Albania’s empathetic handling of the coronavirus crisis beats Boris Johnson’s catastrophic response hands down – just ask my barber

When the UK prime minister was still shaking hands in hospital and urging people to go to racing and attend football matches, Albania was in total lockdown

OK, I have been very negative of late. Hard not to be with Boris Johnson’s shower of clowns and charlatans delivering a national catastrophe. But today, a story with a happy ending, to warm your heart, and show that prime ministers are not all the same, and politicians can make a difference.

The happy ending landed just after midnight in the early hours of Thursday morning with a text from my barber: “We made it!”

When I wrote mid-April about 20 things I was missing in lockdown, Burnley FC games came top, and “abroad” was not far behind, with trips to France, Albania, Singapore, Australia and Nashville (sorry Greta) all postponed or cancelled due to Covid-19.

But there at No 14 was this: “My Albanian barber, Palushi’s of Malden Road. My partner Fiona has done a pretty good job considering she has never cut hair before. But it is growing back in a very weird, uneven way.”

I have never been one for fancy hair cuts and for years Alex Palushi, whose barber shop is a short walk from my house in Gospel Oak, North London, knows what I want, does it, charges eight quid and I give him a tenner.

We talk mainly football and politics – he a disgruntled Arsenal fan, me a one-eyed Burnley fanatic. He follows Albanian politics closely and knows I go to Tirana regularly to advise prime minister Edi Rama. He is not a fan of Boris Johnson or Brexit, warned for years Jeremy Corbyn was never going to be elected as prime minister, thinks that Keir Starmer has a chance. So, when he says he “made it”, what was he talking about?

Just over a week ago I got a text from him, saying his dad, who lives in Albania, was seriously ill in hospital. Alex was desperate to get home, but worried about quarantine, and whether he would have to self-isolate when he got there, and not be able to see his father. I checked it out and discovered that Albania, which went early into lockdown, was coming out of it, and the early quarantine was about to be lifted. So far, so good.

Flights, however, were hard to come by, and in the end he decided to drive with his brother. I warned he might struggle to get through France but, desperate to see his dad, he gave it a go. No joy. He was turned back at the border. So he drove north and set off by ferry for Holland, had more luck there and then drove through Holland, Germany, Slovenia and Croatia, before arriving at the Croatian border with Montenegro.

Left to right: Alex, the barber, his dad Femi and his brother Edmir (Alastair Campbell)

A naturalised Brit, Alex has a British passport. Sorry, said the Montenegro authorities, you can’t go further – Covid-19 restrictions, no evidence of Dominic Cummings style “exceptional circumstances”. He tried to explain about his father, but got the look that said, “sorry mate, computer says no”.

He called me, desperate, and I gave him some phone numbers to try, and said I would also have a root around the internet to see what advice I could find. In doing so, I discovered that there is an app via which anyone can contact ministers in the Albanian government directly, explain their problems, and each minister has a team to help solve them.

If you read my blog you will know that I have spent the last few days making an analysis of the, in the main, deeply unempathetic copy and paste letters sent by Tory MPs to constituents who wrote to complain about the Johnson/Cummings scandal.

You may also know that I have been banging on about the robotic formulation used by ministers day after day as they tell us, “sadly” X-amount (still well into three figures) have died, and, “our thoughts and prayers” are with their friends and families. No, they are not. Your thoughts and prayers are with your own survival and, in Johnson’s case, Cummings’ survival, for which you were all asked to put out near identical nodding dog tweets saying Dom loved his son and it was time to move on.

Empathy, as I said in a piece I wrote for the Standard at the start of this crisis, is about more than words of sympathy. It is about what you do to help people who need help.

Alex hit the phones and he hit the app and six hours later he was being led over the Croatian border by an Albanian diplomat, on his way through Montenegro towards Albania. They had decided that two sons driving from England to see a sick father was grounds for special help.

I also discovered that in addition to the app, people have been posting their Covid-19 related needs and problems on Edi Rama’s Facebook page and he has been sorting them out as best he can, large and small.

The difference in empathy levels between a government which encourages people to ask ministers directly for help, the Albanian way, and those of our ministers, who talk the talk about how brilliant they are while failing on pretty much every aspect of this crisis, is stark, and shaming.

People might forgive lack of empathy, or even the occasional act of hypocrisy by a government adviser, if they saw basic competence. But they don’t. They see gross incompetence bordering on criminal negligence which has people checking out whether government departments are considered corporate bodies covered by a possible corporate manslaughter suit (spoiler alert – they are).

In Albania, 34 people have died from coronavirus. In the UK, even on the official figures, more than 40,000, but the excess death figure is now well above 60,000. Yesterday alone, 10 times more people died of Covid-19 in the UK than have died in Albania during the entire crisis. Of course, Albania is a much smaller country, but they faced exactly the same challenges as everyone, and are much closer to Italy which at one point, until Johnson and co screwed up, looked like being the European Covid capital.

To anyone minded to make jokes about Albania, chew on this: their death per million rate is 11. Ours is almost 600. This is what Johnson calls “apparent success”.

When Johnson was still shaking hands in hospital and urging people to go to racing and attend football matches, Albania was in total lockdown, including strictly enforced curfews from 1pm to 5am, with only one person per family member allowed out to go shopping, monitored by online tracking.

Rama was sending me photos of empty streets. He sent me a BBC headline on Boris Johnson saying schools would stay open because “closing them could do more harm than good” with the message, “WTF!! ‘God help you if this is his ‘scientific advice’ … Italy was ruined by this approach.” He sent me a photo taken on a bus, on which a police officer, like the driver wearing a mask, ensured only healthcare workers got on. Alongside it, a picture he had seen of a packed train platform in London. “Do they know what they are doing?” he asked. “You are heading for catastrophe.” So it has proven.

Two short weeks later, the situation in Albania was sufficiently under control for Rama to be able to send doctors and nurses to Italy where, in a recent poll, he came top in an analysis of world leaders and how they had handled the crisis. His 63 per cent approval contrasted with those two more famous names down at the bottom – Trump, 29 per cent, Johnson 23 per cent.

And what does it say about the state Johnson and his Vote Leave clique have reduced the country to that a British passport is now less of a lever for progress through Europe than an Albanian app?

Perhaps No 10 should get the Albanians to take over the Isle of Wight app that was going to be a “game changer”. Or get Johnson to put a sock in it when he claims there is a world class test, track and trace system in place, when clearly there isn’t.

I have known Rama for years, and seen someone who knows how to do the job of prime minister. I have known Johnson for years, and seen enough to know that he can’t. Indeed, if it was not for the posh voice, the Eton/Oxford CV, I’m not sure he would get a job sweeping the floor at Palushi’s barbers, let alone running one of the greatest countries on Earth.

And finally, can he get his bloody hair cut? Even if Carrie made a mess of it, it can’t look worse than it does now, and a horrific mess would at least be a message for his prime ministerial brand.