YOU can’t move without tripping over union jacks on the TV news these days. No ministerial Zoom call is complete without a flag the size of the average duvet.

All this is just another round in the culture wars. If, as Samuel Johnson suggested, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, there are a lot of patriotic charlatans around at the moment. When they’re not changing the law to protect statues, they’re flapping flags and suggesting that anyone who disagrees is some category of traitor.

The writer of this blog would like to make a confession. While typing this I am not wearing union jack underpants. Feel free to sue my unpatriotic arse if you wish.

An asinine row broke out last week after TV presenter Naga Munchetty “sniggered at the union jack”, according to a report in the i newspaper. She was later coerced into apologising for liking “offensive” tweets criticising a government minister for being surrounded by flags in his office.

If you keep your sensible head on, you will see that Munchetty was sniggering not at the union jack but at ministers wrapping themselves in the flag at every opportunity.

According again to that report in the i, BBC News bosses were angry that such sniggering “undermined the corporation’s major initiative to appeal to working class viewers”.

Oh, they should get over themselves and grant those working class viewers with a bit of nous. I am sure they can see when the union jack is being waved in their faces as a political distraction from other matters.

The BBC running scared of flag sniggering is run by Tim Davie. On Google, “Is Tim Davie…a Tory?” is the first suggested search. The answer is yes, he is a former Tory councillor.

In a surprise turn-around yesterday, the rightwards-tilting new director general was confronted by an indignant Tory MP during a bizarre Zoom exchange about the BBC’s annual report.

James Wild, possibly the oldest 43-year-old in the country, demanded to know why the BBC annual report featured only one or possibly no union jacks (honestly, I refuse to pay too much attention to such a twerp).

Davie pointed out reasonably enough that the union jack flew over Broadcasting House, adding that the lack of a flag in a report was “a strange metric” by which to measure patriotism.

You can be proud about your country without turning your face beetroot-red. And to be proud of your country in a sensible manner, you have to accept the bad along with the good. No country is 100% good and shouting that we’re the greatest is just puerile – and, if you ask me, not very British.

Then there is vaccine nationalism, using the union jack as a convenient sheet to pull over 130,000 deaths so far during the pandemic.

All this anti-Europe shouting has validity only in so far as the EU is being deeply inept in trying to come up with a vaccine policy. Our successful roll-out is a tribute to the NHS and to clear thinking very late in the afternoon. It doesn’t wipe away all the terrible errors. This nation, to quote from last Sunday’s Observer, “verged on criminal incompetence over its attempts to control the disease”.

What the world needs now is global co-operation and no sneering at the neighbours. To borrow a much-abused phrase, we’re all in this together, and gloating over the garden fence, or the English channel, doesn’t help anyone.

We’re not out of this until we’re all out of this.

Oh, and performing well on vaccination doesn’t suddenly make Brexit a good idea. That will still be a stinker long after we’ve waded through this pandemic.

ALLEGRA Stratton, Boris Johnson’s extravagantly paid press secretary, sure has to walk the irony plank. Perched there the other day, she came up with a good one about her boss.

“In the months and years ahead, as he perhaps rearranges his top team, he will be mindful of making sure that that cabinet looks like the British public,” she said.

On those grounds he’d be turfing himself out of his own cabinet. One thing you can say for certain about Boris Johnson is that he has zero resemblance to the great British public.

On the same occasion, Stratton also floated the charming idea that Johnson is a ‘feminist’ – a claim that allowed columnists to pull out a few of his greatest hits, including: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts.”

Perhaps he’d been quoting Germaine Greer or something.

Have you seen the new briefing room in which Stratton will strut her irony stuff? It is said to have cost £2.6m, a remarkable sum for a room that from the early photographs looks like the most expensive village hall in the land after an ill-advised, faintly fascistic makeover. I’d heard that Changing Rooms was coming back to TV but hadn’t realised the series had already started.

Who knew that so many union flags could be squeezed into one place? Like a fool I always thought that flag belonged to the country, but the Conservative Party appears to have bought the franchise when no one was paying attention.

How Johnson enjoys spending other people’s money on vanity projects. Two point six mill is an astonishing sum to splurge on one room so that Stratton can spin-wash the stains. Truly she is the biological washing powder of politics, guaranteed to remove all the mendacity skid-marks.

If you’re wondering how one room cost so much, that’s just how it is with Boris Johnson and money. Someone is always there to pick up the tab. His partner, Carrie Symonds, is reported to have blown £200,000 on decorating a flat in Downing Street – a pound or two over the usual £30,000 budget for prime ministers. A secret whip round among Tory donors is reported to have quietly sorted out that one.

