Reflections upon an unwelcome milestone

Yesterday the UK had to come to terms with the sobering news that our total number of deaths so far due to the Covid-19 virus has just passed 100,000.

From memory I can recall that one of our boffin masters – almost certainly either Professor Chris Witty (chief medical officer) or Sir Patrick Vallance (chief scientific adviser), the double-act who have appeared regularly alongside the Government ministers at the Number 10 briefings – told the media that in his opinion if we got through the pandemic with less than 20,000 deaths we’d have done pretty well.

Elsewhere, in the spring of 2020, Professor Neil (“Pantsdown”) Ferguson, head of the Imperial College Covid-19 response team, who humiliatingly later had to resign from the Government’s SAGE Committee in May 2020 because he’d received two visits from his married female lover during the First Lockdown, had predicted in a paper entitled Report 9 that if appropriate steps were not taken then a worst-case figure of half a million deaths could result.

Now I’m no apologist for the Prime Minister, albeit that when he entered Number 10 I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt (partly because I felt his predecessor was so inept) in the eye of a snowstorm of political punditry coming the other way that he was an intelligent but ultimately lazy and chaotic toff quite incapable of running a whelk stall, never mind London let alone the country.

Since then that old quip “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck” as applied to the Premier seems to have come home to roost … if that’s not too many bird analogies.

In other words, even now for me, he’s been confirmed as essentially a buffoon, a minor “character” clown with the political heavyweight gravitas of a gnat who just about manages to bumble through both his personal and public life by being amusing in small doses.

A classic example of an Emperor wearing no clothes.

He does not possess – and never will – the oratorical skills, vision, insight, what we fans of old-time pugilism used to call “bottom”, or indeed any of the basic leadership qualities required to run the country during a major crisis like this one, including the courage/strength to take difficult and unpopular decisions.

To be fair, as a journalist by trade, he has a certain way with words but sadly zero capacity to inspire his listeners or audience, still less a population.

At the Number 10 lectern he comes across as little more than a slightly dotty but well-loved schoolmaster, or even head boy, giving an impromptu address at a school assembly before everyone skiddles home for the school holidays at the end of another term.

Boris cannot do “serious” competently and the trouble is we all know it.

Nevertheless – and others have made this point previously on the Rust – in a situation like a pandemic the world is full of people weighed down with the benefit most particularly of hindsight and, of course, everyone has a view … and most of them get aired regularly in the media.

There are those now pontificating that the UK should have locked down stronger and harder at the beginning and claiming the fact we didn’t amounts to criminal negligence on behalf of the Government.

Apparently – depending upon your media source of choice – we should have done whatever New Zealand and many Asian countries did, i.e. close our international borders.

We should have done what Sweden did (no lockdown at all) … oh no, wait a minute, that later proved to be a huge mistake didn’t it and Sweden is now suffering for it.

Alternatively, we should have done what Germany … Italy … Spain … Portugal … Fiji … even the USA and Brazil did.

(Or should we?).

The “Whatever you do is wrong” syndrome is alive and well, it seems.

Pardon me for mentioning this when it seems everyone in the country (well, except the airline industry) is now calling for the country’s borders to be closed immediately – allegedly because, if only they had been a year ago, then we wouldn’t have had as many as the 100,000 deaths we have – but (as I recall it) when the first cases of Covid-19 occurred in the UK and the enormity of what was about to confront had begun to dawn upon us, the popular attitude in the media and indeed on the streets was very different.

It was in January 2020 that I was dumbfounded to learn that there were at least a million Brits (holidaymakers, gap year travellers, ex-pats, business executives, whatever) out there somewhere in the world and now potentially stranded.

The Government issued advice that these should all make their way back to the UK as soon as possible.

As a result the UK airwaves and websites of every description became dominated with members of the “overseas group of one million” wailing about the difficulties (and now ever-increasing costs) of getting flights back to the UK they were now encountering.

I remember one evening listening to the Up All Night programme on Radio Five Live to which a lady of (shall we say?) advanced years had called in.

She had gone on a solo holiday to India and had ended up somewhere in the hills, miles away from any semblance of normal civilisation.

She reported how nobody from the British Embassy or Foreign Office had called her – her calls to them had been fielded politely but produced no response or help – and she demanded to know what the Government was going to do about rescuing her from her current situation and getting her home.

She even cited for comparison the fact that the German embassy had apparently organised a coach to get to the nearest town to where she was situated in order to rescue its citizens: why on earth hadn’t the UK done similar?!

Her attitude was very much that Government had a fundamental duty to rescue her from her predicament.

I was privately rather dismissive of this demand.

What right had she – who had taken it upon herself to travel all the way to India (and then to clearly a very remote area of it) – to require the British Government to pull out the stops – and at God alone knows what cost? – to rescue her?

Whatever happened to people taking responsibility for their own actions?

This lady’s sense of entitlement was quite extraordinary.

She effectively seemed to want both the freedom to do whatever she liked and then – if anything went wrong for her anywhere in the world – the Government to act like a fascist dictatorship, switching resources from vital services like the NHS perhaps, in order to facilitate her personal return to Blighty.

My flippant attitude was “Tough, m’dear – you got yourself into this mess, you must get yourself out of it”.

I noted, however, that the following week that the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced a £78 million pound initiative to “bring Brits stranded abroad home”.

I reflected this morning on the fact that in January 2020 the “issue of the moment” pre-occupying the nation and its media was the UK’s urgent need to get all its citizens home … and yet, 12 months on, “the latest issue of the moment” currently topping the UK agenda is that with hindsight we shouldn’t have been concentrating on “getting our people home” … but rather, closing our borders and thereby (presumably) keeping them out!