On the level

Those of us who found ourselves enthused by yesterday’s announcement that a team in Oxford was about to commence human trials of a vaccine for Covid-19 saw that enthusiasm quickly deflated at today’s government press conference. Instead, we were given a harsh lesson on reality from the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty. The chances of a vaccine or drug treatments being available in the next calendar year were “incredibly small”. “Highly disruptive” social distancing would need to be in place for “really quite a long period of time.”

As a friend of mine astutely put it, Whitty had “let the cat out of the bag” with his comments because until now many of us had believed, whilst others had merely hoped, that Covid-19 might be nothing more than a six day wonder, that by the summer holidays, we’d be through the worst of it and virtually back to normal. The truth is rather more depressing.

Extending social distancing, which we will need to carry on doing in order to avoid killing each other, for another year or more will undoubtedly change our country forever. It will destroy thousands of businesses and put millions on the dole. I would imagine the majority of pubs, restaurants and arenas, will go the wall and entire professional sports will be wiped out.

And what about airlines and travel companies? Will the government have to nationalise them all just to keep them going, with no passengers and no holiday makers? The railways have already been renationalised and are being run with no passengers and no income. A year more of this and the country, the world even, will lie in ruins.

We’ve got a special family holiday lined up for June. That’s not going to happen. We’ve got a big family occasion lined up in September. That’s not going to happen. We’ve got a week lined up to visit a Canary Island in November. I can’t see that happening, either. I’m beginning to wonder if we will all be spending Christmas at home alone, communicating by Zoom and Skype, still listening to Dominic Raab every day telling us how many more people have died.

My natural pessimism tells me this will be cataclysmic for Britain. Billionaire and tax exile ‘Sir’ Richard Branson has taken some time off from suing the NHS, to which he has contributed nothing by way of income tax in the last 14 years, to beg the government – which is funded by the likes of you and me who choose to pay our taxes in Britain – to bail out his airline. As I carefully spell out the words ‘screw you’, I am aware that local companies Rolls Royce and Airbus have said they could go to the wall if Virgin Atlantic does.

And who will be able to afford to buy a new car after this is over, whenever that is? Honda are off already and it can’t be long until Nissan in Sunderland pull the plug. After all, there’s no incentive for them to stay because even if their British arm does survive, the EU transition ends on 31st December and we will crash out without a deal. Still, at least we will be able to take back control, even if there’s nothing to take control of.

Perhaps, it’s just my clinical depression that makes me look at the future in such a depressing way. And perhaps the economy will ‘bounce back’, as our schoolboy chancellor Rishi Sunak, who has already had at least six budgets since he was installed as a yes man for Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson, has promised. Something tells me that perhaps things are far, far worse than we can possibly imagine and, worryingly, far worse than the politicians are telling us.

I’d give anything just to get my boring little life back. My little part time job, seeing my boys for the odd pint or six, meeting up with our friends to talk bollocks and, for want of a better description, have a laugh, wandering around record shops and buying even more CDs, driving to Bristol airport just to watch the planes take off and land, playing golf and, more than anything else, not losing family members, friends and even people I have never met. It’s close and personal for us and every time I hear a politician offer his – it’s usually a ‘his’ – sympathies, I want to punch him, especially when it’s Michael Gove. To be fair, I always feel like that about Michael Gove, but you get the point.

I’m not quite at the ‘what if our boffins don’t come up with a vaccine or treatment in the next year or so’ but it won’t be long. I’m old enough to remember when the mothers and fathers of today’ boffins were trying to find a vaccine for HIV. 30 years on and we’re still waiting on that one.

John Nicholson’s brilliant article on Football 365 was published earlier today before Chris Whitty’s warning that “Highly disruptive” social distancing would need to be in place for “really quite a long period of time.” John writes brilliantly about football – buy his brilliant book, Can We Have Our Football Back? – but he could have been writing about Virgin Atlantic, Wetherspoons or Sports Direct, all companies with owners who few regard with any degree of liking or respect.

Things will never be the same again. Things are going to be awful. And sooner or later, there will be a day of reckoning and politicians like Boris Johnson really will have to ‘level’ with us. It’s not that things can only get better. They can only get worse.