The Power of Love – how Johnson hijacked our affection for the NHS

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“The boss”, as his sycophant colleagues insist on calling him, is back. Like a caped crusader, recovered from a brush with kryptonite. Physically weakened, perhaps, but with new, heroic resolve to take on the enemy. Vim, my friends, and vigour. Grit and guts.

But many found Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Downing Street back-to-work address nauseating. Not least because he made almost no mention of the astonishing suffering and loss of life, or the cloud of grief descending upon our land, talking instead of the UK’s “apparent success” in combating the “invisible mugger” that is Coronavirus.

How does a man who has presided over the calamity of our lifetimes dare to stand in front of us and talk of “success”? A man whose inaction and hubris in January and February – not to mention those fateful, shameful eleven days in March – was tantamount to welcoming the Covid-19 “mugger” into the UK with open arms and a free (blue) passport. With the country on course to have one of the worst per capita death tolls in the world; with 45,000 or so lives already lost; with families grieving up and down the land and unable even to attend funerals; with 5,000 new cases a week, what on earth was he thinking?

The answer is there in plain sight – in his relentless insistence on “protecting the NHS”. (Rich, I know, coming from the Tories who have choked the NHS for a decade, frozen nurses’ pay, demonized its European staff, and who even now fail it on a daily basis with their incapacity to deliver basic equipment – and yet they have the temerity to clap on Thursdays and call it “our NHS” … But bear with me. The sheer unlikelihood of the Tories suddenly falling in love with state provision is the clue to understanding Johnson’s evident satisfaction with the current state of affairs.)

Remember Johnson’s “powered by love” speech after coming out of hospital, on 12th April? He waxed lyrical about the NHS, his nurses Jenny and Luis, and about the spirit of the British people, whose lockdown struggle was elevated – by sheer power of grandiose rhetoric – from fretting at home to a heroic defence of the nation and its health service, conjuring up images of brave Brits linking arms around the perimeters of our hospitals, ready to repel for Queen and country.

“We are making progress in this national battle because the British public formed a human shield around this country’s greatest national asset: our National Health Service.”         (12 April 2020)

This idea of the public as some sort of people’s army championing the NHS, though vividly painted here, wasn’t new. It’s been there in our daily diet for some time now. We’ve been exhorted not, as might have been expected, simply to stay at home and (thereby) save lives, but to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives.

What work is this extra clause doing? It doesn’t change the overall instruction. It doesn’t give us anything more to do or not do. Our lockdown cabin fever stays the same. As instructions go, “Protect the NHS” is a weird one. Its insertion feels like a “tell”. And the way it sits awkwardly in the middle like that, it sometimes feels like the ‘protecting the NHS’ part is more important than the ‘saving lives’ part. Sometimes the graphics reflect that feeling, too.

Of course, the notion of us protecting the NHS is the wrong way round. Notwithstanding our duty – shamefully neglected – to protect its staff, the NHS is there to protect us. That’s its purpose. Our “greatest national asset” is not the NHS, it is us, the people. The clue is in the name: it’s a service. Our service. To protect us and care for us. But Johnson congratulates us for forming a human shield around it, as if our job were to sacrifice our lives for it, rather than turning to it for salvation in our gritless, gutless hour of need.

Of course, the NHS can only protect us if we don’t overwhelm it. There’s no doubt that we have all had to play our part in flattening the curve, otherwise the NHS wouldn’t have been able to cope. Flattening the curve has meant we’ve delivered patients at a steadier pace, and nurses like Johnson’s Jenny and Luis have, just, been able to manage. Fewer people will have died than would have been the case if the patients had all presented in one big wave. We get that. We know why we’ve stayed at home.

But our core interest is in saving lives. For us, the NHS is a means to that end, not an end in itself. In contrast, Johnson’s language reveals, time and again, that his priority is to be able to say that the NHS has coped, no matter how many people have died. Saving lives is secondary. Saving lives is in smaller print. When he describes the NHS as “the beating heart of this country”, it’s as if he has substituted the NHS for the people; as if he has forgotten the actual beating hearts of the country. And indeed the ones which have stopped beating.

“We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country… It is unconquerable.”      (12 April 2020)

This warped love for the NHS makes sense if his greatest fear has not, in fact, been a death toll the size of the entire WWII Blitz. It makes sense if, on the contrary, his greatest fear has been the dire imagery of an NHS in collapse. Large numbers of patients dying unattended in corridors, or in ambulances queueing outside. Medics despairing. Emergency services unable to respond. All manner of collateral chaos. The inevitable media reports would be beyond his control, and his premiership would likely be over. The images would endure for generations.

That collapse has, somehow, and mercifully, been avoided. The unfolding care home disaster, which has involved the exporting of demise to disparate locations, far from the hospital front lines, may be part of the explanation. And shattered, lethally under-equipped NHS staff might say that calamity has been far closer than the public realises.

