The more people I talk to, the more I understand that people are not going to be so amenable to instructions from Boris Johnson to lock the country down again as they were before. It could be it’s the company I keep but I am beginning to feel I am in a bit of a minority.
If Johnson calls a national lockdown to combat the spread of Omicron, there will be things we have to comply with, like not going to pubs if the pubs are shut. But other stuff, like getting together with family and friends, it will not be like last year when people, by and large, didn’t meet up over Christmas. My feeling is that they will look after the vulnerable but they’ll take a chance with everyone else.
It is not because the headbangers on the Tory benchers are up in arms that people must now wear masks on buses and in supermarkets, it’s because people have had enough. They’re fatigued by coming up to two years of this dreadful virus and because trust in the politicians who set out the restrictive rules evaporated when it was revealed that those at the top considered these rules didn’t apply to them.
Today, I had to drive to Briz, which is a suburb on the eastern edge of Bristol, technically known as Brislington. I had to travel in the rush hour and I allowed extra time to allow for the usual gridlock but today there wasn’t any. I read that the roads were 20% quieter today due to the government’s work from home directive. And when I decided to drive to Keynsham for an hour’s trainspotting, I watched empty train after empty train rush by, particularly the fast trains to and from London. Part of this will be the absence of commuters whose tickets are paid for by their companies and partly because the ticket prices are extortionate.
Upon returning home, I watched the BBC Parliament channel, as you do, and caught Sajid Javid giving a statement on the government’s announcement that everyone should now get their booster jab. Javid was unusually polite and conciliatory, even in replying to some abrasive questioning from Labour’s Wes Streeting. The rudest he got was when replying to the anti-any-restriction head-banging Tories. The gist of their argument was they didn’t want any restrictions and that no school should ever close through Covid, even if every teacher and pupil was their local ICU. These were not the exact words used but they might as well have said it.
The oddest bit was when Javid boasted that our restrictions were far less than Johnny Foreigner across the channel. With even the prime minister admitted the a “tidal wave” of new cases was about to hit us, it was a strange thing to brag about.
The day ended with Keir Starmer making an address to the nation, trolling Boris Johnson by posing with a union flag clearly in the picture and referring to Labour being a patriotic party. About time too. Jeremy Corbyn’s perverse worldview saw patriotism as being akin to fascism and avoided it like the plague and showed just how out of touch he is with ordinary folk who like the idea of being proud of their country, something that has become extremely difficult under Boris Johnson.
And it wasn’t what Starmer said that was so interesting: it was how it looked. Starmer looked immaculate, every bit a prime minister in waiting compared to Johnson who, having deliberately messed his hair up as usual, came across as an ageing scarecrow that had been on the plonk.
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