Friday, 3 November 2023

Halloween has nothing on the Tory horror show playing out at the COVID inquiry.

 

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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