Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s latest mad wheeze is to propose extending the lockdown — “shielding” is his preferred euphemism — to people over 50. Naturally this has gone down like a cup of cold sick in the Conservatives’ natural constituency, which largely comprises people over the age of 50. 24 hours after floating the idea in the newspapers the government started to backtrack. And understandably so.
Here’s a taste of the responses in the Conservatives’ house journal, the Telegraph:
The ministry of silly ideas produces another one. They come up with more ludicrous nonsense each day, and we are paying their salaries! It’s beyond a joke now.
I’ve had enough of this facade. It’s so obviously a cover to bring in the great reset, give governments extraordinary powers that end democracy.
I genuinely believe this one statement will cause the greatest backlash Johnson has initiated.
From what I gather on Social Media his time will be less than Mays. Probably the end of the Tory Party as a whole.
Perhaps the most significant response, though, is this one from columnist Sarah Vine:
We all have to die sooner or later. If I get Covid and cop it, so be it. My time has come. I'll have had a good life, better than most in this world at any rate. I certainly don't expect the entire nation to bankrupt itself to save my sorry ass.
— Sarah Vine (@WestminsterWAG) August 2, 2020
Vine is, of course, married to one of the most senior ministers in Johnson’s Cabinet, Michael Gove. Yes, Vine is famously independent and forthright and Gove has no control over her tweets. But her comment is, perhaps, indicative that all is not sweetness and harmony in the higher echelons of the Johnson administration. There is now a growing and very obvious rift over Johnson’s Chinese coronavirus policy: between those dogged loyalists who think it is proportionate and responsible and those who think it is erratic, crazed, scientifically baseless, hysterical, and hugely damaging not just to the economy but to the wellbeing and sanity of the nation generally.
My sympathies are all with the latter camp. If — as is rumoured — Gove is planning to do a Kingslayer job on Boris, and do it properly this time unlike his previous botched attempt, then I wish him all the very best. Boris is really no longer fit to be Prime Minister, especially not when he’s got a girlfriend as woke as Carrie Symonds whispering in his ear on issues like the extremist trans “rights” agenda.
Though Gove is wrong on a lot of issues — climate change being the most obvious one — he is absolutely correct to make coronavirus policy his line in the sand, his casus belli, the issue on which he is prepared to rupture party unity and, with luck, to oust the played out and discredited lame duck prime minister.
Sure, Britain has a heap of other troubles to contend with right now besides coronavirus. We saw one example of these at the weekend, with the demonstrations by race-baiting activists in paramilitary uniforms in South London: a menace an emasculated, politically correct police seem quite incapable of handling.
The Public Order Act 1936 prohibits by law paramilitary and political uniforms. Why is the Met Police allowing this to happen? pic.twitter.com/m63fnDQytS
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 2, 2020
But the British government’s coronavirus malfeasance is by far the most dangerous and immediate threat to Britain, because its consequences are so far-reaching and potentially catastrophic in so many different ways.
At the moment, it’s true, a significant chunk of the cowed, brainwashed, compliant population has bought into the government’s Project Fear 3.0 scare narrative.
But the rebellion is growing as more and more evidence emerges that the coronavirus threat has been grossly overstated — for many people, symptoms are so mild they don’t even know they’ve got it; liberties are being seriously infringed to no obvious purpose.
The reason people are increasingly taking to the streets — as they did at yesterday’s London protest march — and flouting government mask regulations is not that they are selfish, irresponsible, and careless of the lives of others. It’s that they believe there is no conclusive scientific evidence masks are having an effect; the pandemic has long since peaked; the so-called “spike” in infections is a sign that more people are being tested, not that the disease is becoming more dangerous or easily transmissible; that pinning hopes on a rushed-out, insufficiently tested vaccine for a constantly mutating coronavirus is foolish; that the most sensible response is to protect the very vulnerable while allowing everyone else to develop herd immunity at minimal damage to the economy, as in Sweden.
Rather than address these compelling arguments, the Johnson administration has preferred to treat everyone like children to be cajoled, frightened, and bullied — but never reasoned or persuaded — into doing the government’s bidding.
This is not a recipe for enduring popularity. Already, large cracks are appearing in the dam.
Government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall — a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) — has called for “a sense of proportion”.
He writes:
COVID-19 was linked to about 50,000 deaths in the first 16 weeks of the UK pandemic – but about 1,000 people normally die every week. In the past five weeks, fewer than usual have died. COVID-19 simply brought deaths forward by a few weeks or months – 80 per cent of victims already had life-limiting medical conditions.
Six months into this pandemic, we have learned that it will not wipe out human life on this planet.
It is a nasty infection and every death represents a person loved by someone. But it is time for a sense of proportion.
Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford has reiterated that coronavirus cases are NOT rising in England, that this is simply an artefact of increased testing.
And government policy is, in any case, proving counterproductive. The otherwise baffling decision to make masks compulsory at a time when coronavirus deaths have dwindled almost to zero could, arguably, be explained in terms of persuading the nervous out of their hidey holes and into the outside world. In fact, though, shops are recording decreased footfall as a result. The bedwetters STILL aren’t going out; the more intrepid, meanwhile, would rather shop online than shop while wearing muzzles.
In Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister acquired the epithet Kingslayer because he killed the ‘Mad King’ Aerys Targaryen. Aerys’s reign began well but descended into chaos as the king went mad, so the maligned Jaime in fact did the Seven Kingdoms a massive favour. It’s not clear whether or not Boris Johnson has actually been deranged by a toxic combination of his near-fatal bout of coronavirus and having a Social Justice Warrior dolphin-hugger as his girlfriend — or whether he was always quite rubbish but just hid it well. What is clear is that the man has to go — and fast. He is steering Britain towards ruination.
Gove got an awful lot of stick when he last backstabbed Boris. But that was before we were all fully aware of just how useless Boris is. With hindsight, Gove was right all along. Let’s hope that he does a better job of it next time round.
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