Then there is the new Boris Bunker, a situation room for national emergencies that will come to a reported £9m. Clearly a bargain, as the only added cost will be a Winston Churchill fancy dress outfit in which Johnson can wander around pointing at things.

And while you are digging down the back of the national sofa, could Johnson please have £20m to investigate building a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Or how about the failed garden bridge project across the Thames, dating from his days as London Mayor? That span to nowhere cost you and me £43m, according a BBC report of February 19, 2019.

And did someone just mention £37bn on a test and trace system that seems to have been of little real benefit? Perhaps the blowing of such an incomprehensible sum explains why there is nothing much in the kitty to give nurses a decent pay rise.

Here, to close, is a trailer for another money-spraying venture. This is the No 10 documentary being heavily trailed on social media with the movie-like tagline: “Extraordinary. Unexpected. Fantastic.” A Beacon of Hope: The UK Vaccine Story.”

Does that sound like a white-washing exercise to remove all memory of all the earlier pandemic mistakes and one of the highest death tolls in the world, while washing away all talk of a public inquiry?

Over to you, Allegra.

YOU have to feel for those poor right-wing newspaper columnists, forced to toil unnoticed as an unfeeling world does them down.

Please lend your pity to Richard Littlejohn. All those years of ranting away in the Daily Mail and other unseemly locations. All those years of the world being against you. Just the other day, Littlejohn could be heard complaining again about that rotten left-wing plot.

“The vengeful Left is cynically using a rift in the Royal Family to launch an all-out assault on the British Press,” ran the headline above his column.

To misquote Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo, “infamy, infamy, those scheming lefties have all got it in for me”.

Just imagine the torment of being a right-wing columnist for all those years. Your side wins the elections, pulls the levers of power – and yet still those devious lefties want to spoil your fun with their liberal establishment and their wicked woke ways.

In this instance, the leftie avengers had ganged up on the misunderstood chief of the Society of Editors, Ian Murray. This is a journo-centric matter in a way, but stick with me. After Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which they accused the British press of racism, Murray issued a tin-eared rallying call, declaring that there was no racism in the press.

Assorted journalists – many black, but by no means all – protested about this statement; assorted editors – some vaguely left-wing, but by no means all – protested about this statement. And Murray stepped down, clearly having erred.

Yet he was the victim of his own actions, not of the vengeful left. It’s telling the way right-wing columnists play the poor us card in order to make themselves the victims. They wilfully exaggerate the power of the lefties and the liberals, conjuring up an enemy far more powerful than the puny reality.

As for what Murray said, the newspapers don’t get to decide if they are racist. That’s for others to say. And the same observation does royal service with the Duke of Cambridge who, when ambushed by a reporter’s impudence, declared: “We are very much not a racist family.” What else could he say? Not much, but again that’s for others to say.

In case you should be wondering what a right-wing columnist might make of last night’s appalling scenes on Clapham Common, think no more. Sarah Vine is on hand in the Mail on Sunday to give her view on the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard, a death that lies heavy on the heart of York, where Sarah grew up.

To be fair to Vine, her column would have been written before last night’s appalling scenes in which women protesting about violence against women found themselves being manhandled – a word used advisedly in this context – by police officers.

But still…

“How wrong for Sarah’s death to be hijacked by men haters,” runs that headline. As for what lies beneath, I’ve not read it and have no intention of doing so. But I did read Littlejohn’s efforts, so feel free to cut me some slack.

Home secretary Priti Patel might say “questions need to be answered” over the police handling of that vigil in Sarah’s memory. But a wider question needs to be asked about her new Policing Bill that aims to extend temporary pandemic restrictions on protest marches.

Sadly, Patel is intolerance personified. She is also a publicly alleged bully whose reportedly intolerable behaviour cost the government – in other words, you and me – £340,000 to settle with ex-Home Office chief Philip Rutman.

Still, there’s probably a right-wing column to be written about how the ‘Pritster’ – to borrow the prime minister’s absurd nickname for her – doesn’t deserve any of this and has been set up by vengeful lefties.

PERHAPS one day all this will be over. Perhaps it already is and no one thought to tell me.

And maybe one day the memory will fade of trying to set up an online work meeting on two laptops at the same time.

The cause of this act of juggling is no longer worth recalling. Just imagine if you will a man watching himself on two separate screens, each capturing a different unflattering reflection, as he bobs between the computers.

