The standard format for public information films is to show in horrific detail what happens if you don’t do the right thing. Don’t check for motorcyclists when pulling out at a busy junction, and wallop! There’s one gone smack bang over your bonnet. Don’t stop smoking and suddenly you’re breathing through a hole in your neck.
And now that the prime minister, health secretary, chief medical officer, Dilyn the rescue dog and – according to Whitehall insiders – both of Chris Grayling’s brain cells are suspected or confirmed to have the coronavirus, it is suddenly obvious that the past two weeks have been a meticulously scripted warning of what happens if you ignore all of the government’s advice, precisely as the government has done.
Don’t stay at home; just carry on as normal, swanking about Westminster because, you know, as long as the little people stop spreading the virus, surely you can do what you like, including going on television and bragging about going to a hospital and shaking coronavirus patients by the hand.
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Don’t “protect the NHS”, but spend a decade stripping it bare.
And save lives if you like, but whatever you do, definitely don’t give even a nanoscopic toss about anyone’s but your own. Where does it end? Well, it ends with you testing positive for the coronavirus, I’m afraid.
Woah woah woah woah, you might say – you’re not actually laughing at Boris Johnson getting the coronavirus, are you? Yes, I’m afraid to report, we are.
One of humanity’s more curious traits in recent years is that the faster it approaches its entirely self-inflicted extinction, the more time it has to turn all jokes into morality-based quadratic equations. But the right and wrongs notwithstanding: is it okay to laugh at the guy who came up with the phrase “Operation Last Gasp” as a way to inject much-needed levity into the somewhat leaden reality that the UK has the worst prepared health service in the entire western hemisphere, now finding himself with a very mild case of the Covid-19s? Well, it’s Key Stage 3, at best.
It’s not a conclusion I’ve come to independently, either. As it happens, I used to live with four NHS doctors, and I’ve another in my close family. At the time of writing, 40 per cent of them are at home with suspected coronavirus symptoms (obviously none of them has been tested), and if they have discovered that the only psychological coping strategy is relentless self-mockery, somehow it wouldn’t seem right not to extend that privilege to the guy who, at least until this morning, likes to stand behind a lectern that says, “Protect the NHS”, but hasn’t yet managed to give the NHS anything to protect itself with.
Whoever could have seen any of this coming, say, 16 days ago, when the health minister Nadine Dorries tested positive for the coronavirus and, within hours, 600 MPs crushed into the hot, sweaty, rodent-infested House of Commons to listen to a Budget that was rendered irrelevant about two hours later?
Who could have known things would end badly when Dr Neil Ferguson – the author of the report that convinced the government that the “herd immunity” strategy was nuts, and who got the coronavirus himself – said “there is a lot of Covid-19 in Westminster”, and then Westminster started telling the rest of the country that it could only come to work if that work was “essential.”
Meanwhile, it spent almost two full weeks holding debates on such matters as cavity wall insulation, the future of farming in Somerset, and rush-hour traffic congestion on Rawreth Lane owing to overrunning roadworks in the Rayleigh constituency of one Rt Hon Mark Francois MP.
By the time the 5pm Downing Street press conference came around, no one would have been surprised to see Congolese IT technician and BBC News Channel breakout star Guy Goma sweeping up to the lectern to read out the latest death toll.
In the end, it fell to Michael Gove to answer questions about why everybody in the government has come down with the disease they have shut down the country to try to contain. Mr Gove managed some vague flannel about how Covid-19 ”does not discriminate”. Except, it very obviously does. It very much discriminates against those who actually take the government’s advice and stay at home. It doesn’t go anywhere near them. The people it doesn’t discriminate against are the people who ignore the government advice, which is to say – the government.
Naturally, speculation is already rife as to the backstory of the remarkable pictures, recorded 20 minutes after the prime minister’s shock announcement, of Dominic Cummings slipping out of the Downing Street back gate, first jogging and then sprinting.
Was it a dash for safety? More likely a strategy meeting somewhere. “Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives,” just isn’t working.
It’s time to plaster something much snappier across those Downing Street lecterns, which have taken almost two weeks finally to be spaced two metres apart. How about this one: “Do as we say, not as we do.” Maybe even with a little, “For Christ’s sake,” at the front.
And in the meantime, of course, we speak with absolute sincerity when we wish the prime minister a speedy recovery, for absolutely no greater reason than that the designated survivor is Dominic Raab.
