Click to listen – running time 5 minutes, 30 seconds.
In his infamous “Sunday Address” on 10th May, Boris Johnson abandoned the Stay at Home message.
As a result, the UK lock-down is rapidly relaxing, and as it does so, we’ll increasingly be going about our business, but with the constant fear of catching the virus.
Trying to get back to normal, but everything – travel, the shops, bumping into friends – laced with anxiety.
Did I just make a mistake? Did I just touch something I shouldn’t have touched? Did that person just breathe on me?
At all costs, we have to avoid catching it. Right?
But, if you think about it, there’s something worse than going out and catching it….
Here’s my story about where I was on the day we gave up Contact Tracing, on 12th March….
About how I did something worse than going out and catching it.
And about the little flashbacks of trauma which I thought were behind me.
Click to listen – running time 5 minutes, 30 seconds.
This audio essay was written and recorded for BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme in the days following the abandonment of the Stay at Home message. It aired, in a slightly different version, on 26 May.
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The start of May, traditionally a day of celebration around the world, marking the coming of spring, the moving of cattle out to summer pastures – a new season of life and warmth and hope – should have been a turning point in our national conversation.
The opportunity was there.
Last Monday, 27th April, Boris Johnson promised a new tone in his government’s relationship with the public.
I want to serve notice now that these decisions will be taken with the maximum possible transparency. And I want to share all our working, our thinking, my thinking, with you, the British people.
– Boris Johnson, Monday 27th April
In an otherwise infuriating speech, this pledge was welcome. On the previous Friday, the playwright David Hare had struck a chord on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme with an urgent plea for an end to the “dodging and waffling” of ministers. There was, he suggested, a quid pro quo: “in return for lockdown, isolation, commercial disaster and social distancing” the government had to start shooting straight.
They must own up to their mistakes, stop dodging and waffling and start to trust us with the truth.
Otherwise, said Hare, the lock-down could not be expected to hold.
He was bang-on right, and Monday’s pledge suggested that the Johnson government had heard him.
Of course, those who heard the Prime Minister promise a new levelling with the British public might have hoped it would be a new beginning not just for the conversation around our collective response to the coronavirus outbreak, but also for our post-truth politics in general.
How about, for instance, some honesty around the challenges for our trading relationships come the end of the Brexit transition period? Our economy clearly can’t cope with another major shock at the end of this year, and yet the government has held the line that it must, and it will.
Would a newly-transparent Johnson government move quickly now to release the Russia Report, helping to restore confidence in our democratic process? Would a newly caring, sharing Johnson government move away from the reliance on patronising, and deeply misleading slogans of recent years? No deal is better than a bad deal. Get Brexit Done. Oven-ready deal.
Sure, even the most optimistic of us wouldn’t seriously have hoped for such a dramatic sea-change, even from a Prime Minister who’d had a brush with the brink, even from a Prime Minister who suddenly seemed to understand what the NHS was for. Even from a Prime Minister who suddenly understood that immigrants are not spongers but great people who will save your fucking life.
We were never going to get a new, humble, sackcloth-and-ashes Johnson, inviting us into No 10, holding up his homework and asking us to help him with some of the thornier questions.
But there’s one thing we could have had. One thing, which might have restored a bit of faith for us all. Something which might have brought us together a little bit. And from that little bit of togetherness, perhaps next week new shoots of unity could have grown. And the week after that. After all, if there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear, it’s that the virus – while its impact varies alarmingly across class and income groups – has to be tackled together, and with unity of purpose.
That one thing is this. May 1st 2020 could have been the day when the government was straight with us about its Covid-19 testing failures.
We all know the story. In setting itself a random target of 100,000 tests, it built a rod for its own back.
In a world where the government binds itself with few, or at best generic and distant targets, communicates mostly with meaning-free slogans, and ducks accountability by sowing confusion wherever it goes, setting a concrete target with a firm end-date was unusual.
The pattern of the crises of the last few years has been one in which our somewhat befuddled and supine press rarely knows which way to look, and ends up looking where the government tells it to look – over here! Over there! Over here! Before any issue can properly be interrogated, the crisis has taken a new turn, and news cycle has moved on. And the public is none the wiser. It’s a pattern which – if you are a failing, flailing government – you might wish to preserve.
In that smoke-and-mirrors context, Matt Hancock’s crisp, numerical promise of 100,000 tests, with a solid Judgement Day of the last day of April, was a political kamikaze mission.
It looked for a while, too, that Johnson’s government was going to throw him under the bus for it, casting him as a man panicked into the promise by public clamour.
“He’s not had a good crisis,” said one senior Tory. “The Prime Minister will say he has confidence in him but it doesn’t feel like that. Matt was extremely unwise to come up with such a high and round figure and to make a dogmatic commitment rather than an aspiration.”