It is rumoured that this man goes out running three times a week. If so, the belly captured on one of the screens seems unfortunate. No, really, that can’t be a true representation. It must be the angle of the screen or something.

For reasons best known to themselves, the two laptops are screaming at each other in a feedback shout-off. The man ducking between the two computers, while trying not to notice his belly again, decides the only thing to do is switch off one of the laptops.

Silence returns, there is only one of the man again, a definite improvement. Then the man realises he’s turned off the computer that made the invitation to the meeting, and now he won’t be able to let anyone in.

The past year or so has been like that for many of us, the office swapped for the study; human company replaced by the rattle in your own head. At least those of us with grown-up children haven’t had to home educate for great stretches of time, a free pass worth having.

But still, all this staying at home is kind of weird. The same four walls, the same two computer screens (plus the trusty old laptop with the sticking keys on which this is being written). The same two work phones (plus the personal mobile).

The office long ago rattled to noisy typewriters and chatter and smelled of smoke and afternoon beer. All that years later has been replaced by these four walls and the occasional smell of coffee.

At the time of tapping, I have done three different jobs within these walls. At least there is a window with a hopeful view over the garden, trees greening, the birds singing. And the bloody cat sitting on the printer yet again. Oy, missus, vamoose. Some of us have got what now passes for work to do.

Which laptop needs turning on first?

ACCORDING to the front page of the Sunday Times, a newspaper which once filled that slot with proper news, the Queen “won’t watch the Harry and Meghan circus”. You and me both, Your Majesty.

It’s common to ask whether or not you are “Team Meghan”. For the record, I am Team Big Shrug. My shoulders have been raised for so long they seem to be stuck.

In this country it’s not always easy to say you are not bothered about the royal family, but that’s the way it is. Not republicanism so much as a long, whistling sigh of, “Here we go again” as the Windsor Waltzer spins off, this time for Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, showing in the US first and airing on ITV tomorrow (although not at Buck House or in this house).

All this takes up so much national headspace. It doesn’t help that royal reporting is mostly assembled from shoddy scraps of nothing. The patron saint of this thankless art is the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell, who pops up on the evening news as if he’s just burrowed into the studio, shaking earth off his nose as he opens his mouth to relay hardly anything at all.

He was at it when the Duke of Edinburgh went into hospital, suffering from heart problems. Witchell knew nothing more than we did, which was that an extremely elderly man had been admitted to hospital again, but there he was, sharing his frown and the little he did know.

The headlines are filled with the royals at the expense of so much else, avoiding the need for proper reporting or investigation.

Yet even a member of Team Big Shrug can see that Meghan and Harry appear to have been set up as convenient media villains, and her more than him, as she ‘stole’ the good prince, and because she’s American, an actress, a woman in her own right, and a black or biracial woman in her own right, too (the nerve of that woman).

Nice, conventional Kate had none of these problems when she married William, the less troubled prince, slipping straight into the dutiful mould prepared for her.

*******

BECAUSE I am kind like that, here is a new motto for Boris Johnson: accept the praise but never the blame.

That seems to sum up his chaotic, self-centred approach to a life in which nothing that goes wrong has anything to do with him. So it is that he wants full praise for the vaccination programme, and not a whisper of blame for one of the highest death rates in the world, and the endless billions spent on a track and trace system of dubious benefit. Endless as in, at the latest count, £37 billion. How on earth is such a mind-boggling sum even possible?

Why is ‘NHS’ often shoved in front of track and track, while it is the government’s vaccination programme? The vaccination programme shows the NHS working at its collaborative best, and the NHS should own it.

After being half-asleep at the wheel, after being too distracted to even bother attending the first five Cobra meetings on Covid-19, after boasting a year ago about shaking the hands of coronavirus patients, after chucking out PPE deals without regard to the usual rules, Johnson eventually grabbed the steering wheel.

But all he did was start doing his job a little more properly, and he doesn’t deserve praise for that.

*******

IN explaining away the government’s insulting 1% pay rise for nurses and other health workers, health secretary Matt Hancock blamed “issues of affordability because of the consequences of the pandemic on the public finances”.

I am confident we will see a lot more of this, with the pandemic becoming a handy get-out clause for everything. Blaming the pandemic is convenient because the pandemic can’t exactly answer back. And it avoids taking any responsibility for the spending of extra billions that perhaps didn’t to be spent so freely.

How long before “the consequences of the pandemic” are blamed for bringing in even more privatisation of the NHS?