Certainly the families of those staff who have lost their lives will find little comfort in the idea of the NHS having been spared complete collapse. Their worlds have been destroyed. The same goes for the families of all of the 45,000+ victims. There is no consolation for them.

But for Johnson, the difference between near-breakdown and total breakdown is all the difference in the world. The optics of a visibly collapsed NHS would likely have been terminal. An ocean of kryptonite from which, this time, there could be no heroic return. The unconquerable would have been conquered. But the invisible deaths of coronavirus, in which loved ones disappear into an ambulance never to be seen again, seem not, yet, to be damaging him.

Small wonder, then, that in his back-to-work address, he saw no problem in stepping over the invisible dead, and talking instead about our “progress” and our “apparent success”. Because, from where he’s standing, a vital mission has indeed been accomplished. The mission, at all costs, to prevent the NHS from appearing to be in meltdown. The mission to save face. The mission, ultimately, to save Boris.

“We defied so many predictions. We did not run out of ventilators or ICU beds. We did not allow our NHS to collapse.”      (27 April 2020)

Johnson and his sycophants have not suddenly fallen in love with the notion of state health care. They don’t profess to love the NHS because it saves you and me. They love it because – for as long as it appears, however narrowly, to be coping – the NHS saves them.

“… if we could stop our NHS from being overwhelmed, then we could not be beaten… ”       (12 April 2020)

Our “human shield” around the NHS is really a shield around the incompetence and arrogance of a Prime Minister who was repeatedly warned there was a “mugger” on the path ahead, but blithely took us that way anyway.

Since then, he has sought to mug us, by hijacking our appreciation for the NHS and twisting it with weasel word-play into a truly remarkable political bomb-shelter. So far, he must be thinking, “apparent success.”

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That Covid Bloke

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For a little while – perhaps because I was an early case to come out of hospital – I became “that Covid bloke”, asked to share my experience in print, on radio and on TV.  I was happy to do it, but I’m not sure how long I want to be that (ultimately) happy “good news” story.

Because, as we all know, almost nothing about this Covid calamity is good news. As I recover, my elation at being alive is developing into something else. Determination. And fury.

Here below (image clicks through to the BBC’s twitter) is me talking to Victoria Derbyshire recently about my hospital experience – and, although she invites me to talk about my anger, I don’t really take it. More fool me. I should have leapt at the chance. 

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PS – I articulate some of that fury for you here.  No extra charge!

Eleven Days In March

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This article also appears in The New Statesman.

Ask a scientist or a mathematician, as I have done, what those eleven fateful days in March cost us.

You won’t like the answer.

It has kept me up, my mind spinning like it does when I’ve had too much caffeine, half the night.

The eleven days in question are 12th – 23rd March. Eleven days in which the government decided to give up with contact tracing and do, well, nothing. Mass gatherings were still allowed (because “science”). Concerts and racing and Champions’ League football. Pubs. Public transport. Everything.  The over-70s, it must be conceded, were advised to avoid cruises.

Medics in Italy screamed – Do something! Don’t make our mistakes! Are you blind? Look at what happens if you leave it too late!

In those eleven days, our government decided there was nothing to be done. We wrestled open-mouthed with the ideas of “taking it on the chin” and “letting it pass through the community” and “herd immunity”.

Then the government realised that this “strategy” might produce upwards of 250,000 deaths in the UK. It woke up. And it locked down. Not very firmly, it has to be said, compared with other European countries. But still.

The eleven days during which our government decided there was nothing it could do include the days during which I was asymptomatic with CV-19. I’m confident I picked up my infection on a packed train from Northallerton to London, on March 8th. I had no idea. In the following few days, of maximum infectiousness, I went to King’s College Hospital for a routine ultrasound. A medic there reckoned all the fuss and fear was unnecessary – It’s just like ‘flu, isn’t it? (Remember those days? It’s just like ‘flu!)

I went to shops and cafes and took my kids to school. On 12th March, with our government saying there was nothing to be done and abandoning us to the virus, I tried to buy hand sanitiser, but it was all gone. I went to the Post Office to pay £3 for underpayment of postage on a mystery item, which turned out to be a small tin of Love Heart sweets, a late present for my daughter’s birthday. I passed my credit card to the post office worker to show my ID. At the pharmacy I signed the back of my prescription using a communal pen tied to the till with string. I went to our tiny, closely-aisled Tesco’s. Etc, etc. All the time, I was anxious about catching this invisible virus which was already wreaking such havoc in Italy. I had no idea that my selfish fears were pointless. I had already caught it. I wasn’t catching it. I was spreading it.

The very thought of it is chastening. I probably spread my infection to others using the post office, the pen at the pharmacy, the keypad at the little Tesco’s. I made them ill. I had no idea, of course. No symptoms at all. But I may have killed people. Let’s be honest, almost certainly I infected people, who infected others, who infected still more… and “my” viral spreading will have cost some people their lives. Some families their loved ones.

