Last month I visited Wareham, my home town in Dorset. While there, I sat on the quay by the river Frome watching kids jumping into the water in the sunshine. If I’d done the same as them back in the 1950s, my mother would have half killed me.
Polio, which was a scourge, could be caught from raw sewage, and the Frome and the nearby – appropriately named – Piddle rivers were full of it, thanks to the cows of south Dorset, which were productive in every department.
During my trip I also visited the graves of my uncle Ronald and aunt Una. I never met them, because they died in infancy in the 1920s from an outbreak of diphtheria.
A school nurse giving boys from the Licensed Victuallers School, Slough, their daily anti-flu gargle. David Mellor says: ‘There is a great danger now that we are talking ourselves into a panic – and that the fear of Covid-19 is far worse than the virus itself.’
Unlike Covid-19, diphtheria liked its victims young. It was known popularly as ‘the Strangling Angel’, the biggest killer of children under 14 at that time.
My grandfather was still recovering from being gassed in the trenches but he, a railway guard, and my grandmother just kept working hard and bringing up their two other children, including of course my mother. They didn’t make a fuss and nor did anyone else. It was just the way things were.
So why, I’d like to ask, can’t we behave the same now? Today more than ten million people are effectively locked down once again. It looks very much as though pubs and restaurants everywhere will soon have curfews.
We will be asked not to mix with other households, despite the loneliness and misery that enforced isolation causes, particularly to the most vulnerable. And if we do not obey these nannying rules, then we face the prospect of arrest.
This was not how we faced down illness in the past, when we were expected to get on with the business of living. We took responsibility for our own actions and the risks we wanted to take.
There is a great danger now that we are talking ourselves into a panic – and that the fear of Covid-19 is far worse than the virus itself. Boris Johnson is quite right when he says another lockdown would be a disaster for the British economy. But he’s drifting into one just the same.
All very Boris. He can’t even get the kind of camel right in yet another of his orotund analogies to justify this nonsense. It’s a Bactrian not a dromedary that has two humps. So go to the naughty step Boris – and while you’re there, help me with this one.
A week ago you were promoting Operation Moonshot, a plan to test ten million Brits every day. But as it turns out, that’s all moonshine.
Six days later the testing system was described as riddled with ‘chaos and inefficiency’, the testing tsar Baroness Harding seems to have got nothing done over the summer and symptom-free people have been told to stay away and won’t get tested for the foreseeable future.
David Mellor, pictured, says Boris Johnson needs o ask himself ‘a few fundamental questions’: Why is he so afraid of a virus that kills one in a hundred of its victims? And what is his strategy?
It’s the way Boris tells them. Those flowery, rhetorical flourishes from a man who is still, at heart a columnist, rather than a Prime Minister introducing and carrying through genuinely effective policies. As Benjamin Disraeli once observed: ‘The British people require grave statesmen.’ Not what we’re getting at the moment.
Instead of a torrent of words, what is surely needed is a coherent, realistic, achievable policy before the public give up on Boris altogether. And that policy cannot be based on running away from Covid.
And yet Boris is holed up in Downing Street right now working on a shutdown of London for at least a fortnight. Catastrophic.
Boris sees himself as a Churchillian figure, so let me remind him of a magnificent piece of Churchillian phrase-making, when denouncing the hopelessness of the Chamberlain government in the 1930s: ‘Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all- powerful to be impotent.’
As a description of Boris’s own government, it’s not half bad.
The thing about Churchill is he saw further than his contemporaries. Does Boris? I don’t think Churchill would have missed five emergency Cobra meetings in January, apparently to sort out domestic problems, when there was still time to take effective action against this newly emergent threat.
And would Churchill have allowed more than 20 million people to flood through Britain’s airports in the following three months without any medical checks whatsoever, allowing the virus to take root and spread? Only when the damage was done were panicky quarantine measures introduced, so arbitrary, they are in the main ignored.
And by then not only was the virus on the rampage, but the most devastating economic harm the nation has suffered since the war – a 20 per cent fall in GDP in the second quarter of 2020 – came about as the direct result of the lockdown. But this unprecedented economic pain hasn’t done the trick, has it?
Within a matter of weeks there were moles to whack, and camel humps to flatten. And, let’s not forget, hundreds of billions have been spent in temporary mitigation of the consequences of the lockdown. What we have seen is the worst deterioration in the public finances ever experienced in this country in so short a time. The effect on living standards will be inescapable. Health will deteriorate and life expectancy will fall.
When I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1990, national debt was 20 per cent of annual GDP. Now it’s over 100 per cent, and if we blunder into yet another lockdown, Rishi Sunak will be pressured into further spending, and anything on that scale will be absolutely ruinous.
Which is why, of course, even Boris acknowledges how disastrous for the economy that would be.
But he seems impotent to stop himself being dragged back into a lockdown, almost by default. Impotence is an insulting charge to level at such an alpha male as Boris, but I do so, and so will millions of others.
Watching Ministers chasing around last week, unable to get even a test and trace scheme to work, is risible. These are people seemingly incapable of organising a drinks party in a brewery.
So it’s surely time for Boris to ask himself a few fundamental questions. Such as this: why is he so afraid of a virus that kills one in a hundred of its victims? The Black Death killed 50 per cent. The public know this, and they know the limited impact that Covid has on young and middle-aged people. Anyone under the age of 45 has almost as big a chance of being killed by a meteorite as dying from Covid.
Much worse for these folk is losing their jobs, and being thrown onto the unemployment scrapheap.
What is Boris’s strategy? Is it, as I fear, to keep us in a state of terrified limbo until such time as a vaccine appears? Which might be never.
If that is the truth about what the Prime Minister and his Chief Medical Officer privately intend, then it is nothing short of a disgrace.
Now is the time to stand up to this virus, as previous generations did. Some 250,000 people died in the Spanish Flu epidemic at the end of the First World War, but the country just got on with it.
Up to seven times as many people have been dying from the flu as from Covid-19, yet we hear nothing about their deaths.
Isn’t it time we stood up to Covid, Boris? Time to be a real Churchill and stop being King Canute?
This virus cannot be halted in its tracks, however many lockdowns you impose. This stop-go nonsense brings whole communities to a grinding halt, destroys lives and livelihoods and threatens the prosperity of each and every family in the land. More of this, Boris, can only spell failure for you, reputational catastrophe and, in due course, electoral oblivion.