Do you remember watching the BBC news bulletins with the horrific scenes from Italy appearing on your screens? The overrun hospitals, morgues overflowing with bodies and the quiet, desolate streets of Lombardy where the deaths from Covid-19 spiralled out of control? Then we watched as people gathered on their balconies to sing. It was deeply moving. We knew it was coming down the road at pace. We would not be as ill-prepared as Italy, would we?
It turns out that not only were we as ill-prepared as Italy, tomorrow we are about to record the highest numbers of deaths in Europe. The scenes in the media have never been as extreme as in Italy, but the death toll is going to be higher, probably far higher. Our hospitals were not overrun and happily, so far, the Nightingale hospitals, the death camps, have barely been used. However, the figures are terrible.
When Boris Johnson suggested other countries would be admiring our ‘success’ in managing the virus, I wondered what failure might look like. In reality, there has been no success. At every stage, the government has been found wanting. At first, they followed the ‘herd immunity’ strategy until it was gently pointed out that 500,000 people were likely to die. Then, we abandoned testing, the key recommendation of the World Health Organisation, we shut down far too late and even when we did it was more of a half-arsed ambiguous request.
I would be amazed if Johnson turned up for the daily press conference on the day our death toll exceeds that of Italy. The PM likes to do optimism, he likes to proclaim good news; he is not the man to tell us how bad things are without telling us how good they are going to be. But maybe he is a changed man.
Maybe Johnson will front up as a real leader should. Maybe the routine lies and half-truths will be replaced with the truth and nothing but the truth. Maybe pigs will fly across Downing Street. The last possibility, an impossibility, is still more likely to happen than the hearing the truth but we can always hope.
When the media turns up to ask questions after the press conference where it is announced that we now have the highest death toll in Europe, I hope we have something better than Robert Peston’s show-boating and Laura Kuenssberg’s junior reporter level of questioning. I am tired of the government suit being bowled simple half-volleys which are easily despatched over the boundary. I know some are arguing for the media to not ask ‘awkward’ questions because apparently what we need now is unity, right? Unity at the expense of accountability. Supine, ineffectual questioning; just tell Johnson how great he is. Welcome to Nazi Germany, welcome to hell.
Johnson and co need to be asked just how proud they will be when we have more dead than any other country in Europe. Johnson himself needs to expand on his assertion that other countries were admiring our great success. And he needs to tell us how the hell we are going to get out of this.
The number to remember tonight is 150. That’s how many more people have died in Italy compared to Britain. Official figures show 28,734 people have already died in our country and it is believed the real figure is much higher than that. But they are not just numbers and figures: they are real people whose lives ended before they should have.
When people around me started dying, any lasting fragments of support I had for Johnson’s government – and there weren’t many – disintegrated. The bullshit and bluster didn’t cut it for me, but then I am one of what appears to be a minority of people who never bought into his shtick.
Johnson’s hero is Winston Churchill and he would definitely like to somehow match his achievements, but he is not so much a Churchill as a posh Tommy Cooper, without the jokes.
The milestone we face tomorrow will be yet another new low in the fight, such as it has been, against Covid-19.
We were told by the top government boffins that a ‘good result’ in Britain would see 20,000 people dead. By next weekend, that figure will exceed 30,000. That’s 30,000 tragedies will many more to come. The TV pictures of our situation were not as terrible as Italy’s, but the results are worse. And that’s a fact.