It doesn’t bear thinking about. It makes me sick. But I had no way of knowing. These were the early days of Covid in the UK. It was still a virus that was “over there” and not here. It was still a virus for older people, not healthy-ish guys in their fifties. Towards the end of those eleven days, on March 19th or 20th, I was starting to realise I had a problem. On the day the government woke up and finally put the UK into lockdown, it was already too late for me. I was gasping for breath and (foolishly) resisting advice to go to hospital. The next day I was in an ambulance, back to King’s. A hospital now completely transformed in the interim since my scan visit. Eerily quiet, and apparently entirely given over to Covid. There seemed to be a massive dissonance between the government’s blasé, laissez-faire public stance, and the complete reorganization of an entire London teaching hospital, impressively ready for the likes of me to start arriving in great numbers. The hospitals knew. They did something. The government must also have known. They did nothing.

Back to those mathematicians and scientists. What did those eleven days of our government standing frozen in the headlights cost us? How many cases? How many lives lost? If I am guilty of spreading the deadly virus, however unwittingly, how about the government? They knew people like me would be going about their business without symptoms, and spreading the virus. They decided to do nothing. How many cases did they, with this knowledge, allow to happen in those eleven days? How many lives did they, with this knowledge, allow to be lost?

The folks who understand maths warn me of all manner of caveats and assumptions. Sure. It’s going to be a highly inexact science. But roughly? Ten per cent? Twenty? Fifty?

No. The answer is somewhere around two thirds. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. Basically most of them. Basically most of the cases. Basically most of the deaths. Most of the horrible sickness and dread. Most of the loved ones lost.*

Incredible, isn’t it? Thousands of people suffering or dying or grieving because of those eleven arrogant, stupid, murderous days.

Of course we’d have had cases, come what may. My own included. But, had there been a lockdown, I wouldn’t have been out and about and unknowingly spreading. That’s the point.

So now what? First: be clear about the truth. Hold onto it. If anger ensues – and how could it not? – feel the anger. Direct the blame. Murderous, criminal decisions must be seen for what they are. Hold those responsible to account. If anyone tells you not to politicise, or that “now is not the time”, or that you are not an expert, so your opinion is not valid, ignore them. They are gaslighting you. This happened. It really happened. Retain your clarity. Focus your rage. Articulate it.

But of course, we can’t go back. So second: learn from this truth. Learn that our government is incompetent and dishonest. Learn that our government CAN cost us and our loved ones our lives. Demand, then, honesty. Clarity. And – now, right now – demand transparency about the plan (if there is one) for the future, for moving out of lock down. Insist, if and when that plan materialises, that it makes sense. Insist that it does not just take us back to where we were in those eleven days, waving a white flag at the virus and hoping it will be kind to us. Do not allow patently absurd policies to be defended by debate-stifling claims that they are based on “the” science. That can’t wash any more.

Because those eleven days show us that our government has form. Left to its own bewildering devices, it makes terrible decisions. Even now, it fails, daily, to deliver on its promises to the NHS. We’re approaching peak and we don’t have the tests. We don’t have the masks, we don’t have the gloves and we don’t have the gowns. The Treasury talks a big talk on the economy, but only a tiny fraction of its advertised bailout measures have actually been delivered. Parliament is not sitting and the daily Downing Street briefings have become a platform not for the dissemination of unadorned public health information, but for ministers to defend appalling records and then bat away the Skype-garbled questions of journalists, as if this were just everyday politics, and not the crisis – literally – of our lives..

So it is up to us all to challenge, to question, to argue, all day long. It is not “unhelpful” or unpatriotic or whatever else the gaslighters will want us to feel. It is our right. It is our duty. Our lives, our friends’ lives, our families’ lives may very well depend on it.

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You might also like: my account of being an ‘early adopter’ of Covid-19.

*I’m not sharing the calculations. They’re so rough. I bet there will be researchers somewhere whose curiosity will have had them working on some harder numbers, based on data and good modelling. I guess it could take months for the data to be solid enough.  Meanwhile, I encourage them to be brave and share their initial findings.

Now Is Not The Time

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Why aren’t the British people furious? As we sit sheepishly indoors, in fear, for ourselves and our loved ones – and, increasingly, in mourning – with no realistic prospect of an end to lockdown, wondering just how sky-high these appalling death tolls will go, wondering how our economy will look if and when the new dawn comes, wondering how to earn money in the meantime, wondering how, safely, even to buy food, why aren’t we screaming blue murder at our embarrassing, disgraceful, criminally-negligent excuse for a government?

It’s not, I think, that the PM wound up in hospital and by some accounts nearly died – though that did give us pause. Even his detractors were shaky when he went into hospital, including, I’ll admit, me. But, human-story distraction though that was, it’s not the underlying story.

