Whatever happened to Boris Johnson?

How did it come to this? A prime minister who was said to be brimming with positivity and can-do spirit leading the most enervating administration this country has ever seen?

Because be in no doubt: this is a giant vampire bat of a government, sucking the life blood out of the nation, bewildering and terrifying an easily led populace, offering almost no hope to a country ravaged not by a virus but by hysteria, group-think and pusillanimous policy-makers, a miserable, vicious ghoul that has made a bad situation ten thousand times worse.

It all started so differently. In fact, the government was complacent. In an action that would come to define his cluelessness, Boris Johnson listened to Professor Neil Ferguson when Ferguson said that China would not send infected people out into Britain and the world, they would test them and stop them from travelling, as they were with those inside China who couldn’t leave Wuhan. Some hope.

In another move that would come as no surprise to anyone who has ever worked with him, Johnson, a man not able to grasp detail and barely able to make big decisions, went from laid-back to full-on authoritarian in the blink of an eye. The move to impose a heinous, draconian lockdown on 65 million citizens will go down as the worst decision ever made by a British PM in the history of our island. Suez who?

The most hateful, damaging slogan ever conjured up by a UK government was ‘Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’; the lives it blighted, and the lives it will cost, is incalculable, and its detrimental effects will spiral down the years in a multitude of ways. Driven home day after day, week after week, Project Terror screamed that nowhere was safe and everyone was a potential leper, which is an almost perfect way to wreck civil society.

No courage was demonstrated; no foresight was shown; no serious analysis was undertaken of the horrific collateral damage resulting from a lockdown. It is quite astonishing that a man steeped in the classics and who wrote a (lightweight) biography of Churchill gave so little attention to anything but the virus and neglected to ascertain the wider effects of closing down most of society and the economy. But then this was also someone who, as his appearances as host on Have I Got News For You indicated, was barely competent running a light-hearted TV quiz, never mind the British government in a time of crisis.

Fast forward three months. Johnson has been seriously ill with Covid and his Ikea-like Cabinet has proved to be useless and rudderless, with stand-in Dominic Raab doing a good impersonation of a rabbit frozen in headlights when presenting the government’s excruciating, unwatchable press conferences. But the virus has declined in voracity – the Nightingale Hospitals (whose construction did little but stoke alarmism) are empty, and normal hospitals are half-empty. Much more is known about Covid: it has an IFR roughly the same as seasonal flu; 99% of those who die with it have co-morbidities; the average age of its victims is 82. Surely this is when society can start returning to normal, accepting the risk – for there is little in life that is risk-free – with our leaders informing the population of the full facts, giving us solid common sense advice? Oh no. This is where the rot really sets in, this is where Boris Johnson really starts sucking the life out of us.

Partnered by a health secretary who looks like he would take great pleasure in putting a dog down if it broke a toenail and an education secretary who would instantly faint at the sight of this, the government wreaked havoc. Schools, which never should have been closed in the first place, failed to reopen even though there wasn’t a single case in the entire world of a child infecting anyone. A child was in more danger of death from putting their trousers on than dying of Covid (which is actually true.)

At least four months late and therefore quite useless, in came travel quarantines that, it soon transpired, were based on the following: if a country (never mind in what area of the country infections were rising) had more than 20 people out of 100,000 test positive, that’d be them on the blacklist. So while on holiday you’d have to be unlucky enough to meet the 1 in 5,000 infected, then you’d have to get the virus from them, then, providing you were in decent health (which presumably you were if you’d travelled abroad) you’d have to get bad bout of it to pass it on, which you’d have a tiny chance of doing, especially since if you were ill you’d stay indoors. Quite a change, and a deeply dispiriting one at that, from official government policy in March, which was to stop the NHS being overwhelmed (which it never was in any danger of being – if only our scientists had paid more attention to the real-life example of the cruise ship the Diamond Princess, where the case fatality rate was 1.1%, as opposed to the doom-laden, ridiculous computer models of Neil Ferguson, a man with a CV so catastrophic it’s extraordinary that he could even get a job as a janitor, or to the WHO with their wild 3.8% IFR estimate). British people who had undergone months of misery were denied the pleasure of a stress-free break from this wretched isle in the likes of Spain or France because, after they had embarked on them, Boris Johnson declared they were virus hotspots.

