Vaccine nationalism and criticising the EU

 

The EU dropped a bollock. A massive bollock. A bollock the size of Jupiter. There, I said it. I am a militant remainer, someone who voted for the UK to stay in the EU in 2016, and would vote to rejoin the EU if the opportunity ever presented itself. But I can still criticise the EU without compromising my views. This is because, like pretty much ever remain voter I know, I can criticise EU decisions while not wanting to dismantle the whole damn thing. 

The bollock to which I am referring is, of course, the vaccine debacle. What started out as the EU being disgruntled over what it saw as AstraZeneca not being able to fulfil the vaccine order from a paying customer quickly degenerated into an unseemly spectacle. AstraZeneca was about 75 million doses short of being able to meet the EU's order of 300 million doses, with the option of a further 100 million. AstraZeneca cited production problems at their Netherlands and Belgium plants. The EU demanded that AstraZeneca should send over a load of doses manufactured here in the UK.

Unsurprisingly, the headlines seen across the UK front pages did not take a measured tone. It was an opportunity to take a huge potshot at the EU while talking up our own vaccination success. Behold, the WWII cosplay language of war and British victory, of explosions - and a Mafia analogy. This was an absolute gift for Boris Johnson - the front pages made him look mighty and powerful, despite lethally mismanaging the pandemic since the beginning, and we could all blame the EU for being mean and evil again. Just like old times!  The fruit was so low-hanging, it was growing with the potatoes.

But then a grown-up entered the room. Michel Barnier, the man who had the thankless task of leading EU negotiations over Brexit, offered his reasonable view that Brussels had overstepped the mark with the UK, and before long, there was a screeching U-turn from the EU. Unlike every embarrassing U-turn Boris Johnson has performed in regard to managing the pandemic, the EU's about-face was swift. There was no EU raid on UK-made vaccines.  

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was reckless when she effectively called for a hard vaccine border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland - and she has kept a low profile ever since backtracking on this issue. The risk to the terms of the Good Friday Agreement cannot be understated here. But her ill-conceived statement exposed just how fragile peace is and, crucially, how the Brexit deal is poorly equipped to cope when Irish border issues crop up. 

The whole fiasco also exposed the embarrassing absurdity of vaccine nationalism. Yes, the UK is ahead of the EU in rolling out a vaccination programme, which is obviously a good thing. Only a psychopath or an anti-vaxxer would say otherwise. It was a gamble to start the programme three months ahead of the EU but it paid off. The rollout is not perfect - there is plenty of evidence to suggest there is a postcode lottery that means rates of vaccinations are varying significantly from region to region, and the real logistical test will come when it is time to give some people their second shot while new groups are being invited to book their first shot - but we are making steady progress.

And the EU will, of course, catch up with the UK on vaccinations. Belgium, Czech Republic, Malta, and Portugal are already doing pretty well. This is also a good thing. It is in our interests for people across the EU as well as in the UK to be vaccinated in a timely manner. Brexit or not, the geography does not change, we are still part of the wider world, people are keen to travel to Europe for work, for play, to see friends and family, and the virus does not care about national borders. 

Carrying on about a British "victory" over the EU makes us look like idiots, just as the EU made itself look silly by making demands on UK supplies. Crowing about our vaccination figures, as if it's a contest rather than a serious global health emergency that can only be properly managed through international cooperation, is pathetic behaviour for a country where its leaders claim that Brexit makes us more outward-looking.

The EU dropped a bollock over vaccines. Then it did the right thing and backtracked. Tiresomely, Brexiters will bang on for the rest of their lives about the time the EU tried to nick our jabs. But the rest of the world won't care, especially as none of this has affected the EU's humanitarian vaccine efforts in developing countries. The rest of the world will move on while Brexiter Twitter will refuse to let it go, like Miss Havisham in a Union Jack wedding dress. And we'll be left with the ongoing economic and social consequences of a poor Brexit deal, as well as the loss of more than 100,000 people. Some victory, eh?

Photography by Gustavo Fring

Covid-19 and the expendables

 

Paul Embery is not an epidemiologist, virologist, or indeed a doctor of any description. According to his Twitter bio, his main claim to fame is being a columnist for UnHerd. Despite being a member of the National Union of Journalists, he appears to have missed the bit in his training where you're taught to properly analyse and responsibly report on statistics.

Unfortunately, his ridiculous tweet received a lot of traction, predictable support from the likes of Julia Hartley-Brewer, and, sure, it looks credible enough. After all, he has included a link to the NHS website. Why, he's just a humble journalist sharing Actual NHS Statistics to prove his coronavirus-minimising point. And given that we all love the NHS so much we used to applaud it every Thursday night, how could we possibly question his wisdom?

Quite easily, actually.

First, we have the ageist bigotry that says it's somehow OK for people over 60 to die of Covid-19, that once we all turn 60, our lives, our value to society, our purpose is diminished. Women over 40 already know they start to become invisible after a certain age. Now we are told that once we hit 60, we should consider ourselves lucky to have had such a good innings.  

