Imagine the anger if Jeremy Corbyn, not Boris Johnson, had overseen the UK’s disastrous response to coronavirus
Where, exactly, is the anger? On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 2,800 people in the UK were recorded dead from Covid-19, and yet there is precious little anger about.
The national mood appears to be one of weary resignation. That these are just the way things are now, that we must go on ’til the end, whatever the cost may be. The coming weeks are rightly forecast to be among the grimmest the country has ever faced, and there is a sense that we shall just have to ride them out, to see them off. Mustn’t grumble.
Eighty thousand people have now died of Covid-19 in the UK, a number that is almost identical, on a per capita basis, to the United States, on whose handling of the pandemic we still inexplicably look upon with horror.
The usual Covid and lockdown denialists are still banging their demented drum. Its most catchy rhythm, the one that has taken strongest hold elsewhere, is that it is, for the most part, only the very elderly who have died, or those with underlying health conditions. This, to a very limited extent, is true. But even to indulge the point more than it deserves to be indulged, it still does not acknowledge the grim fact that those who may not have had long to live, should not have had waiting for them the type of death they have now faced, in their tens of thousands.
It is six months since a Welsh nurse called Rhys Vanstone wrote a letter to Private Eye on this subject. “I’d like to point out that while it may be true certain people were destined to die during these times, they definitely weren’t destined to die in the way they have,” he said.
“I’ve lost patients who last saw their loved ones at home as the paramedics rushed them to a hospital full of strangers. Last goodbye messages were spoken over the phone via staff. I’ve lost two family members who self-isolated in rooms next to each other; when the first family member died alone, the second didn’t get a chance to say goodbye – not knowing that four days later her fate would be the same.
“Had we managed the virus better, a lot of the same people would have died but at least they wouldn’t have had to die alone.”
Thousands – yes, thousands – of these lonely deaths occurred in Britain in the single weekend just gone. There could yet be tens of thousands more in the weeks ahead. It is too late to do anything about it now, in the very short term. The transmissions have already occurred, the grim path ahead set in stone.
So why aren’t we more angry? The nation’s chief rage manufacturers have been predictably relaxed about it all. One day in April last year, The Sun newspaper featured a microscopically small cartoon germ on its front page, upon which was written “596 dead – see p4”, a matter of significantly less concern than news that pubs would be shut until Christmas.
At the weekend, Mail Online was busy publishing news that, fully 10 months ago, at the height of the first wave, while working unimaginably gruelling shifts away from home, the deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam had the temerity to eat a late meal, on his own, in a London restaurant, while the national guidance was to avoid restaurants where possible.
Somewhat reassuringly, even in an age where news outlets are not slow to type up one another’s stories, this “exclusive” is yet to trouble the keyboard of a single reporter, anywhere in the world, and quite right, too.
In December 2019, the voters were asked to choose, in an election, between the two worst options – Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn – that have ever been put before them. A year on, it is very hard to imagine how things could possibly have been any worse with Corbyn in charge, but had he presided over the neverending list of stunning failures that Johnson has managed, the scale of the national rage is almost anxiety-inducing to imagine.
Had Jeremy Corbyn bragged about going into a hospital and shaking hands with coronavirus patients, had he failed to attend crucial meetings in the early stages of the pandemic, had he failed to sack his own chief strategist for breaking not merely the letter but the entire point of lockdown, had he consistently over-promised and under-delivered, consistently overruled his own scientific advisers telling them he must act now, it is hard to foresee how it would be safe for the man to emerge from his own front door.
Country by country, comparisons are tempting, but more often than not a little misleading. It is not Boris Johnson’s, or indeed anyone’s fault, that the UK is not South Korea, which for the most part owes its world-leading Covid-19 defeating status to the fact it had an outbreak of another coronavirus four years ago and thus had an action plan ready to go. It’s not Boris Johnson or anyone else’s fault that the UK did not have Germany’s testing capacity ready to go from day one.
But that was all then. This is now. There are no reasonable excuses, no acceptable mitigation, to be so very terrifyingly ahead not of the first curve but the second one.
Why, for example, has it taken almost a year for any kind of meaningful screening of passengers arriving at airports to take place? Over Christmas it was illegal for different generations of Londoners to meet in their own homes, but essentially legal for them to fly from a London airport and meet in Tenerife instead.
In the coming weeks, thousands of lonely deaths will be marked with the prime minister using his favourite word – “alas” – most likely at a press conference that will have begun with the words “good evening folks”.
The whole dismal business, from start to whenever the finish might be, has been punctuated with the kind of jarring, juvenile pseudo-levity of which only the mildly sociopathic Johnson is capable.
It may just be that this year will be better than the last. That a wave of release and euphoria will come and sweep away the misery. But it has been a complete and epic failure and that should not be forgotten.
