to give at the Downing Street press conference on Saturday after details of the national lockdown agreed between him, Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove and Matt Hancock were mysteriously leaked. to the newspapers the night before. . Not that it was a national shutdown, of course, because Boris had promised that there would be no other national shutdown. Rather, it was a blockade that would be imposed at the national level, although with more or less open schools and universities.
This was a subdued Boris. Even by his own standards, this latest U-turn was a humiliation. An admission that he has not only lost control of the coronavirus, he has lost control of the government. It’s just a piece of wreck that’s getting hit. Not that it stopped him from lying, of course. Only the lies have grown weaker and weaker, as if even he had stopped pretending to believe them.
He began by stating that the government had had to change course because the scientific data had changed on Saturday. The chief scientific advisor and medical director had given their last report to the cabinet long before that, which is why the closure was agreed on Friday. Sage had called for a “circuit breaker” in September and made clear that a staggered series of regional lockdowns would be insufficient to contain the spread of the virus.
But Boris didn’t want to upset his more libertarian MPs, so he decided to kill a few more people. Furthermore, it would have been blatant opportunism to introduce a blockade earlier.
For weeks, Johnson has dismissed Keir Starmer as Captain Hindsight. Now he was tacitly forced to admit that the Labor leader was Captain Foresight and that he was General Hopelessness. Because the measures Boris was introducing were what Starmer had been demanding for the better part of a month. Something that Keir was quick to point out.
The new blockade was more difficult and longer than the one proposed by the Labor Party and was less likely to succeed.
Since the Labor Party had promised Johnson the necessary votes on Wednesday, most of the rest of the session was free for all with the prime minister as the scapegoat.
Much of the anti-aircraft fire came as friendly fire. The Tory Brexiters had not fought to close borders only to restrict the right of all English people to enter any pub they wanted to get Covid-19.
As long as the virus didn’t catch from Johnny Foreigner, then everything was tic-boo. You could die happy knowing that the virus had spread from a Brit. Why bother flying to Zurich, when you can turn the entire UK into a hub for Dignitas?
Who knows, it could turn out to be a great source of income.
The longer the session lasted, the more confusing Johnson’s responses became. He was adamant that the country would return to regional lockdowns on December 2, although he could not offer guarantees that the infection rate would have decreased sufficiently over the course of the following month.
He assumed it would be up to parliament what happened next, he said sadly. So that was a yes and a no.
“The country wants politicians to act together,” he shrugged sadly, seemingly unaware of his own inability to act on the scientific evidence and work with the Labor Party a month ago, and the fact that the parliamentarians least inclined to work together were his. Some wanted to reopen the golf courses, others were happy to commit to pitching and putting. Sammy Wilson of the DUP said he had come to listen to Churchill, but had only gotten a Halifax-style appeasement instead.
What became more and more apparent the longer the session went on was that Boris ran out of ideas. Apart from doing too little too late. He wasn’t even sure what he had and hadn’t promised Scotland by way of ransom. Starmer slumped back in his seat.
He knew what we all knew: that we would return to the Commons on December 2 with little change in the health of the nation, to have the same arguments about the lockdowns and test and trace failure again. You can cancel Christmas now.