From a purely cold economic standpoint, the NHS figures mean that an increasingly productive part of the economy is at risk and should be protected. According to the Department for Work and Pensions, between 1985 and 2015, women aged 60-64 represented the highest increase in employment rates of any demographic, rising from 17.7% participation in the workforce to 40.7%. In the same period, employment rates for men aged 65-69 increased from 12.8% to 25.8%. That's a lot of extra tax revenue and consumer spending from these demographics. As the government continues to raise the pension age, these figures should surprise nobody.

Then we have the sinister "pre-existing condition" part of Embery's out-of-context tweet. It's stunning how casually we can dismiss the coronavirus deaths of those with pre-existing conditions. This includes diabetes, asthma, heart conditions, immune system conditions, regardless of the person's age. Suddenly, we have a much larger group of people at risk from Covid-19. 

By and large, thanks mostly to modern medicine, plenty of pre-existing conditions can be managed so people can live healthy, productive, happy lives. You can't always see a pre-existing condition but if that person caught Covid-19, they could become seriously ill and possibly die way before their time. But Embery's thoughtless tweet devalues the lives and contributions of millions of people as he attempts to minimise how serious this global pandemic is.

And with a virus as easily transmissible as Covid-19, it's not just the deaths we need to focus on. There are plenty of blowhards who'll yell into the internet that there's "no need to panic about a disease with a [insert very low percentage here] death rate!". But that ignores not only the lost productivity from people who test positive, and their contacts, having to self-isolate - it also ignores the emerging data about the long-term effects even after a patient has recovered from the virus, including long covid, where people suffer ongoing health problems for weeks or months after the usual two weeks or so of illness. Even if you do survive Covid-19, that's not necessarily the end of the story - viruses can be nasty like that.

Of course, none of this has been helped by an incompetent government led by a self-serving, impatient, spoiled man-baby of a prime minister, a man more concerned with tomorrow's headlines rather than properly dealing with a major public health emergency. The UK lost the advantage of being an island in March with a late lockdown, no closing of international borders, and letting events such as Cheltenham go ahead.

Boris Johnson hates being the bearer of bad news, hence his pathetic WWII Blitz spirit cosplaying about it being all over by summer or Christmas or Easter or next summer. And don't forget his incoherent ramblings about the commonsense and pluck of the British people, even when this commonsense appears to be in short supply. But that suits Johnson too - it works for him for us to turn on each other for breaking lockdown rules or being "too careful", rather than to seriously hold him and his useless cabinet to account.

There is a desperation for things to "return to normal", which is perfectly understandable. We are all missing so many things from Before Times. But even after we have been sufficiently vaccinated and the virus sufficiently suppressed, there will be lasting changes. This means everything from irrevocably changed personal relationships to radical decisions made after taking stock over lockdown, through to a growing culture of flexible working, a collapse of the commercial property market, and a possible rethinking about how city centres can be repurposed to be more residential rather than merely places where we go to work before disappearing to the perimeters. 

We cannot and should not emerge from this awful time unchanged and none the wiser. But as long as nonsense, such as that ridiculous tweet from Embery, is shared, the stats unparsed without challenge or consideration, the emergence will be a long time coming.     

Boris Johnson's big, green car con

 

Boris Johnson's latest wheeze is to declare that there will be no more new petrol- or diesel-fuelled cars sold in Britain from 2030. Don't get me wrong - clean air is good. Hell, after five years of living in the UAE, working as a motoring journalist, owning a gas-guzzling SUV, and travelling business class for press trips, I should probably atone for my carbon footprint. It was like a coal miner's lung.

It's not the idea that is the problem. It's the lashings of bullshit that come with it.

First, Johnson can say whatever the hell he likes. After all, why break the habit of a lifetime? He knows he won't be prime minister in 2030. He won't have to actually see this idea through. He won't have to take any real responsibility for the government's role in funding infrastructure, determining policy, or liaising with the private sector to make this happen.

It's a calculated risk. He's smart enough to know there will be a bit of an outcry but it's better to have a few people howling about the latest war on cars than let them get too worked up about the government's ongoing mishandling of Covid-19 or the looming Brexit debacle.

It's not all doom and gloom. Charging infrastructure is certainly improving and the range for electric cars has become longer in recent years. Indeed, the range of a couple of hundred miles is ample for the driving many of us do on a day-to-day basis. Electric vehicles often make sense for local authorities too - if the vehicle is only going to be buzzing around the borough, there's little risk of running out of charge. Fast-charging technology is getting better every year.

But for a lot of us, used to being able to fill up a car with a fossil fuel quickly and easily, making the transition to electric cars will take a mindset shift as well as potentially being expensive. Half an hour for an 80% rapid charge will seem like too long for a lot of people, especially when they need a car for work. Business secretary Alok Sharma revealed how stunningly out of touch he is with real people in a pandemic when he was talking about £20,000 electric cars as being cheap on Sky News yesterday morning. 

A decade should be plenty of time to make the transition, if there was a competent government running the show, but I am not convinced that Johnson's electric vehicle policy, part of a 10-point "green industrial revolution" has allowed a big enough budget.

£1.3 billion to roll out charging points in homes, streets and on motorways probably won't be enough. Currently, the government offers up to £350 for households to install a charging point. With around 75% of adults in the UK holding driving licenses, approximately 20 million households will need a charging point - that's potentially a subsidy bill of up to £7 billion. A lot of houses and apartment building car parks will need charging points. 

