Boris Johnson’s Covidiot army won't take yes for an answer

How could the prime minister have foreseen that Euroscepticism and lockdown scepticism would so very predictably go hand in hand?

It does not take a genius to work out that kicking out all of your sane, moderate MPs and replacing them with hard Brexit-loving psychopaths may, even in the very short term, lead to undesirable consequences.  

But unfortunately, when Boris Johnson decided to do this, he only had Dominic Cummings to hand, and the difference between an actual genius and someone who merely imagines themselves to be a genius in the face of the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, could hardly now be clearer to see.

Were it not for the tens of thousands of preventable deaths, and the tens of thousands more that are projected to come, it might be possible to stand back and applaud the scale of the mess Mr Johnson has landed himself in.

Of course, he could not have seen Covid-19 coming. And thus he could not have foreseen that Euroscepticism and lockdown scepticism would so very predictably go hand in hand. So, the likes of Steve Baker, John Redwood and the rest emerge to speak with tremulous concern about the state of the public finances, which now matter them so very much, but for four-and-a-half years came a very distant second to the ideological purity of their project, and the misery they were not merely willing, but thrilled to heap upon others.

And of course, the pro-Brexit anti-lockdown movement would be fully auto-ironic. There they were, expressing their terrible concern for this great erosion of civil liberties, this taking away of rights, having just stripped 70 million people of their right to live and work in 27 other countries. Furiously angry at having to stay indoors for a few weeks, but still thrilled to have slammed the shutters down on their own country.

Johnson could not have foreseen either, that Covid-19 simplism would surpass even Brexit simplism. When Danny Finkelstein was an adviser to Wililam Hague, he used to joke that the Eurosceptics “couldn’t take yes for an answer”.

That whatever they were given, more would be required, as David Cameron, and the rest of the country, have all found out to their terrible cost.

Johnson could not have foreseen, in short, that here he would be, standing at the despatch box of the House of Commons, having taken his country out of the European Union, and having secured an 80 seat majority to do it, that he would have turned himself into a modern day John Major.

Five weeks ago, Boris Johnson rejected his scientists’s advice to impose a two week national lockdown, to bring the virus under control. In three hours at the despatch box on Monday afternoon, Johnson failed utterly to give anything like a credible account of why he had decided he knew better. He did this in the context of Professor Andrew Hayward, one of his own scientific advisers, having said that morning that had Johnson taken the advice he was given, “it would definitely have saved thousands of lives”.

And here Johnson was, having failed to stand up to the now greatly enlarged psychotic wing of his own party, having to impose a four-week lockdown instead of a two-week lockdown, the preventable death count soaring, the economic damage quite possibly an entire order of magnitude more damaging than it might otherwise have been.  

And there they all still were, taking it in turns, one after the other, to say how much more they knew than the scientific advisers, how much more they knew than the prime minister, how lockdown was a terrible idea. How the cure was worse than the disease. There was Philip Davies, to take but one example, demanding the prime minister tell him: “How many collapsed businesses, and how many job losses, he and his government believe are a price worth paying to continue pursuing this failed strategy of lockdowns?”

At one point, Labour’s Pat McFadden wanted to know why a four-week lockdown now was better than a two-week lockdown five weeks ago. The prime minister had the quite incredible temerity to reply with the words of Chris Whitty. “The chief medical officer said, on Saturday, that there is never a good time to close people’s businesses.”

Prof Whitty is frequently said to be on resignation watch. If that is true, he can hardly be blamed. Here was the prime minister, who deliberately ignored the advice Chris Whitty gave him five weeks ago, deploying Whitty’s words to mean the direct opposite of their intention, not so much being led by the science as deliberately misrepresenting it then hiding behind it. The upper limit of the Johnson scale of shamelessness is still not known, but rarely has the knob been cranked up this high.

In the classical sense, the man has been an ambulant tragedy for some time now, but this was the rewritten for primary school version. The lesson has never been made more easy to see.

Tell everyone that everything’s simple. That everything’s fantastic. But then, actually, things aren’t so simple. But it’s too late to expect the simple to understand.