Still, £3.50 a week for nurses – that’s almost what it said on the side of that bus.

The Queen last night, encouraging people to have the jab

THE jab is booked for Monday, but I’m feeling worried. Not about anything going wrong, though.

No, I’m worried about the things I’ll never be inoculated against, such as hating Boris Johnson. Or the nasty suspicion that Matt Hancock will escape having been censured by a High Court judge for breaching the law by failing to publish the details of those hastily arranged Covid-19 PPE contracts.

Or a lingering doubt that Sir Keir Starmer will never hold Johnson properly to account, what with not criticising the government over the pandemic, and shoving Brexit under the carpet instead of pointing to the awful mess on the floor.

And, oh, I’m worried that it won’t inoculate me against feeling cross about things over which I have no control, or guard against becoming over-heated when thinking about politics.

So perhaps I should just enjoy the jab. Good for me and, as the Queen said last night in a Zoom meeting, good for society.

It’s certainly the talk of our WhatsApp group. Stories swapped about who’s had it and who hasn’t. In life’s long arc, teenage worries about who’s had it and who hasn’t are replaced by excited chatter about who’s had the jab.

As I’ve not yet been inoculated against worrying about the news, here is the not-news. That story about Matt Hancock disappeared under a dreary deluge of coverage devoted to a year-old story about Prince Harry not being allowed back in the Royal Family. He was in Windsor quarantine for a year, now he’s off (which he was already).

Down the noisy corridor in Twitter-land, people were ranting about how a non-story had hidden a real story. The BBC didn’t report the story at all, they grumbled – not quite true, but its coverage was subdued, and it seemed to slip off the main TV news altogether.

This government has nearly all the newspapers on side, and if the BBC doesn’t report stories embarrassing to the party in power, who will? Words can have two meanings, and this story was covered in the sense of having something put on top of it.

There followed a spot of Twitter ping-pong with a fellow journalist (if that’s what I still am).

That story’s been muted.

No it hasn’t because muted means an absence of sound, and the story was reported.

Having not yet been inoculated against looking up the meaning of words, I muttered to myself that muted means muffled in musical terms, or not expressed strongly or openly in general terms.

Perhaps after Monday’s encounter with the needle, I’ll be free of such concerns.

My parents, long since separated but united in peering over the fence at 90, were inoculated a while back, and now the jabs are being lined up for youngsters of 64.

Some are suspicious, but we have to put faith in inoculation, as it looks like the best way back to some sort of a life. And the best way back to a much-delayed pint in a pub, seeing live music again, watching a film in a cinema, and a walk with inoculated friends.

They’ll be plenty to talk about.

I see they’ve been doing the hokey-wokey again.

“You put your right arm out
Your right arm out,
In, out, in out
Knees as bent as your mind,
You hit imaginary enemies on the nose.
In, out, in out
You strike a silly pose…”

First up for a dance was Gavin Williamson, the education secretary whose stint has certainly been an education for the rest of us. He is now turning his attention to free speech in universities.

This is such a problem that Williamson is going to appoint a new “free speech and academic champion”. You might have thought he’d have weightier matters trundling through his narrow mind. Such as when schools might open. Or how universities are going to cope as the pandemic winds on.

But why sweat the big stuff when you can pander to one of the boss’s pet subjects. Yes, that old walnut again about the country being run into the ground by those devious lefties. You know, the ones who aren’t in power but take the blame for everything. In the Daily Mail, news of this initiative sees woke hate mobs summoned by professor Matthew Goodwin. Even academics can join in the hokey-wokey.

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden is next in line for a dance round the Cabinet table, possibly taking home secretary Priti Patel for a twirl (“You put your leftie lawyers out…”). Dowden is to hold a heritage summit that will, according to the Telegraph, “be British culture’s last stand against woke zealotry”.

The heads of 25 cultural bodies are being summoned as “too many are possessed by a left-wing spirit”. I’ve swallowed a shot or two of that spirit in my time, but not enough for me to be hauled before Dowden.

Free speech is a fine thing, of course. But with this intolerant lot, you can’t help but suspect that free speech means you are free to speak as they want you to. Free speech is the freedom to tell history the way they want it told; free speech is telling historians what should be taught and the BBC what should be reported.

Thank heavens then for historians such as the estimable David Olusoga, who tells a version of history that departs from their well-trodden track of British magnificence.

Many facets of our history are magnificent; others are not. Cherry-picking the good while overlooking the bad and the ugly isn’t history. It’s propaganda in a union jack waistcoat.