Obviously, it's entirely reasonable for companies such as BP and Esso to fork out for charging points at their petrol stations. But this smells like the government pulling a big figure out of their collective arses in the hope that we'll all be so impressed by the sheer size of £1.3 billion that we won't work out what it really means.  

Similarly, £582 million in grants to buy zero- or ultra-low-emission vehicles is a petty cash drawer figure in terms of government spending.

And "nearly" £500 million over the next four years - so less than £125 million per year - for the development of mass production of electric vehicle batteries really won't go that far. The government statement on the 10-point plan adds that this is part of £12 billion in state spending on developing electric car manufacturing with "potentially three times as much from the private sector". So that's money that we cannot count on, especially if car manufacturing goes down the toilet post-Brexit. After all, it's not as if we will be able to make all components or source all materials from the UK - with inevitably buggered-up, expensive supply chains from the EU, it becomes a less attractive investment. 

Then there are concerns about the supply chain ethics of certain raw materials for electric vehicles, such as the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies 60% of cobalt for this sector. The second-biggest producer of cobalt in the world is Russia and its output is 83% smaller than that of the DRC. Wonderful.

Of course, there is an attempt in the statement to desperately appeal to their newly won Red Wall voters and Conservative voters elsewhere with the pledge to create electric vehicle sector jobs in the northeast of England, Wales and the Midlands. For the northeast, this pledge comes just as there are renewed reports of Sunderland losing its Nissan plant if a no-deal Brexit goes ahead - this could be a pre-emptive strike to convince people that this is how the jobs will be replaced. Ironically, it is faintly reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher convincing Nissan to build the Sunderland plant to help replace jobs lost when the coal mines closed, with access to the EU market as a major selling point. 

But Boris Johnson has not got any of the convictions of Thatcher and he certainly does not have her work ethic. There's no real detail in his plans for the automotive sector about how the money will be spent, and no breakdown on practical things such as budgets for retraining workers and retooling factories. At least Sunderland has experience with building the electric Nissan Leaf. Apart from the electric Mini and the possibility of an electric Jaguar, a lot of money will be needed to ensure electric cars can roll off production lines in Derbyshire, Swindon, Norfolk, Warwickshire, Cheshire, West Sussex and Luton.

But this is not a government that does details.

The point in the plan about public transport has nothing much to say to areas where public transport is non-existent. There is a pledge to spend £4.2 billion in "city public transport". Given that in London, TFL's 2019-2020 budget was £10.3 billion, £4.2 billion across all UK cities is going to spread out very thinly indeed. Again, Boris Johnson pukes out numbers that are more than we'll ever see in our bank accounts and expects us to be impressed without question. 

Still, it's all on brand for Johnson. It's all big-sounding numbers and bumper sticker soundbites, as ever. He was supposedly a green Tory mayor for London but that was a con too. This is the idiot mayor who wasted £1.4 million in a failed attempt to "glue" pollution to the capital's roads and removed the congestion charge exemption for hybrid cars. Basically, he got away with developing a reputation for being an eco-friendly mayor because he was photographed riding a bicycle like a saggy-suited clown.

Boris Johnson's figures for his "green industrial revolution" are as rubbery as the condoms he seems to be incapable of using. It's bluster and waffle, there's a strong whiff of pork-barrelling, it is more simplistic sloganeering.

He is a charlatan, a fraud, a major league con man, someone who has fooled voters for years on an industrial scale, the wrong person to be in charge of anything let alone an environmental programme this nakedly ambitious - put that on your electric car bumper sticker.

How to fall in love with a country again

 

Oh, how we whined and whinged when it became apparent that, for a number of reasons, a holiday in the UK was going to have to replace our usual September jaunt to somewhere warm and European. It just wouldn't be the same as lolling by a pool in Corfu wiling away the afternoon with endless gin fizzes or hiring an open top car to explore every corner of Rhodes. Indeed, as we booked rooms in two old hotels at Grange-over-Sands and Peebles, both places where people used to travel in pre-antibiotic days to "take in the air", we resented every penny of the price. We could have a week in Menorca for the same price, dammit. Would it even feel like a holiday if we did all our travelling in the car rather than leaving the trusty Volkswagen at the long-term parking at Gatwick and jumping on a plane?

But as we left the M25 hellscape and hideous traffic around Birmingham behind us, Cumbria hovered into sight and we found our hotel overlooking the Irish Sea at Grange-over-Sands. Sure, it wasn't the most soundproofed of hotels - I am still convinced the couple in the room above us were moving furniture in between acts of copulation - and the breakfast service could have been a bit better organised, but the picture above was the view from our room. When we opened the florid, floral curtains and were greeted by a scene that definitely beat the "sea glimpses" promised on another holiday, there was an overwhelming sense that it was going to be OK.

It was better than OK - work worries were forgotten, we ate, drank and were merry, like all good holidays there was "the incident" (in this case, my sense-of-humour failure after a misreading of Google Maps in the rain in the Lake District), we saw new places and revisited old favourites. When we crossed the border, we had to pre-book our pool time in Peebles, which does kill the spontaneous swim, but we had lovely weather, which is always a bonus on any trip to Scotland. The big coats, packed pessimistically, remained unworn on the back seat of the car.

