Of course COVID-19 is political

The COVID-19 pandemic should not be an excuse to score cheap political points. It is not an excuse to wish death on politicians and their loved ones like a psychopath. It is not the time for ridiculous, batshit conspiracy theories about 5G causing the pandemic. It is not the time for anti-vaxx pedlars of death and disease to spout ignorant, science-denying twaddle. And it is certainly not a time to become a racist bellend. But it is political. It is naive to think otherwise. 

Countries across the world are relying on their governments for leadership, to figure out the best way to manage this terrible virus, to support healthcare systems, to know what the hell individuals can do to stop the disease spreading, to ensure the scientists working on a vaccine and a cure have everything they need, to work out what role charities and the private sector should take, and so on.

This means, obviously, politicians everywhere are making decisions - and it is naive to expect that certain decisions won't be politically motivated rather than for the greater good. In every democracy, this means they should be held to account - every decision that our leaders make affects our health and our wealth. We all have a huge stake in this. And in every country that is not a democracy, this should be the catalyst for increased transparency and public participation as a positive after-effect of the pandemic - after all, if you think the official mortality figures coming out of China or Iran are accurate, I have some magic beans and a time share in Narnia to sell you. Then again, the UK isn't bothering to include care home deaths in official stats so we still need to lift our game in terms of accuracy and transparency.  

In no country should COVID-19 be a time for cultish, blind loyalty to any leader of any political stripe. I'm glad Boris Johnson didn't die of COVID-19. And I'm glad Carrie Symonds, his pregnant fiancee, is doing well. Hell, I'm glad that he is recovering for a few weeks rather than working because that is what every coronavirus patient should be doing after they leave hospital. I am also glad that the attempt to stir up a national round of applause for the prime minister's recovery was a massive damp squib. A nationwide chorus of clapping and pot-banging for one man would have been embarrassing, unnecessary and definitely cultish.

And while Johnson may now join the immune herd for COVID-19, he is not and should not be immune to criticism or scrutiny - and neither should the hapless cavalcade of assorted incompetents, yes-men and women, charisma-vacuums, intellectual lightweights and slippery moral bankrupts who are filling in for the PM at the daily briefings.

It is clear that political decisions have been made which are not necessarily in our best interests, such as declining an invitation to join a European Commission-funded scheme to stockpile essential medical equipment, to have constantly dropped pandemic planning from the agenda since 2016, and for Boris Johnson to have found better uses for his time, such as meeting a dancing dragon for Chinese New Year instead of attending a COBRA meeting - or indeed attending five COBRA meetings on COVID-19.

At a time when we should be re-evaluating our relationship with China on multiple levels, including taking a stand on human rights and animal welfare issues and getting over our reliance on cheap goods often manufactured to low standards and in awful working conditions, the photograph of Boris Johnson gurning gormlessly at the dragon is not ageing well.

Yes, it's true that the relevant cabinet minister chairs COBRA meetings but given these meetings were about a global pandemic, it is negligent at worst and lazy at best for Johnson to simply not bother with these ones. Imagine the outcry in an alternative universe if Prime Minister Corbyn missed five COBRA meetings because he was pottering about on his allotment or attending a Venezuelan solidarity Zoom meeting. The very same people who are demanding we leave poor little Boris alone would be foaming at the mouth at the very thought of Corbyn neglecting his duty so comprehensively. Hell, imagine any prime minister in living memory missing such meetings.

In January, when PPE supply chains should have been bolstered and early scientific advice heeded, Boris Johnson was distracted by January 31's Brexit day brouhaha, something which at the time he thought was going to be his greatest triumph, his most memorable speech, the iconic photograph for the history books - but now it seems like a lifetime ago. That was a political decision as well as a negligent one.

To those who are upset about the much-villified "mainstream media" going over past decisions of recent months, please try to comprehend that it is important to flag up the mistakes that have been made. If only we had a leader who could graciously admit to and apologise for mistakes in the way that Emmanuel Macron did - that would be a good first step on the road to accountability and to quickly learning from mistakes which have surely cost lives. There will almost certainly be some sort of inquiry further down the track as to how the government handled the pandemic, when lockdown restrictions have been lifted or at least relaxed. But for now, we need decisive action from accountable leaders who are prepared to admit to errors and work their arses off to fix them.

Getting upset because The Sunday Times and Reuters have pointed out these failings in great detail is absolutely pathetic behaviour. Michael Gove was on brand on Marr this morning when he admitted Johnson didn't attend five COBRA meetings but gave the mealy-mouthed excuse that cabinet ministers chair such meetings, while simultaneously making a dig at journalists, a more articulate but equally venal version of Donald Trump's constant whines of "fake news". This was political manouevring on Gove's part - he appeared to be Johnson's loyal footsoldier but his defence of Johnson missing meetings would collapse in a light breeze and he knows it. He is not an idiot. Gove, ably assisted by his wife, Sarah Vine, a Poundland Lady Macbeth, would most likely be delighted if the pandemic cost Johnson his job. Again, let's not be naive here.

