In the past few weeks, every single senior member of the government has stood at the same lectern in 10 Downing Street and, when asked to explain why the UK appears to be doing things differently to every other comparable country, has replied with the same four words. That we have been “led by the science”.
It is Matt Hancock who likes to say it the most, but they’ve all been there. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Dominic Raab, the lot. Dare to wonder why, to take just one example, the day before Italy introduced a lockdown for the whole of the north of the country, Johnson was watching a Six Nations rugby match at Twickenham, and you’ll be told that the government has been “at all times, led by the science”.
To be “led by the science” means one thing, which is to be led by the advice of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, better known as Sage. We, the mere public, the non-scientists, the non-experts, must do the right thing and be quietly led by the science.
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So it is particularly unfortunate when a member of Sage, the director of the Wellcome Trust, Professor Jeremy Farrar, appears on national television on Sunday not only to say that the UK may well be the “worst affected country in Europe”, but also to heap yet more praise on the markedly different German approach, which has yielded significantly superior results.
Having been “led by the science” it is entirely legitimate to ask how we ended up here, in a place not unlike that unfortunate motorist who was “led by the satnav” directly over a cliff.
The study of grim country-by-country graphs has become something of an international pastime. For some time, people have talked about little else beyond the UK being “three weeks behind Italy”, “two weeks behind Spain” and so on. It is easy to vindicate failure on these metrics by pointing out that no two countries are the same: different health systems, different demographics, differently distributed population densities.
But the most crucial difference is time. Coronavirus is a new, deadly and poorly understood disease. Each country forced into fighting it is free-climbing a deadly wall. In such a position, the unluckiest are those that must go first. The most fortunate get a chance to learn from the misfortunes, possibly even the mistakes, of others.
That the UK looks set to steal the grim lead, with its vast time advantage over comparable European countries is a failure of truly epic proportions. It is almost a month since the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a clear three-word instruction – “test, test, test” – and a certain fact that those countries who took that advice have death tolls that are a fraction of what the UK will suffer. South Korea had the bad luck to be one of the first countries to suffer a deadly coronavirus outbreak. It has recorded 217 fatalities, currently 50 times fewer than the UK, though where it ends up is anybody’s guess.
The public, for the most part, has been overwhelmingly supportive of the government. It would not be an exaggeration to say that lockdown was imposed chiefly to meet the public demand for one. The Cheltenham Festival went ahead after huge lockdowns were imposed in other European countries. But for a positive test for the Arsenal manager, Mikel Arteta, and the Chelsea player Callum Hudson-Odoi, a full weekend of Premier League football fixtures would in all likelihood have gone ahead. It is incredible but nevertheless true that one month ago, Atletico Madrid fans were banned from watching their team play in their own stadium, but free to fly to Liverpool in their thousands and watch them there.
Meanwhile, as nearly a thousand people lose their lives every day, among them doctors and nurses, lives sacrificed for want of a few quid’s worth of mask and apron, the front pages of the newspapers palpitate with joy at news of the prime minister’s recovery.
That Johnson was moved from intensive care was sufficient for The Sun to declare Friday “a good Friday” in the life of the nation. Never mind that, when the true number is counted, more than a thousand people died that day, in part as a consequence of decisions ultimately taken by him.
Of course, we wish the prime minister the speediest recovery imaginable, and the swiftest return to an epic, avoidable mess for which the buck must stop with him.
Much has been made of his comments to Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, about just letting the virus “move through the population”. Those comments have been misrepresented. He never argued for such a thing. But for the actual prime minister to even be discussing it – on live television – as having been an option worthy of consideration, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths involved, is a window into the stunning deficiencies in the quality of thinking going on in Downing Street, as compared to almost every other similar nation to whom we still imagine ourselves to be superior.
The lessons to be learnt from coronavirus will dominate national life for years to come but they are for the most part already clear. They reveal the final re-emergence of Great Britain as a second-tier country, and in thrall to a governing party that could not even be described as 10th tier.
Could it ever have happened before that the police are left for weeks on end to suck up the nation’s ire as they try to enforce social-distancing regulations that no one truly understands, but the home secretary is simply too hopeless to be allowed on television, a fact that is immediately confirmed the very moment the ban is lifted?
One of Eurosceptics’ many rallying cries for many years has been that Britain is “good enough to govern itself”. Now is as good a time as any to point out that it has always, always governed itself, and there is no more certain evidence of its capacity to govern itself than that, until four months ago, it had never been stupid enough to elect a government stupid enough to want to leave the European Union.
The price of admission to the cabinet these days is either crushing stupidity, suicidal recklessness or both. It is no surprise, at all, that it should have been so hopelessly found out.
In less horrific circumstances, it would be worth noting the irony that the men who have drawn their right to govern through their absolute readiness to lie, lie and lie again find themselves facing down a silent, invisible enemy, who cannot be bull****ed and belittled away. It is also especially unfortunate that the nurses and doctors who keep dying keep being either immigrants or the children of immigrants. They must now beatify the people they scapegoated.
Boris Johnson has already thanked, by name, the immigrant NHS workers who tended to him in intensive care. No doubt he meant every word of it, he owes them his life. But let us also consider that he owes his station in life in part through his willingness to vilify immigrant workers just like them.
Should Britain end up as the “worst affected nation in Europe”, as its own scientific advisers now forewarn, it will be shocking, but not surprising. It has never been so badly governed.