Of course, no matter where I go, I can't quite divorce myself from politics. After all, I am the nerd who went to Cyprus on holiday and wrote about the tragedy of the abandoned resort of Famagusta, and went to Menorca and ended up writing about feelings of solidarity with the Talayotic people who lived on the Spanish island from about 1400BC until AD1287. 

And so it came to pass that on last week's UK holiday, we could not be unaware of government's ongoing cack-handedness with the coronavirus pandemic. Whether it was loving how the wearing of a mask improved the olfactory experience of using public toilets or wondering how necessary masks were while aboard a boat that was open to the wet and wild elements on our one day of shitty weather, we were conscious of the virus. 

On the way back to London, we stayed with the in-laws in the north-east for a few days, just as the region went back into a partial lockdown - the chat as I got my hair done for a considerably cheaper price than in the capital was of confusion over the latest restrictions, in between utter disdain for Donald Trump ("He's out of his box!") and sympathy for "lovely" Keir Starmer having to self-isolate. North-eastern salon banter never fails to surprise, amuse and delight in equal measure.

In Scotland, we noted the contrast between Peebles and Jedburgh. Peebles was lively, shops were open and busy, there was an air of prosperity, a sense that this historic town was going to be OK no matter what an uncertain future might hold. But Jedburgh, equally bursting with fascinating history and general prettiness, was ultimately a depressing lunch stop - it was hard to find an open cafe for lunch, barely any shops were open, pubs were boarded up, there was neither hustle nor bustle. 

Both towns, along with plenty of places where we stopped in Cumbria, had plenty of signs indicating funding from the European Regional Development Fund - a source of valuable income that has now dried up. These funds are unlikely to be easily replaced, especially as the government's absurd or corrupt attempts to prevent pandemic-related economic disaster drain money away from everything from funding tourism promotion to ensuring the decrepit but clearly once brutally beautiful lido at Grange-over-Sands is properly restored any time soon.

But while I may still be angry about the sorry state of British politics, my anger is tempered with a renewed love for my adopted country and the many lovely people we met along the way. I have a desire for the UK to be the best it can be be - and one thing I do know is that it deserves better than either the elected and utterly risible Johnson government or the hypothetical Corbyn government that was never going to happen because, like it or not, he was never going to resonate with large swathes of voters across the places I visited and revisited on what was a truly wonderful holiday.   

Moving on from Cummings going to Durham with the Dompologists

The Dompologists came out in force as soon as their hero was busted. Apparently, Dominic Cummings going to work on what should have been his first day at home for a 14-day quarantine; driving 260 miles non-stop to Durham with a child in the car while he and his wife were both possibly contagious so they could be near the person who was their only childcare option; the person who was the only childcare option apparently incapable of travelling alone to London if required; being tragically unable to ask a single friend or family member in London to drop off groceries or medication during quarantine; being unable to pay for a grocery or medication delivery service despite having a pretty good combined household income; driving his child to hospital in Durham with his wife while still possibly contagious; driving to Barnard Castle on his wife's birthday with his wife and child in the car on a 60-mile round trip to test his eyesight; not sharing the drive home with his wife even though she can drive; his wife writing a column for the Spectator about life in lockdown which omitted the salient fact that they'd buggered off to Durham; testing the capacity of a Range Rover petrol tank to its absolute running-on-fumes limits; being the parents of a four-year-old with a cast iron bladder; and retrospectively editing a blog post in April 2020 to give the impression that he warned everyone about the coronavirus last year - all mean that he didn't break any of the rules he helped to set and therefore he shouldn't resign.

Instead, a pathetic rebranding of Dominic Cummings, father of the year, erupted. It was quickly pointed out that the whole "he did what any good dad would do" line insulted everyone, especially those struggling to juggle kids and work, and all who had followed the rules since March.

So, the Dompologists started yelling: "LET'S MOVE ON AND TALK ABOUT THE IMPORTANT ISSUES!".

OK. Sure. Fine by me. Let's talk about the important issues. How about we start with childcare? Seriously, I've never heard so many people who have never previously breathed a word about childcare talk so much about childcare when they leapt to Cummings' defence.

Let's talk about childcare not just for now - although that is important - but for the long-term. What can we do about (mostly) women giving up careers because childcare costs meant they were literally paying to go to work? What about incentivising employers to subsidise childcare, offer more flexible hours or working-from-home opportunities to help families? Hell, if anything good can come of this wretched virus, it might be the penny dropping for presenteeism-obsessed employers in regard to trusting staff to work from home. At the same time, though, how about recognising the need for people who work from home to have access to childcare? And what about affordable, high-quality childcare for people on low incomes? Maybe some of the Conservative MPs who smashed the red wall could raise this issue on behalf of their working class constituents?

Perhaps the craven cabinet ministers who all spinelessly tweeted embarrassing boilerplate nonsense about Cummings being a plucky little battler who was struggling with childcare could show the same concern for families up and down the country? I could introduce them to someone I know, a single father raising a severely disabled teenaged daughter while working from home. I'm sure that meeting would prove very instructive for the government front bench.

And let's talk about how shamefully outrageous the Downing Street rose garden press conference was. Why was an unelected adviser allowed to use that particular space to defend himself on live TV?