The next political decision to watch is in regard to an extension to Brexit negotiations, which has a deadline of June 30. The government is adamant that the UK won't ask for an extension but they may be left with little choice if the EU decides it has bigger virus-shaped fish to fry for the rest of the year. The British economy can recover from COVID-19 or it can recover from a no-deal Brexit after December 31 this year, but to try and get through both economic and social shocks, most likely concurrently, will be wantonly destructive. We have no choice but to deal with COVID-19 but we do have a choice about taking a more responsible approach to Brexit. Either way, it's a political choice and it will affect us for years to come.




Image: Mikhail Denishchenko

Of dead cats, engagements and babies

Ever since Boris Johnson romped into power with an 80-seat majority last December, he has created a cottage industry of dead cat-dumping. He got into training years before the election when he explained the art of dumping a dead cat on the dining room table to create a distraction when you're losing an argument in a column for The Telegraph in 2013. 

And last June, when he wanted to be the Conservative Party leadership frontrunner without any of the scrutiny, he took the heat off by claiming to paint wooden models of London buses for fun. As a bonus, this weird claim helped drop Google results about dishonest Brexit referendum claims emblazoned on buses, and his shameful waste of public money with the dreadful "Boris buses" when he was mayor of London, way down the list.

So it comes as no surprise that the PM's lust for dropping dead cats continues apace, now he has the job to which he has felt entitled since he was a boy. 

Reviving the ridiculous idea of a bridge between two remote points in Scotland and Northern Ireland a few weeks ago was a classic of the deceased feline genre. Johnson knows full well why it would be an expensive, dangerous engineering nightmare, although this probably won't stop him spending more of our money on a feasibility study even though the outcomes are a foregone conclusion. 

It took a serious brass neck to drop the big bridge dead cat - Johnson does not have a great track with bridges. The Garden Bridge debacle from his time as mayor wasted millions of pounds of public money, raised as-yet-unanswered questions about corruption and conflicts of interest, and the stupid project was ultimately, mercifully abandoned by an exasperated Sadiq Khan, his successor as mayor of London. It was the inevitable result of letting Joanna Lumley dictate urban planning.

But talking up a big, dumb bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland was an excellent distraction from big issues around that time, such as the Streatham stabbing, which could be directly attributed to the early release of terrorist offenders on the watch of the Conservative governments over the past decade. This dead cat also stalled any proper scrutiny of the UK's Brexit negotiation preparations ahead of talks with the EU, which are due to resume this month. What a handy fictional bridge that was!

And yesterday, we were treated to the news of Boris Johnson's engagement to Carrie Symonds, complete with an early summer baby on the way. But this does not necessarily automatically fall into the category of dead cat, despite Twitter last night exploding with claims of ex-pussies. There were a few appalling commentators urging Carrie to take advantage of Britain's liberal abortion laws - but here's the thing about being pro-choice. It means you do not condemn women for making choices that you wouldn't make for yourself. 

Even with Johnson's notorious virility, it is preposterous to suggest that he and Carrie planned a productive bunk-up late last year that would coincide with an engagement/pregnancy announcement to fall on a weekend where the Sunday papers had plenty of embarrassing front page options. 

Anyone who knows about female biology would realise they have been aware of the pregnancy for a while, and anyone who knows about the Conservative Party's need to appeal to social conservatives would realise the announcement would have to wait until after Johnson finalised his divorce with Marina Wheeler, his second wife. Who knows if they really did get engaged last December and, frankly, who cares? It was just a necessary part of the announcement to appeal to Tory pearl clutchers. And the pregnancy announcement obviously couldn't be delayed forever. 

In any case, if it was a dead cat, it was a pretty unsuccessful one. While the engagement/pregnancy made its way to most front pages - and it is naive to expect otherwise - it was really only The Sunday Telegraph which went for the full-on, Hello!-magazine-style gush-fest. I'm not surprised there was no byline on that story - any journalist with even the tiniest shred of credibility would be embarrassed to have that on their CV.

The Mail on Sunday ran the Instagram photo of a stubbled Johnson kissing the cheek of a beaming Carrie but tempered the soppy, sickly claim to an "exclusive inside story of their love" with a "CRIPES!", which was probably the reaction of plenty of people across the country yesterday. And across the bottom of the front page is a damning story about a leaked government memo that demonstrates that not being content to "fuck business", Boris Johnson may well be tempted to fuck farmers as well in his quest to give Dominic Cummings his wet dream Brexit.

