All this staying at home is making us ill-tempered, judging by some responses to the Sunday Times’ analysis of how the government initially failed to act against Covid-19.
The main takeaways from this report were that the government didn’t do enough (maybe anything much at all) in January and February, leading to disgraceful decisions about ‘herd immunity’ and a general lack of preparedness.
It seems that gung-ho Boris didn’t at first wish to heed the scientific advice he later swore was his guiding hand in all decisions.
The other major cause of gravity in jaws was Michael Gove’s admission that Boris Johnson did not attend five Cobra meetings on the crisis. You may recall that the first such meeting was put off until the next available Monday, as Johnson is said to enjoy his weekends off.
Search among the Twitter embers and you will also discover theories that the prime minister wanted to spend time away from work with his pregnant partner, while trying to finalise his divorce.
Boris being absent from those Cobra meetings didn’t much surprise those of us who always suspected him of being lazy and duplicitous.
Professor Sir David King was chief scientific officer from 2000 to 2007, touching the Blair/Brown years. Asked on Sky News about the Sunday Times report, he said: “And when Michael Gove says ‘but prime ministers don’t attend all Cobra meetings’, I cannot recall a Cobra meeting when it was called with Blair or Brown as prime minister when the prime minister wasn’t in the chair.”
In the pro-Boris Twitter comments, there was much Trump-like fake news nonsense, and plenty of grief for journalists. What those defenders of Johnson forget – quite apart from all the sterling work being done by journalists right now – is that Johnson and Gove were/are journalists.
Not only that, but Johnson was famed for doing everything at the last minute – a technique also employed for writing speeches for which he was generously recompensed.
As passed on here on November 12, the Guardian’s media editor Jim Waterson reported that Johnson always left writing his Monday column for the Daily Telegraph until the last possible moment, leaving the briefest possible time for editors to make any changes.
While such behaviour can, at a mighty push, be portrayed as breezy charm, really it suggests laziness and arrogance: “everyone else can fit around me”.
Merely an anecdote, of course – but if the same breeziness applied to attending important Cobra meetings about Covid-19, and if actions that could have saved lives were delayed, then we are looking at serious failings.
In an unusual move, the government published a lengthy rebuttal of the Sunday Times’ report. Well, I say lengthy rebuttal but ‘incoherent ranting ramble’ might better describe this circuitous complaint. Michael Gove put this out on Twitter, and you do wonder if he’d bothered to read a word before hitting send.
It was the longest, scrawliest bit of official government graffiti ever seen.
Yes, fighting this virus is tough. Yes, the government has got things right (such as facilitating those ‘instant’ hospitals). But endless glorification of Boris and his ‘brilliant handling’ of this crisis doesn’t count as journalism and should instead be filed under screwball propaganda.
And, yes, I do hope the prime minister soon feels well again, although I wouldn’t go as far as today’s headline in the Daily Express: “We need Boris! Race to put PM back in charge.”
He has to be better first; and perhaps the editor of the Express should put in an order for the Sunday Times.
Hypocritical footnote: As a long-time Observer reader and subscriber, I saw excerpts of the Sunday Times report on Twitter. This was, hands up, bad behaviour as such journalism shouldn’t be got for free. But I’d already paid for my copy of the Observer, so had at least done my bit for newspapers.
Telling footnote: The Sun today lays into critics of the government, calling on them to “cut the backseat driving”, and let ministers get on with making decisions away from public scrutiny… my italics put there in astonishment: isn’t that exactly the opposite of what a newspaper should do? And presumably the editor of the Sunday Times, which has the same owners, is one of those backseat drivers.