But more importantly, if the Dompologists want to talk about the big issues of the day, let's talk about how Cummings' defence blew wide open the rifts among Brexiters, and how it became painfully clear that the main reason Boris Johnson hasn't sacked him is because he is too scared to try and be prime minister without his trusty adviser.

Cummings came across as being puffed up with his own self-importance during his rose garden statement but he had a point - to Boris Johnson, he is important. Cummings was quite right to talk up his importance to the running of the country - this is the pedestal on which Johnson placed him and now he's incapable of taking him down.

We have a prime minister who is self-serving, unpleasant, cowardly, bullying and lazy. This PM gig has not panned out like he thought it would when it competed for top billing in his masturbatory fantasies at Eton. As a result, he relies heavily on Cummings, having been way too impressed by the effectiveness of the "Take back control" slogan of the Brexit campaign.

Since then, Classic Dom's simplistic slogans have been the order of the day. To be fair, "Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" was clear and effective. It was an instruction the Cummings himself found impossible to follow but it made sense. Now we have the shitshow of "Stay alert" with a government rushing to ease lockdown rules because public trust has eroded. It seems the government has figured everyone is just going to flock to the nearest park or beach anyway. Bizarre rules about allowing six people in your garden as long as nobody sits on the sunlounger or uses the toilet abound. We're being warned not to have sex with anyone outside our own households but we can let the cleaner, nanny or estate agent in, if required.

Today, we witnessed the Rees-Mogg-inspired farce of MPs queueing in a ridiculous conga line to vote in parliament, along with a drive to force all 650 MPs back into the House of Commons before it's safe to do so, all because the PM is useless without his braying fan club behind him. The pared-back parliament with limited numbers in the house and questions by Zoom exposes Johnson as an incompetent blatherer, a desperate haystack of a man, obviously out of his depth, reaching for Latin Christmas cracker jokes when he has no answers.

Dominic Cummings isn't urging the PM to take a step back and look at this mess with a cool head. He's probably delighted with the chaos - after all, we are edging towards his libertarian wet dream where everyone does the hell they want so they can all be blamed when there's a second spike in COVID-19 cases. And he is happy to continue to lead Boris Johnson down this pitiful path, regardless of whose lives it might cost, along with leading us over an irresponsible no-deal Brexit cliff for good measure. One unelected man has way too much power. That is what has emerged from the scandal over the drive to Durham. That is what is so outrageous and that is why we should stay angry.



Photo: Ninian Reid/Flickr

Alert or alarmed? Conservative communication at its worst

As soon as Boris Johnson pivoted from "Stay home" to "Stay alert", I had flashbacks to Australia circa 2002. The John Howard government, in all its wisdom, spewed forth the slogan "Be alert, not alarmed" in regard to being vigilant about terrorism. 

Of course, by this stage, plenty of people were alarmed about the threat of terrorism in a post-9/11 world and it was never entirely clear what "be alert" meant apart from maybe going above and beyond the usual neighbourhood watch curtain-twitching if you suspected someone might be plotting a terror attack. Alertness didn't stop four young Australians getting killed in 2005 when they were enjoying a night out in Bali, nor did it stop the 2014 siege at the Lindt Cafe in Sydney's Martin Place, in which 18 people were taken hostage and three people were shot dead. 

Should the people who went out for a night on the razz in Bali or the people who were going about their business, meeting friends or colleagues for coffee in Martin Place have been more alert? Of course not because it's is a load of victim-blaming nonsense.

That's the problem with telling people to "stay alert" - at what point does alertness give way to ridiculous paranoia? And how meaningful is advice to stay alert? 

Staying alert is reasonably sound life advice in that it's smart to be aware of one's surroundings, pay attention while driving or keep an eye on the kids when they're swimming in the sea, but how does it apply to a virus that is invisible but deadly? It won't jump you from behind and nick your wallet, despite Boris Johnson's crap mugger analogy after he emerged from hospital like scruffy Jesus. It won't cut you off like Prince Phillip when you have right of way at a T-junction. It won't drag the kids underwater like a freak wave at Tenerife.

In any case, we are already alert. 

For weeks now, people have been rolling their eyes, tutting or yelling at people who don't respect social distancing on footpaths or can't follow simple one-way systems in supermarket aisles. Hell, some people are reporting their neighbours to the police, be it for non-crimes, such as sitting in the sun for a bit, or genuinely dangerous petri dish situations, such as having a load of mates over for a party.

And people were alert enough to avoid public transport unless absolutely essential until this morning. 

Boris Johnson's new "Stay alert - Control the virus - Save lives" message was coupled with a pre-recorded address to the nation last night which avoided the scrutiny of parliament. The advice seems to be to go back to work if you can't work from home, unless you work in a pub, restaurant, barbershop, hairdressing salon or beauty salon; try to walk, cycle or drive to work if you can; and only take public transport if there is no other option. But this was issued at 7pm on a Sunday night, without the accompanying 60-page guidance document, and without any real advice to employers to make sure the workplace is safe before calling people back to work. 

The overwhelming message that cut through was "Shit! I think I have to go to work tomorrow!", probably followed by assorted panics, such as "Shit! Childcare!" and "Shit! I can't get to work unless I take the tube!".