The Independent ran an old photo of the happy couple with a discreet caption but went big, and rightly so, on Sir Philip Rutnam's departure from the Home Office amid claims of bullying, lying and intimidation by Home Secretary, Priti Patel.  Bizarrely, the apologists for this wretched government seem to think Priti Patel's existence as a powerful woman of Asian heritage is some sort of gotcha-headfuck for those who oppose this government. Nope, sorry, Johnson fans, Priti Patel does not get a leave pass from scrutiny because of her gender or ethnicity. How patronising.

The Sunday Times and The Observer also led with the Home Office troubles, with both pieces holding Priti Patel's feet to the fire. The ST added a teaser for an exclusive on the forthcoming budget with news of entrepreneurs losing a big tax break. The engagement/pregnancy headline was a wry "What a good day to announce a No 10 baby", while The Observer went with a picture caption of the happy couple, and a story at the bottom about Matt Hancock's absurd plans to pull NHS doctors out of retirement to deal with the coronavirus. 

The Sunday Mirror made the obvious "Carrie to go into labour" pun and described her salaciously as the "PM's lover" in a splash of barely disguised judgement. But the lead story was still an exclusive on Mo Farah's ongoing drug row.  

And The Daily Star, which exists in its own glorious bubble of madness, had no mention of engagements or babies at all. Instead, it went big with "QUACKERS - Plastic ducks barred from charity race to save the planet", along with some Love Island gossip.

So it was reassuring that, apart from the Sunday Telegraph, the newspapers weren't too badly distracted by the PM's personal announcement, news that was, in all honesty, as predictable as it is banal.

Of course, the ball is now in Johnson and Symonds' court - with wedding plans and a baby due in a few months, there are plenty of dead cats they could gleefully drop, especially if negotiations with the EU go as pear-shaped as many expect. 

There are golden opportunities for pictures of an engagement ring to be sent out into the ether, wedding dress design speculation is compulsory, maybe some hints will be dropped about the decor of a Downing Street nursery, and because every pregnant woman in the public eye must have her private choices exposed, there is plenty of scope for the "Will Carrie give birth naturally to whale music?" genre of intrusive journalism. 

Will they opt for privacy or will they happily let fluffy wedding-and-baby stories take on a life of their own next time Johnson cuts his own throat, fucks up, or would rather not face hard questions about the path on which he and Classic Dom are dragging the country?  

Photography by rawdonfox/Flickr

When the news became a great big trigger warning...

The news cycle since last Thursday has been more unedifying than usual. Perhaps it is naive to expect that people would largely agree that the correct way to deal with a peaceful protester at an elite dinner is not to push her into a pillar and frogmarch her out, grabbing the back of her neck. And perhaps it is naive to expect that if a couple is having an argument so loud it can be heard in the street as well as in neighbouring flats, a reasonable response would be to knock on the door to see if everyone is OK and, if there is no response, call the police.

Yet here we are, arguing all over the internet about all this. I can only imagine how horrific it must be for so many women who have been victims of physical violence or domestic abuse, which can be physical, emotional, verbal or psychological - or an awful combination of these types.

On Thursday night, Janet Barker, a Greenpeace campaigner, along with a group of fellow activists, managed to barge into the Mansion House dinner just as Chancellor Phillip Hammond was about to give his speech. She was dressed in a red cocktail dress and heels, she carried a small bag, a phone and a bundle of leaflets, and she wore a Greenpeace sash. Her fellow protestors were similarly dressed - red cocktail dresses and sashes for the women and tuxedos for the men - and the obvious question is how did they get as far into the building as they did? It is astounding in these paranoid times, that they were not stopped at the entrance, bags X-rayed and leaflets inspected. I've been to events at the Houses of Parliament and Portcullis House and the security was on par with catching a plane.

But get into the dinner they did. And when Janet Barker walked towards the front of the room, Mark Field MP took it upon himself to stop her - which would have been fine if he'd handled it almost any other way other than the way he did. 

He could have been a true class act and defender of free speech by stopping her, asking her to tell the room why she was there, and then handed her leaflets around the room. Or he could have steered her away by the arm rather than push her into a pillar and grab her by the scruff of the neck, his face magenta with instant rage.

For so many women who have been attacked in that manner, whether in public or private, the endless repetition of the footage for a solid two days cannot have been easy. The pushing into a wall, the grabbing of the neck, instantly weakening defences - it's appallingly familiar for too many. It gave me a brief flashback to the time I was pulled off a footpath in Dubai and pushed into a bush in an attempted sexual assault. And I managed to get away, albeit with laddered tights and a scratch on my chest. I can only imagine how much worse this footage would be for women who have suffered worse violence at the hands of men, especially over a sustained period of time.

