I keep imagining a scene: it’s 2020. Patrick Vallance sits jotting down his memories of the day. The phrases that he heard earlier, surface in his mind. Boris Johnson, he remembers, talked of “letting it all rip”. There was talk of “casualties”. I pause: is that what these folk call dead invalids? Casualties? And then as regards these casualties, Vallance reports Johnson saying “so be it”. It’s a fatalistic shrug. How extraordinary that at the height of a national life and death struggle, we had a prime minister whose go-to philosophy was que será, será.
Then Johnson switched tack. These casualties, he said, “have had a good innings”. I read that as him thinking that these people had notched up a good score, so no need to panic or fret. The playing field has often been a fertile resource for those looking for imagery to explain life. Here, Johnson recruited cricket to serve in the task of neutralising pain and desolation. In which case, wasn’t he telling his colleagues that there was no cause for mourning the departure of old people? Just clap them off the pitch. Play up, play the game.
In the midst of this joshing, it’s easy to lose sight of the thousands of beloved nans, grandads, aunts, uncles, friends or lonely people being kicked off the planet. Because we mourn in small groups, we can easily forget that what happened under Johnson’s leadership was a national disaster. In short, not only were these chums getting in some hard partying, they were saying that the old and vulnerable were surplus to requirements. Vicious jollity.
I re-run on my retina the Johnson rise to power. Alongside his bus-ad hoax, I see him standing on a soap-box outside a care home shouting, “Remember the Bard: ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. We shall abolish the seventh age of man. What a relief for everyone concerned, eh?” Would that pitch have worked as well as “Get Brexit done?” Probably not. So how has it happened that the Johnson team have been able to get away with this murderous stuff?
And, according to Vallance, it wasn’t only Johnson. He writes: “Rishi thinks just let people die and that’s OK.” I didn’t vote Tory but once they got in, I confess I did possess a smidgeon of gullibility to think these people wouldn’t actually throw us under a bus. Wrong again, Rosen. But there’s more. Vallance jotted down that Johnson said: “Most people who die have reached their time anyway.”
So we put our lives in the hands of someone who not only thinks that life is a cricket match but it’s one where the scorecard is drawn up before we play. The great advantage of this, he thinks, is that swathes of old buffers leave the pitch, retired hurt.
I’m one of them. Yes, I see myself amongst the buffers, and reading Vallance’s notes is bitter fare. I don’t like my Covid inheritance: my mostly blind left eye and mostly deaf left ear. But then I remember that thanks to people who acted in ways diametrically opposed to this government’s necrophilia, I got to play again. They worked like crazy to make sure I didn’t die - and of course not just me, tens of thousands of us. In the here and now, reading the chilling stuff that this inquiry has brought to the surface, I see a boiling mix of Malthus and Calvin. That’s to say, not only have millions of people been treated as an unwanted surplus but Johnson thought it was pre-determined that they should be. That’s a sinister recipe.
Michael Rosen’s poem:
Out of bedrooms and wards
long lines of the dead walk towards you
asking you,
‘Who were you to decide
that our innings was over?
Who gave you the umpire’s white coat
and upraised finger?’
Did you think we would never speak
from the graves you gave us?