Cue packed tubes in London this morning as people were either called into work by unscrupulous employers who couldn't possibly have done all the due diligence required to make workplaces safe between 7pm last night and 9am this morning, or people who saw the message from the prime minister as a non-negotiable order to get back to work ASAP. For many of these people, it was a decision that was based on fear of unemployment, even if it put their health at risk - and not everyone who went back to work today would have been empowered to walk off the job if they didn't feel safe. 

A construction site worker on a zero-hours contract is not going to be in the same position of power and self-determination as someone who can merrily keep working from the comfort of home. This virus is not the great leveller some say it is.

The poor messaging from a table-thumping Boris Johnson last night was compounded by a hapless Dominic Raab this morning who stammered his way through an interview with the excellent Michal Husain, admitting that maybe it would be better to wait until at least Wednesday to go back to work and, at the same time, refusing to come out and say that workers who don't feel safe should be able to walk off the job without fear. He expressed a faith in the willingness of employers to do the right thing that was, at best, cute and naive and, at worst, a reckless, irresponsible means of washing the government's hands of a likely second spike in virus cases.

It's so easy for people to claim the government's messaging was perfectly clear when they have the luxury of working from home. It's so easy to accuse people of not knowing what the word "alert" means. It's so easy to set the bar so low for this government, even though they have a well-paid communications team at their disposal.

And it's so easy for the latest example of poor communication from this government to be misunderstood - or understood and followed because there was no choice to do otherwise - possibly with the worst possible consequences.

Photography by Circe Denyer

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

What next after the Johnson triumph?

"Get Brexit done!" That's what cut through at this election as swathes of once-safe Labour seats fell to the Conservative Party, particularly in the north of England. Just as "Take back control!" was an appealing, simple message during the EU referendum campaign, after three years of abject incompetence in trying to leave the EU, "Get Brexit done!" sounded very appealing.

It doesn't matter now that plenty of useless architects of the Brexit negotiation shitshow have kept their seats in parliament, or that if the spectacularly self-serving Boris Johnson and others had voted for Theresa May's still-terrible-but-better-than-Johnson's-deal, we'd be out of the EU by now. That's all completely irrelevant.

It doesn't even matter that "Get Brexit done!" - as if it's going to be quick, easy and painless, and then we can just get on with other things - is a massive, simplistic lie. It worked. It resonated with people. Labour wasn't able to compete on that playing field, even if it would actually make sense for Corbyn to stay neutral during a second referendum campaign and then implement the result untainted by how he campaigned - that was a major stumbling block for Theresa May. Corbyn's Brexit stance became irrelevant. And, ironically, he has always been a Brexiter.

Jeremy Corbyn has to resign. He should have resigned in his concession speech, clinging to a few shreds of dignity. Labour has lost two elections on his watch.

It doesn't matter what he promised in his manifesto. Out on the doorsteps, especially in the north of England, the Midlands and South Wales, he is not appealing to voters. It doesn't matter how deeply you analyse his manifesto. Out on the doorsteps, the feedback is that he's too far to the left, he's an overgrown student protester, he comes across as being happiest when he's churning out pamphlets on a creaking old Gestetner in an Islington basement rather than leading a country.

Boris Johnson, meanwhile, was able to get away with puking out endless, easily disproved lies, promises that will be impossible to keep even with a healthy majority, hiding in a fridge, pocketing a reporter's phone, refusing to be interviewed by Andrew Neil and running away from small groups of protesters for bullshit security reasons, mostly because people cut him some slack. He's a truly terrible human being, a self-serving, over-promoted charlatan and a pathological liar, but people still fall for the contrived lovable rascal act.

And let's not forget anti-semitism in Labour. It is there and it is real. It is still not being properly addressed and this was not lost on large numbers of Jewish voters, as well as non-Jewish voters who are not prepared to throw their Jewish friends under a bus. There is plenty of racism and bigotry among Conservative Party ranks and it would be naive to deny that, but it's never a good look for anyone to resort to whataboutery when their own issues with racism are called out. It's not good enough to dismiss charges of anti-semitism with a wave of the hand and a sniff or to minimise anti-semitism as somehow being a lesser form of racism. Labour needs to deal with this issue properly as part of its process of renewal.

If Labour can't work out what has gone wrong from the top down over the last few years, it will not be an effective opposition in the days, months and years to come. It will not be in a position to hold a Boris Johnson government to account. A strong, credible opposition is essential for a functioning democracy in a civilised society. We do not have this right now, and at this moment, we need this more than ever.













Photography by DPP Business & Tax/Flickr

Britain: the spoiled toddler of Europe

We got home in the early hours of this morning from a brilliant holiday on the Greek island of Rhodes. Everywhere we went, my Australian self and my British husband did not have to trouble ourselves with knowing a word of Greek, apart from "Yamas!" when the beers arrived. 

Waiters, bar tenders, hotel receptionists, hotel cleaners, the woman in the mini market, people urging us to have fish pedicures and walk through a giant lion's mouth to enter a club in Faliraki, the guys who take the money for the sunloungers on the beaches, the cheerful car hire bloke - they all spoke good English. Better than good. Way better than anything I could burp out in Greek. And then you'd see them talk to other people and effortlessly swing from Greek to French to German to Italian and back to English for the monolingual people.