I suggest the real reason we are not, yet, furious is that we are being successfully played on two, related fronts. First, we’re being told “now is not the time” to challenge leaders and scrutinise their choices. [E.g. Lucy Allan MP’s tweet, pictured. And a number of other MPs tweeted along similar lines, in what was clearly an instruction from Conservative HQ.]  We are not, for instance, to question their reliance on “the” science, even if that science might appear to be entirely at odds with the science of the World Health Organisation, other countries, and common sense. To express concern is to be unpatriotic, is to undermine the “Herculean” collective effort, even to undermine the NHS and our heroes on the front line, just when they need our support most.

Clever.

Scrutiny, then, is not for now, while we’re in the thick of crisis. The unspoken implication is that there’ll be a time for questions later, when the hurly-burly’s done; then (but only then) there can be investigations and inquiries. As if inquiries ever proved to be anything other than lost balls and long grass.

Second, we’re being invited to think of our country as being “at war” with the virus. [E.g. “We must act like any wartime government.” – Johnson, 17 Mar 20.  “This national battle” – Johnson, Easter Sunday.] This language also inspires – and demands – unity, stifling healthy criticism and debate. After all, we are, surely, together in this. We must all play our part. Undermining leadership at a time of war is tantamount to treason. It takes a brave soul to speak up, to put his or her head above the parapet in such circumstances. But it’s a false notion of course. The virus doesn’t know who we are. It does not think it has “the UK” in its sights. There is no war. The language and metaphor of war is being deployed, not to make our situation clearer or easier to understand, but to insulate those responsible for serial failures from scrutiny and blame.

Clearly these are related tactics, deliberately designed simultaneously to deflect blame and silence the masses. And, so far, they are working.  If surveys [e.g. by YouGov] are to be believed, a startling number of us feel the Government is doing a good job. Friends, let’s see this for what it is, expose it, and fight back. Thousands of us are dying every day. How many of those deaths are down to incredible paucity of leadership? If we are not to be angry now, then when?

This post brings together two twitter threads I wrote today:

1. Now is not the time.

Now is not the time to ask Where are the masks and the gowns?

Now is not the time to ask Where are the tests?

Now is not the time to ask Why don’t the tests work?

Now is not the time to ask why we’ve bought millions more tests – and they don’t work, either.

Now is not the time to ask Where are the Rolls Royce ventilators?

Now is not the time to ask Where are the Dysons?

Now is not the time to discuss pay rises for nurses.

Now is not the time to ask when the financial support – if it is real – will actually arrive?

Now is not the time to ask Why didn’t we act earlier, when we knew this was coming?

Now is not the time to challenge the government.

Now is not the time for Parliament to be recalled.

Now is not the time for journalists to challenge Ministers.

Now is not the time to ask why ‘herd immunity’ was a serious strategy.

Now is not the time to ask, lockdowns aside, whether ‘herd immunity’ is not still the strategy.

Now is not the time to ask How do we actually get out of this?

Now is not the time to ask Who’s actually in charge?

Now is not the time to depress people.

Now is not the time to frighten people.

Now is not the time.

Now is not the time to ask whether our loved ones, in their thousands, needed to die.

Now is not the time to ask How many more of our loved ones need to die?

Now is not the time.

2. I’d call it a war, too

I’d call it a war, too, if I wanted to characterise myself as Churchill. If I wanted people to look outwards, somewhere else, over there, to a conveniently invisible enemy, and rally blindly behind me.

If I wanted to deflect responsibility for my hollow words, my failure to deliver even basic testing, masks and gloves. If I wanted to divert attention away from my arrogant denial of the threat, even though it was clearly coming.

I’d call it a war, too, if I wanted to divert attention away from my murderous, eugenicist, early policy of “herd immunity”. From my lies about being “guided by the science” while ignoring the advice of the WHO and countries already in crisis.

I’d call it a war, too, if I wanted to divert attention away from the complete absence of an exit plan, from my failure to put in place the infrastructure of tracing, home testing and domestic monitoring so that lockdown could actually one day end.

From my ideological refusal to accept help from, or co-operate with, the EU, even if it costs British lives. From my party’s failure to back the NHS for a full decade, its decimation of the police, social care and so many front-line services we now know are literally vital.

I’d call it a war too, if I thought I might get (and deserve) the blame for leading a country towards the highest death rate in Europe. I’d call it a war, too, if I were playing any part in this murderous, inhuman government of spin, lies and criminal negligence.

I’d call it a war, too, if the language of a common, external, military enemy were my last shield, my only hope, the only remaining explanation for the blood of thousands of fellow citizens on my hands.

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Top image added 27/1/21 – sadly now is still not the time.

My experience of hospitalisation with Covid-19 here.