“He was under pressure at the time. It is pretty clear that he is not going to hit the target.”
A ‘Number 10 insider’ told The Daily Telegraph: “The problem is with this arbitrary target. There is a faint irrationality behind it, just because there was a clamour for mass testing.”
In the end they decided to stick with him. The machinery of government went into overdrive to help him achieve his target. Or if not to achieve it, to be able to argue that he had achieved it.
First they tried to convince us that capacity was the same as testing. They suggested that they “could have done” more tests than they actually achieved, so they were delivering on their ambition.
This didn’t wash. It was widely ridiculed online, with one person on twitter suggesting that her bank account had “capacity” for millions of pounds, even if she only had a couple of hundred quid in there.
They tried blaming health workers for not showing up to get tested at those out-of-town car parks they keep showing us on the TV, because they wanted their Easter weekend at home with the family.
That seemed like a cheap shot too. We all knew tests were desired, and the process of getting them had to be opened up and made easier.
Eligibility had to be broadened. Effective demand had to brought up to meet supply. They tried offering tests online as way of attempting to reduce the gap between theoretical testing “capacity” and actual tests done. Online test booking crashed the systems in minutes.
In the last week we’ve had reports of tests for key workers being done in the field, but with no intention of actually giving the results to the individuals. If true, this appalling treatment of individuals speaks to a mad dash to get tests “done” for the sole purpose of meeting an arbitrary target.
Screenshots began to appear online of emails to Conservative party members exhorting them to apply for tests – more evidence of desperation to massage figures.
Then yesterday came the reports that the 100,000 target had been met – but only by sending out tens of thousands of home test kits. Have those 27,000+ test kits arrived? Will they be properly handled by their recipients? (If you’ve had a Covid-19 swab test, you’ll know how invasive it can be – a LONG cotton bud has to be put deep into the nasopharynx, and it feels like it’s probing your very mind. It’s not clear that individuals will be able to achieve this by themselves.)
Will home tests be sent back in good order? There are reports of packs containing no return label. Will those that are returned be sent back in time, for the test to work, and to be meaningful? If an individual does have Covid-19, and performs the test correctly, and returns it successfully, when might that individual receive a result? Covid-19 is massively infectious just before symptoms present themselves, and in the first three or four days after; speed matters.
For the thousands of posted tests, there seem to be thousands of unanswered questions.
In any case, “tests sent out in the post” are clearly not “tests carried out”. In any ordinary, honest interpretation of the Hancock promise, it has not been met. On the last day of April, 73,000 people were tested. That’s the bottom line.
There is a number in a column marked “Number of Tests” which exceeds a hundred thousand. As we’ve seen, tt is almost meaningless. Really, let’s cut to the chase – it’s a lie.
But it gave Johnson’s Tories what they needed to set about bragging that they had met their target.
The BBC and others duly generated the headlines and disinformation the government has come to rely on.
Johnson’s Tories know it’s a lie, of course. They know that anyone with an enquiring mind knows it’s a lie. Yet still they cannot resist the cheap twisting of truth; the headline for today designed to undermine and undercut the deeper analysis of tomorrow; the cynical, habitual instinct to confuse, gaslight and demoralise the public.
It could have been different. They could have delivered on a much more important promise – the Prime Minister’s one – to engage honestly with the British public.
It could have gone something like this.
Sorry, we didn’t quite reach the target we set ourselves. We’re trying. We’re working not just to achieve it, but to surpass it, because testing on an unprecedented scale will be required for us to move to the next phase.
Once we have the virus under control, we will need huge testing capacity as part of a “track, trace and test” package to keep it contained and avoid any “second wave” of infections.
We could have claimed to have met our target, for example by adding in the numbers for home tests sent out, but we did not. This is because, as the Prime Minister indicated on Monday, we are in this together, and our dealings will now be undertaken ‘with the maximum possible transparency’.
From now on, as Boris Johnson promised, we will share our working, our thinking, and our successes and failures, with you, the British people.
Would that have been so hard? If so, why promise on Monday what you cannot deliver on Friday?
The truth is that the 100,000 tests target, achieved or not, is nothing but a random number plucked out of the air by a cornered politician. It means nothing to criticise him for failing to achieve it, or to compliment him for having achieved it. The long, exhausting battle with the virus goes on regardless.
But that new tone of honesty Johnson promised us on Monday? That could have meant the world – for our handling of the pandemic, and for our politics as a whole. It could have meant a May Day with the beginnings of unity, setting out together for new, summer pastures.
There was a big, bold promise made this week. A remarkable pledge for which it truly would have been worth holding the government to account.
As ever, we focused on the wrong one. It was never the new tests that mattered, it was the already jettisoned, already risible, new order of political transparency.
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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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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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*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.
“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.