Field's defence was that he "acted on instinct" but if that was his instinct, he really does need to take some time away to reflect as to why his immediate reaction was rage and excessive manhandling of a woman who was clearly representing a group known for peaceful protest. Please note that "peaceful" in this context means "non-violent", not "quiet" or "non-disruptive". The Greenpeace protesters who woke me up one morning in Durban in 2011 to protest a gas industry event in my hotel made a racket but nobody was in any danger. They were allowed to sing, bang drums in the street and chant unimpeded. One activist managed to get into the hotel business centre and change the wallpaper on the computers to the Greenpeace logo. There was no harm done. I giggled to myself when I went to the business centre to write up my notes from the gas event on one of the altered PCs - it was excellent mischief.

And nobody was in any real danger last Thursday night. 

Nobody else at the dinner felt the need to react so disproportionately. Plenty of people who were at the Mansion House dinner were at the Conservative Party conference of 2017 when Simon Brodkin, a "prankster" (read: overgrown schoolboy who is about as funny as burning orphans), barged in and handed Theresa May a P45. On that occasion, no male MPs felt the need to be a Billy Big-Balls hero and push Brodkin into the wall or frogmarch him out by scruff of the neck, Theresa May was the very model of British good manners when she took the P45 form in the same way that many a Brit is too polite not to take a leaflet from someone at the tube station, and the security guard who escorted Brodkin out did so with a single, gentle hand to the back.

Following on from the usual suspects defending Mark Field, news broke of a noisy row at Carrie Symonds' flat, which would not be newsworthy except the argument was with her partner, one Boris Johnson, the man most likely to be the next prime minister. He has been staying there after his second marriage broke up. God forbid he rent a place in Uxbridge, his actual constituency, but that would require him to show some sort of commitment to his job as an MP.

But I digress. As with any argument between a couple, only the couple knows the full story, but we do know this argument was loud enough to be heard on the street and through walls, Ms Symonds was heard saying "get off me" and "get out of my flat", Mr Johnson was heard saying "get off my fucking laptop" and smashing sounds were heard. It's the kind of language and sounds that are familiar to many a victim of domestic violence.

The ethics of the neighbours giving a recording of the altercation to the Guardian newspaper is being furiously debated - along with the ethics of other newspapers making hay from it all while spouting fauxrage at the neighbours who recorded the argument and claiming Ms Symonds is "furious" based on what "friends" have apparently said, rather than anything she has directly told a journalist. There is definitely an intelligent debate to be had about media ethics here, especially in regard to whether this endangers Ms Symonds' safety. The Daily Mail, in particular, should remove from its website a diagram of the apartment building, including a floorplan of Ms Symonds' flat - that invasive crap goes way beyond the public interest defence.

However, it is stunning that anyone says the police should not have been called. The ire has been directed at "nosy neighbours" and their own politics have been thoroughly dissected in today's papers. But in this sort of situation, where an argument can be easily heard outside a flat, where it sounds as if there are people in distress and possibly in physical danger, calling police is absolutely the right thing to do.

It is pretty common for police to arrive only to be told everything is fine, but there are plenty of occasions where the arrival of the police has saved someone's life or is the turning point for an abused partner to leave a dangerous relationship. In the wake of the Johnson-Symonds row, people have spoken up about how they were grateful for the neighbours who called the police, or how they would have left an abusive relationship sooner if the police were called earlier or, tragically, how people were left badly injured or killed because nobody picked up the phone.

I have been the "nosy neighbour". In 2005, I called the police multiple times on the couple in the flat across the hall from me in Sydney. They were drug addicts who would have noisy and violent fights that would spill out of their place and carry on outside the door to my flat, usually in the middle of the night. This went on for months. On one occasion, after I knocked on their door telling them to be quiet because I was trying to sleep, the woman bashed on my door when I was back in bed, yelling that she would "kick my cunt in". Then there was the day when I burst into tears at my desk, crying frustrated tears of distress and exhaustion because I was too sleep-deprived to do my job properly.

That story did not end happily. The parents of the woman called me, desperate for information about their daughter, particularly as they were caring for her child from a previous relationship. One night, the woman knocked on my door to tell me she was pregnant and too scared to tell her boyfriend - I told her she would have to start taking better care of herself if she was serious about continuing the pregnancy and that she should end the relationship. I let her know that her parents were very worried and would take her in. She told me it was too hard to leave him and scuttled back to her flat. The good news is that ultimately she did leave the toxic relationship, but not long afterwards, her boyfriend committed suicide in the flat - by this time I'd moved to Dubai and a friend who lived upstairs told me the sad, sorry story.

I don't regret calling the police. The police officers' interventions could have defused life-endangering situations, even if they always sent the police away and said they were fine. Calling the police several times was still the right thing to do. And it is the right thing to do, regardless of whether the couple is a wretched pair of drug addicts or a privileged couple who are on the verge of being the most powerful twosome in the country.

The more we argue about the morality pushing women into walls and grabbing their necks or whether we should call the police if we overhear a nasty argument, the less safe women will be. Why the hell is anyone who professes to be decent tolerating this?

Photography by George Hodan