How the British Government Lost All Credibility
A brief history of twenty-one months of scandal, hypocrisy and lies.
You know the expression âthe straw that broke the donkeyâs backâ? British politics has felt like that lately, except instead of a straw, itâs a ten-ton anvil, and instead of a donkey, itâs a donkey whose back has been broken repeatedly by a factoryload of ten-ton anvils. To say that the public in December 2021 are losing faith in Boris Johnsonâs government would be like saying that Mauritius has a minor shortage of dodos. Consent to be governed is hanging on by the barest of threads, and itâs speculated that, if another lockdown were announced, there would be mass disobedience.
How did we get here? It didnât always feel like this. Common adversity makes people put aside their differences, and for all the division in British society, in March 2020 it really did feel for a brief moment like we were all in this together. But whatever goodwill the government might have started with, itâs nowhere to be found twenty-one months later.
The first tremor came just two weeks in, when Scotlandâs chief medical officer was forced to resign after being busted making trips to her second home in violation of her own guidance. Then a month later we learned that Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose dubious modelling had paved the road to lockdown, had been âentertainingâ a female friend at his house, a friend who didnât live with him and thus was ignoring Fergusonâs official advice to stay at home.
Fergusonâs excuse was that heâd already caught and recovered from COVID and so thought he was immune and not at risk. He was probably right - it was clear by then that COVID-19 kills almost exclusively the old and infirm - but he had made a powerful admission: the people who make the rules donât really believe theyâre necessary. Or at least, theyâre not necessary for enlightened men like Ferguson who can be trusted to make decisions for themselves. We, the unwashed masses on the other hand, are too dangerous to be allowed a little bit of independent thought.
How dare this man break the rules for the sake of sex when he had condemned half the nation to celibacy? Still, at least he did the right thing and resigned from his position as a government advisor. The same couldnât be said for the next scandal.
Dominic Cummings was a senior advisor to Boris Johnson - an influential figure, if not exactly a household name, at least not before he was rocketed to superstardom on May 22nd by allegations that heâd spent two weeks with his parents in County Durham, a whopping 264 miles from his house in London. A more blatant rule violation could not be imagined, or so we thought.
The public were united in their outrage. Condemnation rained from every direction. Cummings was the most hated man in Britain. It didnât help that he was one of the main people behind Brexit, which made him easy to hate for many. Millions called for his resignation, or execution.
At first the government tried to ignore the story until it went away, but we were all stuck at home with nothing better to do than scream. Finally, Cummings gave his side of the story at a surreal press conference on May 25th. Heâd gone up north, he said, to stay in a vacant house on his parentsâ land, wanting to be close to mum and dad in case he and his wife became too ill to care for their five year-old - and indeed Cummings had become very unwell while there, presumably with COVID. But he hadnât broken any rules, he said, pointing to a dubious technicality about exemptions for facilitating childcare. He had, he believed, âbehaved reasonably and legallyâ. And he wasnât resigning.
Cummingsâs desire to safeguard his son was understandable, if not acceptable, but there was another allegation he needed to address. If he and his wife had spent the whole time with his parents, then why had they been spotted on April 12th - Easter Sunday and his wifeâs birthday - relaxing in the sun thirty miles away at the popular tourist destination of Barnard Castle? Cummings had an excuse for that one too: heâd made the trip - in words that were widely ridiculed - âto test my eyesightâ, a quick drive to confirm that he was well enough to make the full journey back to London the next day. And he still wasnât resigning.
No-one bought that excuse. The rage continued unabated. Protestors harassed Cummings outside his home. On Newsnight the next day Emily Maitlis attacked Cummings so fiercely in her opening monologue that the BBC received almost 24,000 complaints for allegedly breaking their own rules (the irony) on impartiality. #DominicGoings trended on Twitter, but despite the outcry neither Dom nor his higher-ups gave the remotest hint of apology, much less accountability. A message had been sent loud and clear: the system protects its own. Public faith in authority had taken a gut punch.
We thought it couldnât get worse. We were wrong.
Cummings, to his enormous fortune, was quickly pushed out of the headlines by George Floyd, but another strange thing happened that week. Thousands gathered in central London to protest against racism and police brutality. They were breaking the law, and some worried that we were witnessing a superspreader event. For months weâd been told that to gather in large crowds was tantamount to mass suicide. Yet in the weeks that followed the protests, London hospitals werenât overwhelmed. In fact COVID cases were falling. Something didnât add up, but we soldiered on.
Time passed. We opened up, we saw our friends again, we ate out to help out, we followed the ârule of sixâ. COVID came back with a vengeance and we locked down again. Vaccines arrived, but the rollout was slow. On December 20th came the excruciating news that Christmas was cancelled for much of the south east including London. Tens of millions ate turkey alone, although that didnât stop Boris and Carrie Johnson having a friend over on Christmas Day - a member of their âchildcare bubbleâ and thus permitted, or so they said. Why the Johnsons needed help with childcare when they were both at home with the day off remains unanswered.
The months dragged on, but there was light at the end of the tunnel. Cases were falling. The vaccines were working. On February 22nd the government published its four-step âroadmap out of lockdownâ, with the final step, nicknamed âfreedom dayâ by some, promised ânot before 21 Juneâ. An agonising four months to go, and that was the best-case scenario. Our hearts sank again on June 14th when Boris took the stage to say that freedom day would be delayed by four weeks. How much longer would we have to suffer?
So by late June, the public was running out of patience. Weâd been lonely and isolated for months. Hundreds of thousands had lost a relative. Countless businesses had been shuttered, livelihoods devastated. Children had lost a year of education. The already-huge gap between rich and poor had been blown to cataclysmic proportions. Weâd be cleaning up this mess for years, if not for the rest of our lives, but the powers that be assured us it was worth it. Every sacrifice weâd made had been necessary. Or so they told us.
