That the political editor of The Times newspaper should, on live television, accuse Boris Johnson of having been too vague about his reproduction rate comes as sweet relief that even these tragic times remain entirely auto-parodic.
The prime minister was back doing the 5pm press conference and had with him a little video explaining how lowering what is known as the “R-number” — that being the capacity of the virus to reproduce — is the single most important challenge facing the nation.
It is not yet 24 hours since all of Boris Johnson’s official spokespeople declined all opportunities to clarify the prime minister’s own R-number, which cannot now fall below 6, the upper limit being set only by how deep investigative journalists can be bothered to dig, and thus is unlikely ever to be known.
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Some time ago, and in relation to some story or other I cannot recall, a columnist superior to me described Boris Johnson as a rapidly mutating hospital superbug hoping to stick around long enough for the nation’s immunity to lower itself far enough as to no longer be resistant to him.
Alas, that clinical outcome has now come about, rendering Johnson something of a medical miracle. Failed diseases usually achieve success by mutating into more potent forms, rather than aggressively undermining the host’s power to fight them, as has been his life’s work.
Of course, it hasn’t helped that for almost five full years, the Labour Party was unable to produce a vaccine that wasn’t demonstrably worse than the disease itself.
While major breakthroughs have now been made on that front, delivery will not be rolled out until 2024 at the earliest; by which point, Britain is likely to have become the first known case of a country to have actually died of herpes.
The UK is very much on course to have the worst coronavirus death toll in Europe, despite having long weeks of luxurious opportunity to learn from the stunningly self-evident misfortune of our neighbours. But such trivialities were never going to be sufficient to prevent Boris Johnson taking every imaginable opportunity to pay tribute to his own successes, which very palpably do not exist.
“We haven’t seen hospitals overwhelmed. There hasn’t been a shortage of ventilated beds as we’ve seen in other countries,” he said, in what could yet be the faintest, most damning self-praise ever to have been uttered.
We have, apparently, just come through a “long alpine tunnel” but we may yet “run slap-bang into another mountain”, so there can be no end to social distancing just yet. The mountainous imagery refers as ever to the peaks on various graphs with which the world has become obsessed.
Painful though it is to have to state again, there are plenty of graphs out there to show that the UK has not been through any kind of tunnel. The tunnellers are the Germans or the South Koreans. We have been sent up Everest in our shorts and T-shirts.
The only terrifying peak we have avoided is the one with hundreds of thousands of deaths on it, which for a while we were actively taking on, while all other governments around the world locked down their people and gazed upon us in wonder at our suicidal stupidity. But we’re not allowed to talk about that now.
Johnson’s big announcement was that we are officially “past the peak”, an announcement which could have been made days ago, but that would have meant somebody other than Boris Johnson making it, and of course that won’t do.
“We are on the downward slope,” he said. Only the very churlish would point out that two minutes ago we had tunnelled through the mountain, yet now here we were coming down it after all.
Even Boris Johnson couldn’t stick to that piece of particularly artless bulls**t for long. And don’t expect the epic size of the mountain he sent us up to fade in the rearview mirror for a very long time to come.
