You couldn’t make it up. “Now was the time for personal responsibility,” said the prime minister with no sense of personal responsibility. His whole life has been conducted with a reckless disregard for other people. Boris Johnson is a man who has always done exactly what he wants, when he wants to do it, and has a trail of broken marriages and promises to prove it. When the rest of us mugs were doing our best to follow the letter of the rules that he made, he was busy enjoying himself at one party after another. And when he was caught, he didn’t have the decency to apologise. Instead he chose to brazen it out, cheapening himself and his party still further.
No matter. Do as I say, not as I do and all that. In any case, the changes to the Covid rules that the Suspect was announcing in his Commons statement had little to do with what was scientifically proven. Rather, it was to win over the libertarian rightwingers in the Tory party who had always been against any form of lockdown restrictions and on whom he was relying to support him through his ongoing Partygate difficulties.
So here was how Covid was going to work from now on. Basically, we would be acting as if it was over. After all, it certainly was for the 175,000 people who had died from the virus over the last two years, and it was time for the rest of us to get with the programme. And if anyone was unlucky enough to get Covid, then they should just knuckle down and do the right thing. Whatever that was. Johnson tugged at the toddler haircut. We were in a world of moral relativism. It might be fine for some to carry on as normal. That would be people who couldn’t afford tests and who would no longer have access to statutory sick pay from day one. They could work and infect vulnerable people. For others – that would be the better-off – not so much. It turns out you can put a price on personal responsibility.
Still, Omicron hadn’t turned out to be as bad as all that, so it was time to end compulsory self-isolation, get rid of expensive test and trace programmes and see what happens. And if some of the elderly, vulnerable and unvaccinated died, then they died. They probably had it coming to them, and in any case they could all die happy knowing that life for the rest of the country would be free from health restrictions.
There was one small caveat. Covid might not actually be over after all. It may return as a deadlier variant, in which case the decision to end all free testing could prove to be a huge advantage. Apparently. The Suspect hadn’t quite thought this one through. So he ad-libbed. We’d just be relying on the ONS survey to detect future Covid strains – even though there would be far fewer tests to detect them. There again, on the plus side, the fewer tests that were done, the fewer infections would be registered. Put this way, you could eliminate Covid completely by just stopping all testing. Why hadn’t he thought of that before?
Understandably, Keir Starmer was less than impressed. While not against the idea of loosening restrictions in principle, he just wasn’t sure they didn’t have more to do with party management than the nation’s health. After all, they seemed to have been cobbled together at the last moment. So much so that the chancellor and the health secretary had been having a standup row over the cost of some of the changes that very morning. And judging by the frown on Sajid Javid’s face, the health secretary still wasn’t happy at having come off second best.
The Suspect merely laughed this off and went out of his way to deliberately misinterpret what had been said. Either that, or he’s dimmer than we thought. The Labour leader had grabbed the stick by the wrong end yet again, he said. Except he really hadn’t. Only Johnson didn’t care. No more than he did when other opposition MPs asked why it was that the World Health Organization and the British Medical Association weren’t backing the changes. Or that there were no safeguards to protect the clinically vulnerable from being infected by their carers. Or countless other serious objections to plans that had been made on the hoof. Just rely on personal responsibility. Said the man without any.
Because this was all about him feeling the love from his own backbenchers. A national health policy designed only to please 250 or so Tory MPs. And in that respect, it appeared to be wholly successful. Because not a single one found fault with a word he had said. The intellectually challenged Graham Brady sought guarantees that there would be no more lockdowns. The equally intelligent Edward Leigh merely asked for a guarantee of no more lockdowns for 10 years – the length of time he expected the Suspect to remain prime minister. Really.
John Redwood wondered if the same ingenuity that Johnson had used on the pandemic could be applied to the cost-of-living crisis. That would be billions of pounds of state aid and several tax rises. So much for the free-marketeers. But the prize for maximum stupidity and toadying went to Matt Hancock. He declared it was entirely down to Johnson’s self-restraint and personal responsibility that the UK was now the first country to have seen the back of the pandemic. To think he was health secretary once. How badly must he want to be loved by Boris.
The Suspect was rather more guarded in his later press conference – apart from insisting that the country should be proud in ending restrictions; as proud as he had been to break them, presumably – but then this time he was flanked by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance. Both men seemed to think that Covid was far from over and that the measures that had been lifted could easily be reinstated with just a couple of weeks’ notice if a subsequent variant – and there would be variants, they were certain of that – proved to be more infectious and vaccine-unfriendly. As for self-isolating, it wasn’t a matter of personal responsibility, it was a national necessity,
Johnson just stood there and sucked it up. He’d done what he set out to achieve in getting Tory MPs back on his side, and that was all that mattered. If he broke his promises and had to impose a further lockdown in nine months’ time because he’d screwed things up, then what the hell? He’d deal with that as and when. For now, as so often, he was just fighting for his life in the here and now. And under those circumstances, anything goes. Especially when you’ve no sense of personal responsibility. Whoops.