Because that is what Brits (and Australians and Americans...) have come to expect - that everyone will speak English. 

I couldn't sneer at the Greek waiter who said "Lovely jubbly!" as he took our order at a beachside taverna, even though I find Jamie Oliver chronically irritating. After all, he took the time to learn a popular English catchphrase for our benefit. If I was waiting on tables in London and that waiter turned up, I wouldn't be able to muster a single Greek catchphrase to welcome him. I could manage some schoolgirl German, maybe some French and Italian babble that would make me sound like a reject from 'Allo, 'Allo, but I'd be flattering myself if I thought I could hold entire conversations with our nearby neighbours in their own language.

But the cliche of the British tourist expecting to be pandered to, coddled and pampered like an obnoxious toddler is true. You do see British holidaymakers talking loudly and slowly, creating halitosis mirages in the faces of bemused Europeans. It's embarrassing (and I'm only British by presumption and association when I travel with my husband) but it's a microcosm of how Britain expects to be treated by the European Union.  

And we have been treated very well as members of the EU. We are not compelled to have multilingual road signs. Our driving distances are measured in miles, not metric. We can order a pint rather than 568 millilitres of beer. We have kept the pound as our currency rather than adopting the euro. We are not part of the Schengen zone. We have the power to deport Europeans for reasons of security and if they are a burden on the welfare system. We would have had even more rights in terms of deporting EU citizens under the deal David Cameron negotiated before the referendum - if we'd voted to stay in the EU. Ironically, he did a better job of negotiating with the EU than any of the lazy, low-information charlatans who have turned up to Brussels since the referendum still expecting special treatment.

It is pitiful to see Brexiters whine about the EU being mean to them when all they are doing is enforcing what it means to leave the EU. The four freedoms are indivisible - if you voted to leave the EU, you literally voted to give up those freedoms. You can poke your bottom lip out and wobble it all you like, but that is what you did. At least have the courage and awareness to own your shit.

If we do end up leaving the EU on October 31, we don't yet know the level of chaos that will ensue. Only a masochist would want things to go badly. But there are some things that will become more difficult, things that many of us haven't even considered. There are no cheaper, smoother alternatives for British companies who benefit from supply chains through Europe - and this is not just for exporting to the EU. Anyone with a map of the world can see that the port of Antwerp offers an easy route to Africa, for example. 

There is a world of crap facing the travel industry too. Trust me, I report on it for a living. Bus drivers who drive in Europe will need EU-approved certificates of professional competence as UK certificates would become invalid in a no-deal Brexit. Insolvency protection for UK retailers selling to EU customers and vice versa will become way more complicated, such as those who sell travel products. UK travel companies will need to take out insolvency protection for each EU market into which they sell. EU-based tour operators will need to be ATOL members. UK travel agents will need proof that non-UK organisations they work with comply with separate UK regulations.

But supply chains and ease of working for bus drivers and insolvency protection for the travel industry and Antwerp - that's all boring, right? If anyone read the paragraph above in its entirety, I'd be stunned. Here's the link to a story I wrote on it if you can be arsed.

No matter what I write, there are still plenty of people who are fetishising any possible hardships, spouting tedious bumper sticker slogans about how we survived two world wars and we just need to invoke the Blitz spirit. Except WWII ended 74 years ago. People who have never fired a shot in defence of anything are carrying on as if they were there, underneath Luftwaffe bombs and enduring rationing. It was a bloody awful time. 

We survived? My arse, we did. We didn't have to do anything because most of us weren't yet born or we were too young to really remember - and for that we should be grateful for the generations before us. But in the online peanut galleries, it is the Brexiters who are claiming a monopoly on respecting the sacrifices of our largely long-dead soldiers. That's bullshit.

The desire in particular to see young people suffer post-Brexit is particularly vile. When did people stop wanting the next generation to have a better, easier life?  My grandfather, who saw the horrors of WWII up close in Papua New Guinea and Japan, was always grateful that his son and daughter and my sister and I did not have to go to war. He did not want us to see what he saw and he did not want our young adulthoods blighted by war and suffering because he was decent and rational.

And as the days grind on, ever closer to October 31, it's obvious Boris Johnson, our wretched joke of a prime minister, has nothing to offer. He has no real desire or ability to negotiate anything with the EU. All he has is meaningless arse-waffle about "believing" and "getting on with it" and "clean breaks". It's the Brexiters who are all about the feelz, even when the attempts by the government to negotiate a deal that won't damage the economy collide with reality and dissipate into a fine powder of delusion.  

This country is behaving like a spoiled toddler. I hope we're not the poorer for it. If the Brexiters prove me wrong, fine. So be it. But spare me the WWII analogies - they're historically ignorant and you're embarrassing yourself like a prime minister who runs away from a bunch of middle-aged protestors in Luxembourg.

   

Photography by Eyesplash/Flickr

Of dead cats and trial balloons...

Dead cat: Apparently coined by political strategist, Lynton Crosby, it is something said or done to draw attention away from unpleasant news.

Trial balloon: A project, scheme or idea that is tentatively announced to test the reaction. 

There is nothing particularly new about dead cats or trial balloons, but in the last few months, we've had enough dead cats dropped on us to fill a Stephen King novel and the sky is so full of trial balloons, everyone has received an online petition about it from Greenpeace.