There are always different stories to tell, different aspects to catch the eye. Future historians looking back at where we are now will be able to argue among themselves about whether Boris Johnson’s government handled the pandemic well or badly. If they consider only the vaccination programme, his efforts may end up being painted a success; if they include the shockingly high death toll, the verdict may be one of tragic failure. What’s certain is that Johnson will spin and splutter one of those for years to come.

As for the hokey-wokey, isn’t this is a tawdry dance turned against anyone who thinks differently to those in power, a vaguely sinister populist war designed to distract?

Yes, that’s what it’s all about.

I MUST say I’m very much looking forward to not watching Andrew Neil’s GB News channel. If this puts me among the righteous throng of “woke warriors” Neil seems to loathe, all the better.

Neil, ex-editor of the Sunday Times and onetime big hitter political interviewer for the BBC, left the corporation after 25 well-padded years because the “direction of news debate in Britain is increasingly woke and out of touch with the majority of its people”.

Still, setting up an anti-woke TV channel cannot be too taxing, as Neil seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter being rude about the woke.

Before we progress further, here is your reminder that in the lingo of cultural scorn, ‘woke’ is the new ‘political correctness gone mad’. And here is your refresher in how to play Woke Bingo: just shout ‘bollocks!’ every time someone uses the word.

It’s all a bit of a puzzle. To be ‘woke’ is basically to be against racism, so doesn’t being anti-woke suggest you favour at least a teeny bit of racism? Anyway, in the spirit of friendship, I’d like to thank Neil for reportedly hiring Nigel Farage and Julia Hartley-Brewer for his new station. It saves me the bother of tuning in.

Now there are those, including the fine editor of the Yorkshire Post, who have joined Neil’s side of the argument on Twitter, and that’s fair enough. Maybe we do need such a TV news station. But for all Neil’s protestations that GB News will be impartial, you can’t help but worry that this will lead to US-style TV ‘news’, where the likes of Fox News report politics with all the narrow and biased focus of our newspapers.

But perhaps we should let this tedious enterprise start before weighing in. Maybe it won’t be that terrible (you never know); perhaps no one will watch (here’s hoping).

It seems to me that Neil is drawing this TV news station from the same poisoned well that landed us with Brexit. He is defining the ‘enemy’ by disparaging the ‘woke warriors’, and somewhere I read that his station was for the over-looked 52 per cent, which is weird as they don’t seem that overlooked to me.

What a splendid case of political ball tampering, roughing the argument before tossing it at enemy wickets. It’s that liberal conspiracy all over again: if these fiendish liberals are scheming to undermine national life, how come they never end up in power?

The liberal establishment is frankly rubbish at its job.

Shouting ‘woke’ is the same shake of the cutlery drawer that sees Home Secretary Priti Patel attacking “leftie lawyers” – her party owns all the knives and forks but she can’t resist a rattle. As for Neil, he’s jumping in puddles to make a muddy splash.

Think I’ll be sticking with the BBC and Channel 4. Mind you, I do like the Berger & Wyse cartoon in my Saturday copy of the wide-awoke Guardian. Beneath the words “The News” a worried woman sits at a table listening to the radio. “Good morning, minister. You’ve done something awful, haven’t you?” “No” “Thanks for coming on.”

Says quite a lot in rather fewer words that I’ve just used.

OF all the unlikely routes to overnight fame, agreeing to host a parish council meeting must be right up there. Yet that is what happened to Jackie Weaver.

It’s hard to say exactly why millions of people ended up watching the ensuing squabble at Handforth parish council in Cheshire. Perhaps it was an escape from the gloomy single-track of our claustrophobic lives; perhaps it was a change from that lockdown Netflix habit.

Or perhaps it was just that so many of us are denizens of Zoom-land, where the inhabitants have bloodshot eyes and where, or so I’ve been told, if meetings go on a bit, they sometimes mute their microphone, turn off the camera and pick up their guitar while continuing to pay full attention to that important meeting.

Whatever the reason, something gelled.

In case you’re not up to speed, the Handforth meeting descended into acrimony, with heated exchanges, loud objections to Weaver’s presence, and some of the objectors being locked out by her.

The chairman, Brian Tolver, was removed to a virtual waiting room after saying: “You have no authority here Jackie Weaver.”

Councillor Aled Brewerton screamed that as vice-chairman, he should take charge of the meeting – “Read the standing orders – read them and understand them!” His vice, it seemed, lay in loud interruption.