If it was ever true, it became a lot harder to believe on June 25th, when video emerged of Matt Hancock MP sneaking into a Whitehall back office to give a handsy snog to his aide Gina Coladangelo, a married woman who wasnât his wife. It would have been a scandal even with no pandemic: a senior minister having an extramarital fling during work hours with an old university friend whom heâd appointed to a cushy government gig despite her apparent lack of qualifications.
But this was no ordinary scandal, and Matt Hancock was no ordinary MP - he was the health secretary, on pandemic matters the U.K.âs second most important elected official behind Boris himself, the man who had spent the last year telling us not to go out, not to see friends, not to hug our grandparents, not to kiss our loved ones goodbye as they breathed their last on the COVID ward. Matt had smooched Gina on May 6th (and thatâs just the time that was caught on camera), when England was still on Step 2 of the roadmap and indoor gatherings of two or more were permitted for work purposes only if âreasonably necessaryâ, a proviso which presumably didnât extend to sticking your tongue down a colleagueâs throat.
A year earlier Hancock had welcomed the resignation of Neil Ferguson. Would he now live by his own words? Would he resign, or be fired? Fat chance: Hancock gave a half-hearted apology and that was good enough for the Prime Minister, who thus âconsider[ed] the matter closed.â
That was on Friday the 25th. Whoever leaked the tape had impeccable timing, because an big anti-government, anti-lockdown protest was already planned for Saturday the 26th, and the enormity of Hancockâs hypocrisy poured jet fuel on an already-blazing fire. Protestors travelled to London from all across the country to express their rage at 15 months of humiliation, hypocrisy, scandal and lies. There might have been a million people in the streets; probably the largest demonstration in British history. âArrest Matt Hancock!â and âMatt Hancock must resign!â were common chants.
The media ignored the protest almost completely, but someone in Whitehall must have got the memo: Hancock resigned that afternoon. âThose of us who make these rules have got to stick by them,â he said, but the damage had been done. Never let it be forgotten that he tried to hang on - and that Boris was prepared to let him.
We thought it couldnât get worse. We were wrong.
By November, cases were rising again in Britain and elsewhere. We watched with apprehension as neighbouring countries introduced new mandates, lockdowns, and âvaccine passportsâ. News came on November 24th of a new variant. The government announced a new mask mandate and further restrictions seemed imminent. Were we back to square one?
Then we learned about the parties.
Remember last winter, when Christmas was cancelled at the last minute? Remember the loneliness and isolation that tens of millions were forced to endure by a government who said it was looking after us? Remember how the rules forbade socialising âwith anyone you do not live with or who is not in your support bubble in any indoor settingâ?
On November 30th 2021, we learned that none of that had mattered to the ruling class. The Mirror broke allegations that, during those winter lockdowns, goverment staff had held two office parties inside Downing Street, one of which was apparently attended by Johnson himself. Nothing was proven, and Johnson offered only the evasive non-denial that âall guidance was followed completelyâ. The story simmered for a week.
Then a video appeared. At a rehearsal for a press conference on December 22nd 2020, Downing Street staff had been filmed joking and laughing about a âfictional partyâ with âcheese and wineâ and âdefinitely no social distancingâ that had recently taken place. It was undeniable. They hadnât just broken the rules. They hadnât just lied about it. They had laughed at us. Boris blustered, apologising âfor the offenceâ but still insisting that âno COVID rules were brokenâ⌠as far as he knew. But it got even worse. New allegations came in. There hadnât been two parties - there had been three. No, four. Or was it five? At the time of writing Whitehall stands credibly accused of throwing at least seven rule-breaking parties during lockdown last year. An alleged photo of one such party surfaced just as I was putting the finishing touches on this article:
As if we hadnât been insulted enough, when the incriminating press conference video was published last week, Borisâs first move was not to resign - as many were calling for - but to announce that very same day that a new round of lockdown-lite restrictions were coming into force. Sorry Boris, but thatâs going to be ânoâ from me. Your authority has expired, and no amount of hysterical predictions from the same âexpertsâ who have got everything wrong before is going to make me take your edicts seriously.
Thereâs so much more I could write about - like the months the government spent telling us not to wear face masks (now compulsory), their repeated assurances there would be no vaccine passports (now being introduced), their promise that the February to June lifting of restrictions would be âirreversibleâ (now being reversed), their fabled â15 millions jabs to freedomâ (weâre now at 122 million jabs with no freedom in sight), or the exemptions theyâre so happy to keep carving out for their rich and powerful friends (apparently you canât catch COVID if youâre a UEFA official or Cop26 delegate) - but Iâm not trying to fill a book. Now they tell us vaccine passports are only intended for large venues, and they have no plans to make vaccinations compulsory. If you still believe a word of these sociopathsâ promises, I know a Nigerian prince whoâd love to send you an email.
Itâs over. If youâre young, healthy and vaccinated, you can go back to living your life. What more proof can you possibly need? When the people who tell you to be terrified of COVID demonstrate at every turn that they arenât afraid of COVID in the slightest - and Iâve only discussed the U.K. in this article but the phenemonen reaches far wider - then maybe their actions speak louder than their words? Why in a million years would anyone continue to take these fraudsters seriously?
And if youâre still falling for any of this nonsense, I have to ask: whatâs it going to take? Where is your breaking point? How much worse is the ruling class going to have to treat you before you tell them âenough is enoughâ? This question is not rhetorical. Freedom is taken, not given.
Things are going to get worse.