Most of us probably
believed in the bogeyman when we were children and then, as the good book suggests
we should, put away childish things when we became adults. What though would happen
were that creature to be unearthed years after the event and obliged to sit in
an uncomfortable chair answering questions about just what it had been up to
lurking under beds and at the back of wardrobes back in the day?
That’s what watching Dominic
Cummings squirming about as he was faced with the content of his expletive laden
emails and WhatsApp messages at the COVID inquiry this week felt like.
It was not a pretty
sight. The one-time mover and shaker who was going to dissolve the Whitehall ‘blob’
and replace it with something funkier looked shifty, seedy, and just a bit
pathetic. Like a dodgy trader being door stepped on a consumer rights TV show
and making a dash for cover with his tail between his legs.
On the way he spilled some
shocking beans about the toxic mixture of over confidence and lack of
preparation that characterized the Johnson government’s approach to the
pandemic.
The former prime
minister emerged from this as a pretty unsavory character, lazy, arrogant and
at times downright callous. Something demonstrated by his jaw droppingly crass
comment that the COVID virus was just nature’s way of dealing with elderly
people.
There was more toxicity
on display later in the week when former senior civil servant Helen MacNamara
gave evidence to the inquiry. She described a culture of casual sexism and
macho incompetence operating within Downing Street presided over by Boris
Johnson.
Things were rounded off
by Lord Stevens, who was the chief executive of the NHS during the pandemic,
dropping the bombshell that then Health Secretary Matt Hancock wanted to have
the power to grant or deny treatment to patients, overriding medical advice, if
the NHS became overwhelmed. Thankfully that awful day never arrived, but just
think about his eagerness to be a bargain basement angel of death next time you
see him gurning at the camera in his latest desperate attempt to be a ‘celebrity’.
Compared to the cast of
grotesques masquerading as a government during the greatest crisis this country
has faced since 1945 the ghosts, ghouls and vampires associated with Halloween
looks about as frightening as a party of maiden aunts holding a tea party.
Who now could hold to
the view that Boris Johnson was one of the lads, a bit of a laugh, at worst a
lovable rogue? The clown mask has slipped to show the scowling rictus of
arrogant entitlement that was always there underneath.
This is the man who
partied the night away while the elderly people of whom he was so dismissive
died alone in care homes. Who when challenged about his actions twisted and turned
to avoid responsibility, parroting out lies that were so absurd as to be
insulting.
Johnson is and always
was a nasty piece of work, out to serve his own interests and to dodge blame
for the resulting chaos. No wonder he gathered around him a such as cast of sycophants
and chancers, birds of a feather flock together, and some of them are vultures.
It should be remembered
though that it isn’t just the failings of one group of individuals that should
be held up to the light to show how dirty they are. The whole Tory ideology is
morally bankrupt.
From Mrs. Thatcher
saying there was no such thing as society, through Norman Tebbit telling the
unemployed to get on their bikes and look for work to Lee Anderson telling
people made destitute by austerity they can feed their families for 30p a day
they have sought to make selfishness and brutality into virtues.
The result is the
divided, angry, and increasingly impoverished country we see around us.
Boris Johnson likes to
play at being a historian it is fitting then that history should recognize him
as the most incompetent prime minister in the history of the office. It is time
for the ideology of which his government and its excesses are the end product
to be consigned to its dustbin too.
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