The clip that went viral was, according to Radio 1’s Newsbeat, circulated by 17-year-old Shaan Ali from East London. He explained his unusual behaviour like this: “I guess I’m just fascinated by what local authorities do and the role they play up and down the country.”

I’ll own up to having been fascinated and amused by the disparity between the size of the egos and the relative smallness of the task. After all, this has been the bedrock of many a sit-com, Arthur Lowe in Dad’s Army being a classic example.

The anger on display was supremely out of scale with the task at hand, but perhaps that’s the way on parish councils. Jackie Weaver appeared to enjoy herself, saying with admirable understatement on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour that meetings were “often less exciting”.

After the amusement, came more sober observations about misogynistic meetings. This isn’t funny, women and some men complained. Too often women are abused like this in meetings, they said.

While that is true, something seems awry about that argument in this instance. It was a woman, the unflappable Jackie Weaver, who stayed coolly in charge; she was the grown up in the room, while most of the men were behaving badly.

Yes, women can be treated badly in meetings, and watching the footage may have upset women who’ve had that experience. But men too sometimes are the victim of other men in meetings; and men and women have surely sat there thinking ‘Good God, what am I doing here and shouldn’t there be more to life than this?’, while distracting themselves by idly wondering what’s for tea.

There is something else here, too. Such sudden notoriety says much about the random outcomes of modern life. All it took was a smart teenager to create a sensation by sharing something that normally nobody would see.

You can regard his handiwork in different lights. It certainly provided unlikely entertainment for the masses. Yet those men, however unpleasant, had no idea they were going to be paraded on social media (the modern equivalent of the stocks).

Mostly, though, that small island row blown large meshed with how many of us live. It wasn’t as funny as the second series of the BBC1 comedy Staged, in which David Tennant and Michael Sheen play heightened versions of themselves trapped in the corridors of Zoom with their bruised egos, but it comes from the same confined place.

This is us and it’s kind of weird.

HARRY Houdini was visiting a friend on the night of the census in 1911 and listed his occupation as Mysteriarch. A pleasing little fact that finds a reflection in today’s politics.

When Boris Johnson fills in his census form next month, he will at a guess write “prime minister” under occupation. Unless he goes for “political escapologist”.

His now quite long political life has seen him wriggle out of assorted scandals and self-propelled mishaps. So will he now escape all blame for the UK’s shocking 100,000-plus deaths from the pandemic? You wouldn’t put it past him.

Most of the first year of this pandemic has been long, chaotic and marked by late decisions, poor decisions, wild inconsistency and needlessly blown billions. Leaving us with that tragic death toll and a shot economy; and reportedly leaving some of his chums very much richer thanks to PPE contracts handed out in haste.

This has now been followed by the successful roll-out of the vaccine – a great relief all round for most of us. The vaccine nationalism and the bragging are ridiculous and hard to swallow, but you have to admit that Britain has played this part well. Thanks mostly to the NHS, pharmacies, public-spirited volunteers, brilliant science.

So does the good second half erase all memory of the shocking first half? It shouldn’t but you can see the thought bubbles.

It’s common for Johnson to be found booming “Move along, nothing to be seen here.” All talk of an inquiry in his handling of the crisis is brushed off – the moment isn’t right. And, knowing Johnson’s track-record, the moment never will be right.

Should this upset us? Those of us who’ve never fallen for all the bumbling persona should have reason to be upset – but not as much reason as those who’ve lost loved ones. They really should be calling for an inquiry.

But Johnson has something in his favour: people prefer optimism to pessimism, even when it’s the cheery, deceptive boosterism flourished by a famously unreliable politician. Many people would rather look forward than back; they’d rather think that something brighter lies ahead.

None of this should excuse all the earlier mistakes, or the gaslighting – blaming us for not behaving properly, rather than blaming his own mistakes. But you can see the glint in Johnson’s bloodshot eye. He can spy a way out for us and for himself.

And don’t be surprised if Houdini Boris wriggles free from this one, as he has done many times before.

He’s often lucky, too; lucky in having had Jeremy Corbyn as an opponent; lucky with the slavish loyalty of our Conservative-backing press; lucky even in the pandemic headlines covering up the complicated, red-tape littered mess of Brexit (never have so many teeth been lost to teething troubles).

If we do ever have an inquiry, it should consider not just what went wrong in the past year, but before that too, in the undermining of the NHS and cruelly unnecessary austerity. Whoever’s in charge, whoever’s to blame, we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And there are at least 100,000 reasons for that.