Boris Johnson has every right to sound knackered. It’s little more than a couple of weeks since he came out of intensive care and his partner has just given birth to a baby boy. But sounding breathless before he had even gasped out his opening sentence at his first Downing Street press conference since falling ill with the coronavirus probably wasn’t the commanding, reassuring presence he had hoped to convey.
The Boss may be back, but the man who longed to be the new Churchill isn’t even the old Boris. The upbeat ebullience and jingoism no longer comes naturally. He can still come out with the same words, but he can no longer even bring himself to believe them. For the first time in his life, there are signs of self-doubt. When he looks in the mirror, he now sees his reflection beginning to fragment. His persona that has been carefully constructed over 55 years to protect himself from the pain of being himself is falling apart. Yet still he can’t quite access the humility that might go some way to healing himself.
Not that Boris didn’t give it his best shot at papering over the cracks, but it cost him dear. By the end of the press conference he was just two pinprick, bloodshot eyes peeping out of an ashen-white face. If he really feels the need to get back to work so soon, then he can’t have much faith in the rest of his cabinet. There again, that’s one area where you can’t really fault his judgment.
“I’m not going to minimise the lack of personal protective equipment or the failure to expedite testing,” he said. Before proceeding to do just that. The lack of PPE and adequate testing – today was the day we were supposed to have reached 100,000 daily tests – have been two of the leading factors in the UK’s mortality rate, but according to Boris the government hadn’t put a foot wrong. The lack of an apology becomes more insulting by the day to the families of the nearly 27,000 people who have died. It appears that the only people in the entire country not to have heard of the 2016 Exercise Cygnus, that highlighted the risks of a pandemic, are the entire government frontbench.
Rejoice, rejoice. Sunlight was visible. We had avoided the worst-case scenario of 500,000 dead by burrowing under the alpine mountain. Boris appeared to have both forgotten that we were already well past the 20,000 “best-case result” of his chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, and that – even allowing for statistical variations – the UK had a fatality rate significantly higher than that of Germany or South Korea and might even have the worst record of any country in Europe.
The line that the government did the right things at the right time becomes ever more untenable. What can’t be admitted is that Boris effectively took a 10-day holiday in March, at a time when he could have done more to protect the country. Seldom has so much been owed by so few to so many.
Boris then breezed on to the R rate – AKA the reproduction rate. Here satire nearly died. For as scientists struggle to pin down the UK’s R rate to between 0.6 and 0.9, no one has the first idea of Boris’s own reproduction rate. We know its current level is at least six – though even Boris doesn’t appear to know if it’s more – and with every likelihood of adding to the score in the years ahead. If Boris were a virus he would be deadly.
On and on he bumbled. We would have to wait until some time next week for the government to make it clear it still had no real plan for ending lockdown. Things were definitely getting better but no one had a clue how to ease things while ensuring R remained lower than one. Even Vallance and England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, couldn’t help Boris out with that one. The only certainty was more uncertainty.
The questions only revealed how little everyone really knew, as Boris had no clear answers to anything. He couldn’t say anything on tourism to Cornwall – “there will be more information later” – and his suggestion that people with mental health issues should call NHS helplines rang hollow as successive Tory governments have cut mental health provision to a bare minimum. Even if you’re really desperate, you’re lucky to get an appointment inside six months these days. An embarrassed Whitty eventually had to intervene and point people in the direction of mental health charities if they needed urgent help.
Otherwise, there was just more of the same. The scientists urging caution while Boris talked big about the economy bouncing back, avoiding the second peak and enforcing the wearing of face masks which only a month ago he had said were a waste of time. But deep down, Boris knows he’s met his match. Up till now, he’s never found a situation in his life which he couldn’t bluster his way out of. Now he’s come up against a power greater than himself; coronavirus is so far immune to almost everything. In a straight contest between coronavirus and bullshit, the coronavirus wins every time.