Basically, the government wants to know how far it can go, exactly how strong is our appetite for assorted populist, right-leaning policies and how loud and effective are the dissenters. And when something awful is happening, a diversion will be created.

The two most obvious trial balloons of recent months were flown by the chronically misnamed Centre for Social Justice,

A think-tank, led by Iain Duncan Smith, floated the idea of increasing the age when the state pension can be accessed, to 75. The CSJ put the proposal forward and it wasn't long before it was howled down by many. It was a bold move for a conservative think-tank led by a Tory politician, considering the reliance by the Conservative Party on older voters.

IDS himself spluttered out a tweet which made a valiant attempt to put a positive spin on a policy that would make many a tired, overworked voter furious:

"Removing barriers for older people to working longer has the potential to improve health and wellbeing, increase retirement savings and ensure the full functioning of public services for all."

Never mind that this policy would lead to many people placing further strain on public services, such as the NHS, because they've worked long after their bodies have started begging for a rest. As if he cares about that - it's all about saving money on the state pension, the biggest proportion of the welfare bill.

A 75 retirement age was never government policy and may never happen, but the reaction to the balloon was probably very instructive for the government.

The other trial balloon from the CSJ was to urge Home Secretary Priti Patel to make the minimum wage for visa applicants £36,700, effectively eliminating people from coming to work in the UK in most nursing, teaching, hospitality and aged care jobs. Despite the obvious labour shortages that such a policy would create pretty quickly, particularly with an ageing population (but, hey, maybe we can look forward to a country where the average care home worker is over 70...), this idea seemed to be a bit more popular, particularly with anti-immigration voters who are being courted by the Conservative Party, lest the Brexit Party parks too many more tanks on the manicured Tory lawns. 

I'm sure it has given Priti Patel much food for thought - and I wouldn't be surprised if she finds it rather tasty indeed.

Of course, both trial balloons caused insta-outrage across social media, even though neither was actually government policy. That said, awful ideas should be challenged loudly because complacent acceptance can be taken as consent.

Meanwhile, dead cats have been distracting us particularly in recent times. The two most obvious dead cats are the ridiculous Jacob Rees-Mogg issuing a ridiculous style guide for his staff to use in written correspondence, and Boris Johnson absurdly claiming he paints wooden buses as a hobby.

While the country was generally united in saying "What a dickhead!" in regard to the Rees-Mogg style guide, Boris Johnson was getting his arse handed to him in Brussels over his delusional rhetoric about negotiating a whole new deal before Halloween. It was probably around then that he realised he had all the negotiating power of a kitten trying to wrest a zebra steak off a lion and started investigating proroguing parliament - or asking Dominic Cummings to look into it for him, because Johnson is essentially a lazy bugger. Negotiation has never been his strong suit.

And Johnson's own dead cat - the admission that he makes model buses from old wine crates for fun - was possibly a work of evil genius. Anyone who seriously thinks Boris Johnson paints model buses in between his busy schedule of shagging, abusing exclamation marks in official letters, farting, spilling red wine on sofas and bellowing bumper sticker slogans instead of answering journalists' questions properly, is either naive or stupid. There is a theory that he was advised, possibly by a digitally savvy member of his team, to confess to this dorky hobby so that whenever someone Googles something like "Boris Johnson bus", the demonstrably dishonest red bus of the EU referendum campaign drops off the search engine's top results. 

Sure enough, I just Googled "Boris Johnson bus" and the first page spat out three model bus stories and three videos on this story at the top. The image search results still lead with Johnson standing in front of the bus promising an extra £350 million a week to the NHS if we leave the EU, but the search results are certainly less embarrassing than they were before that story broke.

As a bonus for Boris Johnson, while everyone was saying: "Model buses? Really?", the heat died down around the story about his row with girlfriend Carrie Symonds, in which the police were called to her flat. 

Johnson is not afraid to look silly. Indeed, his ludicrous persona has helped him get so far with minimal challenge, so pretending to make buses from wine crates is a minor example of buffoonery compared to his litany of contrived wackiness. His whole manufactured eccentric schtick is possibly the biggest dead cat of them all.

And the biggest trial balloon of them all? The one that could rival the movie Up for its house-lifting properties? Proroguing parliament, of course. This is a classic example of Johnson, with the able assistance of Cummings, seeing what they can get away with. It was so easy. He knew the Queen was not going to tell him to fuck off. 

A much-longer-than-average prorogation of five weeks may only mean a few less sitting days in the House of Commons, because of the party conference recess, but for Johnson, it reduces the time for proper parliamentary debate, and further scrutiny is shut down as the House of Lords and all select committees must close under prorogation. This is sinister. If Theresa May tried to do this to force the passing of her EU deal, there would be outrage across the political spectrum, no doubt with plenty of sexist abuse thrown in for good measure. If a Labour government pulled this stunt, the accusations of Stalinist tactics would fly thick and fast.

But already Brexiters are accusing remainers of panicking over a little shut-down and gleefully celebrating the fact that the prorogation makes a no-deal Brexit on October 31 more likely. The trial balloon is having the desired effect. Dominic Cummings is playing a blinder and we'll probably all be poorer for it.

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