It was beyond the wit of our officials to note that, in the vast majority of cases, infections looked higher because there was more testing. Plucky Luxembourg heroically tested 10% of its population by mid-August – its reward was to have the UK put it on the naughty step. Cue the wholesale destruction of the airline industry and swathes of tourism and travel. But then we can't have the great unwashed actually going to places and enjoying themselves, can we?

Ideas of individual choice and personal responsibility became quaint, old fashioned concepts, like the test card and Lyons tea shops. No one could now be allowed to choose to take a ‘risk’, of, say, attending a concert or visiting a nightclub; quite why they were not allowed to do so led to obfuscation, mutterings about ‘killing granny’ or putting too much pressure on nurses and doctors. None of these things were any more the case than in the usual course of life, where we assess our own risks and rewards every single day.

This is a government that seems to despise its citizens, that cloaks its hatred in a kind of crazed paternalism spattered with near supernatural levels of incompetence. Imagine you were a supermarket worker, keeping the likes of those ‘resting’ teachers in food for months on end, and you could finally have a break from the grimness – and then you found that on returning from your break you wouldn’t be able to work for two weeks and would lose two weeks’ pay. This is a government run by nerds and nobodies in Westminster who know nothing about ordinary people’s lives, who know nothing about running businesses, who know nothing about what makes life good or rich or fun or worth living.

When the nation needed hope, the chief gave virtually none. There will probably be a second wave, he repeated parrot-like because he’d heard one of his scientific advisers say it. Go back to work, he said. But doesn’t use public transport, he said. Go out and stuff your face at the government’s expense, he said, but don’t get fat or you might get the virus, he said. The messages coming out of Downing Street changed with the weather. What more obvious sign could there be that we have a leader who does not lead but who governs on whims, a leader who has no underlying philosophy but flip-flops depending perhaps on what he’s eaten for breakfast, or whatever will get him the most short-term popularity.

And that led to the dumbest mixed messaging of them all: masks. Just two months previously deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries had said they did more harm than good; Chris Whitty was not convinced there was good evidence for their efficacy; the WHO had advised against their use; even the manufacturer of one of the best-selling mask brands wrote on their packaging that they would not stop the transmission of Covid-19! And yet they were made mandatory, first on public transport, then in shops, then in churches, cinemas, galleries and more.

So a government that apparently wanted people to go out and return to normal behaviour sought to muzzle them, to present them with crowds of masked zombies, to stifle their breathing while watching a movie or looking at a picture in a gallery, to forbid them from giving a smile to a stranger or a friend, all because of a virus that was now taking fewer victims than flu. Well, scared people are more obedient.

Then there were local lockdowns. Because of what was almost certainly an extra 15 positive swab tests, 3.5 million people in the north west were deprived of their basic freedoms for a further few weeks. This is not the action of a rational, clear-thinking leader, never mind one who had been labelled as conservative or libertarian: these are the actions of a fuzzy-headed despot.

You can’t do anything without interference from the state, you can’t plan anything because there might be a local lockdown or a new travel quarantine - you are at the mercy of bureaucratic diktats that are made up on the hoof without Parliamentary scrutiny or any input from voices that might dissent from official orthodoxy.

The effect of all of these measures, of the masks, the local lockdowns, the travel quarantines, the byzantine rules and regulations that businesses have to adhere to, dishing out vats of stress to their employees, is that this is a nation terrified of getting back to its feet, like a cowed dog beaten so many times it fears standing upright. The trains and buses are empty, the capital city is a wasteland, the GPs surgeries are deserted, the theatres are boarded up, many shops and hotels and pubs will soon follow them, the sports arenas echo with isolated shouts, masked, mute hordes queue outside supermarkets like in the Soviet Union, a mental health tsunami will be upon us in no time, as will tax rises, inflation, mass unemployment and social unrest.

All thanks to electing a prime minister who was ‘brimming with positivity’. What a joke. But then Boris Johnson is little but a sick joke.