No going back

Have you ever had one of those ‘fuck this for a game of soldiers’ moments? I’ve had plenty of these in the past however many months it’s been since Covid turned up. From Boris Johnson rushing around a hospital shaking hands with seriously ill patients, through Dominic Cummings driving a coach and horses through the ‘stay at home’ message he helped create and now Matt Hancock breaking his own rules by snogging with a woman he appointed to advise him on how he could kill even more people in care homes. Actually, I may have made up the last bit because Hancock was doing perfectly well on his own and killing old people in their scores of thousands but Christ on a Bicycle: can things get any worse? Of course they can.

Sexy Matt was, according to the Sun, engaged in a ‘hot clinch’ with Gina Coladangelo which certainly suggests that social distancing wasn’t on his mind at a time when he was lecturing the rest of us on not to cuddle each other. I’m more pissed off, it must be said, at the brass neck of these sleazy charlatans handing public – ie our – money to their mates but Hancock’s canoodling has sent me over the edge.

This snotty little health secretary is playing a massive role in preventing people travel abroad to see long lost family because it’s dangerous to go near anyone else. Unless, of course, you are a government minister who is desperate to get his leg over. Let us not forget, at this time, that only a year ago or so, the same Hancock was suggesting it would be “a matter for the police” to investigate professor Neil Ferguson for allowing his girlfriend to meet up with him, adding that Ferguson had “done the right thing” in resigning from SAGE. If it was the right thing for Ferguson – and I don’t think it was – then shouldn’t Hancock be doing the same thing?

But it’s about much more than this grubby little politician struggling to keep his flies done up. It’s how we, the lumpen proletariat, are supposed to feel about it. Many people have followed all the rules from the start, only to see those at the top doing what the hell they like. Many thousands have been told to isolate without any kind of financial remuneration, yet they – we, actually – have to live our lives differently.

Johnson was in Cornwall at the G7, or whatever it’s called this week, wining and dining with no obvious social distancing, Hancock is revealed to be, just like his boss, a love rat. This is not a normal country, is it?

I see the levee of public support collapsing in the wake of this latest shit show. Our so called leaders don’t follow the rules, but hector us when we don’t. Sorry, but that’s not good enough.

The evidence of my own eyes, and what I see in my own life, is enough to suggest this whole lockdown scenario is lying in ruins. They’ve seen what politicians think of them and they will now do their own thing.

Ever since Cummings, I have interpreted the rules to suit my life. Nothing has changed. I will do what I can do protect others, as well as myself, but it won’t be because I want to follow Johnson, Hancock and the like: it will because, like them, I will make my own decisions from now on.

I’m just surprised so many people have obeyed the rules for so long given the pitiful lack of leadership from the top. They aren’t now and they haven’t been for some time. The only rules they will follow are the ones they literally cannot break because, for example, night clubs are closed.

16 months of absolute misery and heartbreak and this is how our leaders behave. Johnson “considers the matter closed” and that’s how more people will now regard his restrictions. People have been told society will need to live with, and die from, Covid. They understand that and the change is well underway. There’s no going back now, whatever happens.