Boris, nod twice for yes. Is anyone in charge?

A lot has happened this week, what with the American election, Donald Trump rerunning the Berlin bunker epic Downfall, and Boris Johnson putting England back into Covid-19 lockdown on the basis of some impenetrable graphs and data that turned out to be somewhat dodgy. I’m not going to attempt to distill all that into one over-arching theme in a long essay about the meaning of politics and the oddities of human existence.

This newsletter – with several items – will be on the short side. Some of it might even be sharp. You have busy lives. This weekend, if you live in England you have plans. You want to take time to meet up with 35 friends, then do some shopping for non-essential items, play a contact sport, breathe over some people on public transport, visit a busy pub before moving on to a crowded restaurant, and then top it all off with a trip to the theatre before enjoying a nightcap at a nightclub or a dance at an illegal rave.

Sadly, none of that is now possible, other than the business of attending an illegal rave. Those gatherings are fast becoming almost as popular in Britain among the young as they were in the late 1980s, back when impromptu raves or parties featuring lots of drugs and loud music were held in muddy fields near the then newly-opened M25, the motorway that rings London. More than thirty years later, mid-lockdown, some among the minority of youngsters who have had enough of the latest restrictions have taken to organising such raves on the basis that they are young, and while Covid-19 is a serious disease it does not kill the healthy young.

Apologies to readers outside England, who will have little idea what I’m talking about. We’re in lockdown here, again, and the national situation becomes more surreal with every passing day.

I was going to say that the height of absurdity this week was the decision by someone in a position of authority at Manchester University to put a fence up, internment camp-style, around student accommodation blocks. The students (heroes) who are paying vast fees for the privilege of being locked up marched in protest and demanded the fences come down.

But that wasn’t anything like the height of absurdity, this week.

What was most weird was the peculiar sequence of events that left Boris Johnson announcing his lockdown when he did not, it seems, even want to do it.

A week ago last Friday, a group of key ministers met with Johnson to discuss whether to move to a full lockdown in England or to stick with less stringent regional tiers. They discussed a lot of scary charts presented by government scientists showing the virus surging. News of their discussion  leaked, somehow, and Boris was furious. The next day, Saturday, he was bounced into an emergency meeting agreeing the lockdown, and after several hours of delay while the politicians squabbled he unveiled it in a press conference beamed to a nation awaiting that evening’s edition of Strictly Come Dancing, the popular entertainment show.

The Prime Minister was reluctant because he had wanted to wait, to see how the Covid case numbers developed. The bounce put an end to that.

By the middle of the week it turned out that the numbers on which the decision was based were highly questionable. The projections and worst case scenarios had to be revised down.

Advocates of lockdown are nothing if not endlessly flexible. They deem lockdown always the answer, no matter what the question. They had demanded the lockdown because numbers were supposedly rocketing. When the latest Office of National Statistics figures published on Friday suggested a possible plateau in the numbers then the pro-lockdown forces said continued lockdown was also the answer to maintain the levelling off.

The lockdown argument looks lost. The lockdowners have triumphed and there will presumably be more and more of the things.

But the strange episode makes it obvious no-one is in charge of the clattering train. Boris looks like a confused and lost soul, a prisoner of events and of those around him.

There is a no meaningful political opposition either, beyond a band of Tory rebel MPs who cannot win votes in the Commons. Labour, the official opposition, is aggressively pro-lockdown in order to make the government look lax, so any suggestion that this national lockdown and baseball-batting of the economy is over the top must be ignored by the Labour leadership. Meanwhile, the government is full of exhausted, traumatised people who do not want to take the blame for something else going wrong. So they put scary graphs in front of a confused Boris (never a detail person) and here we all are.

Once in a while the British political system produces these strange moments of broad consensus when the opponents are deemed to be eccentric and almost everyone agrees to go along with the established view until the following year when hardly anyone can be found who is still for the policy. Appeasement in the late 1930s and Britain’s entry to the ERM in the early 1990s spring to mind.

I wonder if lockdown will be like that, once people realise that we have flattened the economy, perhaps induced a Depression, and condemned many of our fellow citizens to other illnesses and immiseration, by for the first time in human history dealing with a virus by shutting down an entire society.

Good King John

My new hero is John King of CNN, the manipulator of the magic screen on election night and in the days that followed. The magic screen displayed maps of the US election battleground and journalist-presenter King pressed it, pointing at a state or a county while rapid-fire analysing the information on votes cast and results as they came in. His style is calm and non-partisan.

His was a mesmerising performance, kept up hour after hour. He was still going on Friday as victory loomed for Biden.

In our house we tried switching to a few other networks throughout the night, and subsequent days, but it just wasn’t the same without King, his screen and his myriad catchphrases, all delivered serenely. They are all good adages for how to live life, including: “If you lose votes there (points at Arizona) you have to make them up somewhere else.”

Trump’s in a world of pain

Donald Trump, the outgoing President of the United States, channel-surfs constantly. So there is a good chance he was watching CNN some of the time. It is a network he hates, but he knows all the programmes and what’s on them. Was he watching when John King said on Thursday that Trump’s angry demand to stop the counting made no sense? If the counting had been stopped then, when Trump tweeted, he would still have lost as Biden was ahead. His lead has only lengthened since. King’s putdown was all the better because there was none of the usual CNN-posturing. It was a simple statement of fact.

What will Trump do next once the legal challenges on the result fizzle out? There’s an assumption that he will still be a major player. True, he or his daughter Ivanka may run in 2024 and he’ll fight to maintain control of the key positions in the RNC, the body that runs the Republican Party. Big money Republicans and the old party establishment will have to be careful, because Trump has his base and the party needs those voters.

But as a Reaction reader and veteran of the American media/political game reminded me this week: Trump out of office is soon going to find himself in a world of pain. For years there will be endless legal cases and he has a mountain of debt that needs to be refinanced to keep his commercial empire going.

I hope that thought – of Donald Trump being litigated to hell and back for years while he battles to refinance his vast debts – doesn’t ruin your weekend.