Instead of dishing out the bad news, Boris Johnson placed the blame on us

In a back-handed compliment, the PM used his address to the nation to explain Britain, as a ‘freedom loving country’, couldn’t be expected to obey some silly rules about social distancing

It doesn’t really suit Boris Johnson, dishing out the bad news. It isn’t what this high priest of “boosterism” was put on earth to do.

To borrow his own phrase, he is as “spiritually reluctant” to tell us that in a few weeks we’ll experience the worst Christmas since the Second World War. So he didn’t. He did tell us that there will be difficult months ahead, but chose not to repeat the affecting and memorable line he used when the pandemic began, that loved ones would be taken from us before their time.

Instead he blamed us, subtly but unmistakeably, for the mess he and his government have made of dealing with the crisis. It’s our own fault, you see (especially the young ‘uns). In a back-handed compliment, and in so many words, our national leader explained that a “great and freedom loving country”, as Britain is, couldn’t be expected to obey some silly rules about social distancing, whatever that is, and fling around looking like we’ve just emerged from an operating theatre. 

Of course, if that were true it rather invites the question as to why the authorities were now tightening the rules and setting the army loose in the “freedom loving” people of Britain. 

We are invited to believe tact the reason why other countries haven’t suffered one of the worst death tolls in the world is because the likes of the Chinese and the Germans are just automatons trained from birth blindly to obey authority. Nothing to do with better testing facilities or tracing apps or anything like that. 

It was a fairly feeble and transparent bit of spin, and the country may just be starting to realise that it is being run by a charlatan. A highly literate charlatan, with a newspaper columnist’s gift for phrase making (“the iron laws of geometrical progression”); but a charlatan all the same.

Even now, even after all the broken promises, Johnson couldn’t resist using his favourite distraction technique - no jam today but look over there at the giant jam factory we’re building on the moon. “Mass testing” with results “within minutes” was promised - yet again. Things will “be far better in the spring”.  There are “great days ahead”.  

Fists jabbing, those close-set eyes staring intensely though the screen, palms waving as if grabbing an invisible cricket ball as if to crumble it, Johnson’s insistent body language was that of a salesman desperate to get you to take his offer. 

Someone had taken the trouble to tidy up and respray the famous blond mane. The tie was straight (straighter than he’ll ever be, anyway). The jacket looked fresh from Sketchley’s. The Union Jack was parked there as usual, a too-heavy signal of his innate patriotism. 

He wanted us to trust and believe in him, even to love him as a national leader, the people’s prime minister. He wanted it to be like the referendum win in 2016, or the December general election, when boosterism was all you needed. 

But he is a man now out of his time, badly miscast in his current role. Last night Boris Johnson was pitching like his whole political life depended on winning the battle against covid. Sadly for him, it does.