The brand that is Boris Johnson is back and “raring to go”, says Dominic Raab. Go where, one wonders.
We are to believe that he is fully recovered and able to make the life-and-death decisions of which his cabinet is apparently incapable. It is a sign of the strangeness of the times that I find myself agreeing with the health minister Nadine Dorries, who tweeted that most people who have been in intensive care with Covid-19 need months off, rather than weeks, work to regain their strength.
Of course, we are supposed to think of Johnson as an exception to the rules he has been breaking all his life. Now he gets to make the rules, while trying to be upbeat, but still insisting on this ridiculous language of war and conflict. This is war as a game, in which there are victors and heroes who get medals while flags are waved. Real war is needless slaughter and torture and starvation, but that would spoil the metaphor of triumph.
No one wins in a pandemic. The UK certainly isn’t winning now. We are set to have the highest death rate in Europe, so I am not quite sure what victory looks like – 50,000 or 100,000 dead? No amount of “Boris bounce” can dilute the blocks of loss on the graphs, or make us unsee the abandonment of the social care workers who look after those in “homes”, sleeping there overnight to avoid infecting their own families.
The last week has been the toughest so far. The rate of infection is still very high, but people have torn protective tape off park benches to sit down. War and Peace remains unread. Lockdown diets went out of the window weeks ago. Mainly, we miss each other. Zoom is good for certain things, but it can certainly exacerbate one’s loneliness. I don’t understand why I must partake in the jolly quizzes that are shared with me, when I never did before. Likewise baking. My deprivation is minimal compared with that of many – I have had too many conversations now with people who have lost their incomes for the foreseeable future. Yet, as tough as it is, the majority of the population, right across the age groups, continues to support the lockdown, because we are not stupid.
In places, patience is fraying, sure, and people are taking more risks, but still we fear death – not just our own, but that of our loved ones – more than recession. The sections of the rightwing press urging us to end lockdown, continually telling us the public is restless, always cite anonymous “Tory grandees”. These are millionaire donors who lather up discontent by saying long-term economic lockdown will destroy more lives than the virus. It is a pity they didn’t speak up after the last financial crash, which ushered in a programme in which the very poorest were punished for the sins of the bankers.
Now, however, the public is ahead of the political elites. The dark side of lockdown, the fact it involves terrible individual suffering, is clear: domestic violence has moved from being low-level background noise to something we actually acknowledge; there has been an increase in uploads of child abuse images; for many cancer patients, treatment has stopped.
But when asked to think collectively, to protect the vulnerable, it is a measure of people that most do. This is not a British quality, but a human one. (Indeed, our lockdown has not been as strict as that of many of our neighbours.)
Whenever the lockdown is eased, Covid-19 will still exist and we will live with whatever we deem to be an acceptable level of death and risk. As individuals, we are poor at risk assessment. Adult conversations need to be had by this government. What are the risks for a healthy 25-year-old woman or a 55-year-old man? How many children have been ill?
Why should we trust a government the strategy of which has been secretive and mostly too little, too late? The economy has shrunk; we all know that. We can grow it again, and more equitably, if the political will is there. It can be resurrected. The dead are locked down for ever. Stop this inane talk of saving lives versus saving the economy. It is a false binary.
Health is wealth. If we don’t understand that now, we never will.
Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist