I’ve been in lockdown for over a month now, since our MD asked me to stay at home on March 11 as a precaution when I showed some cold symptoms. With some UK newspapers now reporting that the measures may stay in place for up to a year, that seems like aeons, with a century happening in each day of lockdown. The languid pace of domesticity juxtaposed to increasingly dramatic headlines and international multilateral webinars are making for a strange quality of time.
Boris Johnson nearly died, I think on Tuesday, during my 30 second commute to the kitchen to fix a cuppa. He nearly died in what is now the nerve centre of the pandemic in Europe. You couldn’t make it up. In an already fearful and fraught time, the UK was faced with the very real prospect of losing its prime minister. The anxiety was too much to bear when it was announced he had been moved to ICU.
Thankfully, due to a curative combination of Withnail and I and Sudoku, Johnson has been discharged from hospital and is on the mend, and the consequences of a government adrift with a panicked Dominic Raab at its helm will only be short term. Johnson, whose “macho work ethic” and reckless handshaking with all and sundry in early March have been blamed for his near-death experience, has now been firmly told to rest up. So his cabinet blunders without a clear steer from Johnson, and with no sitting parliament to hold it accountable.
Blunder after blunder has characterised the government’s handling of this pandemic, with insufficient testing, no contact tracing and no vaccine. This means we have no exit strategy in place as we enter the deadliest phase of the pandemic. The UK hit a total of 10,000 deaths on Monday.
It seems reckless to go outside even though we are allowed one form of exercise a day as well as shopping for essentials and medicines. As irony would have it, the weather has been blissful, warm with clear skies. And this after a long, dull winter also makes going outside important for mental and physical health. I am fortunate to live in the beautiful area of Swiss Cottage, and my daily walks have been a sanctuary, punctuated as they are with the multicoloured children’s drawings on pavements, the songs of birds that have returned to urban areas, and the occasional sighting of the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, who also lives here.
But amid the suburban bliss and slower pace there is also tension and rising anger in the long supermarket queues and at “covidiots” who have been flouting the lockdown rules. For the most part, the UK public has overwhelmingly surprised the government and ourselves, with mass compliance to the draconian measures.
Before the lockdown it was widely thought that it would not be possible in such a liberal society to introduce measures as has been seen in Asia. One of the government’s major blunders may have been that it took so long to implement the lockdown measures. The majority of the public also supports the looming extension of the lockdown as well as mobile phone surveillance if that was what was required for the exit strategy.
But the lockdown cannot continue indefinitely. Chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Matt Hancock are at each other’s throats about the trade-offs between the losses to the economy and the losses of lives. For now the government is prioritising the saving of lives, but if the lockdown continues for several more months Sunak’s stimulus and wage supports may not be enough to quell social unrest as jobs are lost and businesses collapse.
• Dr Masie, a former senior editor of the Financial Mail, is chief strategist at IC Publications in London and a fellow of the Wits School of Governance.
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