Adam Boulton Diary – Trump and Boris are this years’ Christmas muppets
My favourite Christmas film is The Muppet Christmas Carol. The puppets preserve the pathos of the original fable but avoid much of Dickens’ signature pomposity and sentimentality. Michael Caine’s laconic acting is admirably suited to the slow awakening of Scrooge’s conscience.
Approaching a year’s winter solstice, I’m usually inclined to a Muppet-style treatment, lightening my verdict on the months gone by in a spirit of amused forgiveness. Not this year.
For me the twin defining moments of 2020 came when both the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the President of the United States caught Covid-19. Other leaders may have been infected, most recently President of France, but only 10 Downing Street and the White House became hotbeds of contagion for others.
Britain and America were shamed by the recklessness of their leaders. Their own experiences reflect in microcosm the disaster which hit the citizens they had been so eager to govern.
After a year of pandemic, nations, as great as both Johnson and Trump boast them to be, should not be recording some of the worst tallies of deaths and new cases in the world. We had the science, the hospitals, the schools, the universities, the informed populations to fight the disease but we did not have the leaders capable of marshalling them effectively or honestly. 301,536 Americans have died due to Covid and 65,000 Britons, according to Friday’s edition of The Times. There is, at yet, no reliable information on the many people debilitated by long covid.
Trump is culpable for ignoring and downplaying the pandemic. In his last few days in office, he has besmirched the office of the President, tweeting lies about his election defeat while still largely denying the health crisis gripping his country.
Boris Johnson’s failure of leadership is different. Unlike Trump who immediately received the best available treatment even while carrying on provocatively regardless, Johnson was initially the victim of the penny-pinching egalitarianism with which we treat our Prime Ministers. He did take the pandemic seriously after his own near-death experience. Unfortunately, it is now clear that he took the wrong decisions or failed to take the right ones at the right time. Still worse, he did not manage to inspire confidence or rally the UK behind him.
With hindsight, it is now clear that the UK went into the first lockdown too late and came out of it too early. The opening up which followed “super Saturday” and the Chancellor’s summer “Eat Out to Help Out” campaign was a costly mistake. In September, the Prime Minister resisted a second lockdown. That indecision alone, according to last week’s devastating investigation by the Sunday Times Insight team, is costing between 7,000 and 13,000 lives. Johnson has no need of hindsight; he had the best scientific advice available at all times, but he chose to override it and obfuscate. Confused messaging from the top continues over the Christmas break and into the return to school in the new year.
It is true that the other nations of the United Kingdom have not done much better in the face of the disease. Scotland’s death rate is only fractionally lower than England’s, for example. But Nicola Sturgeon inspired confidence by continuing with the daily briefings, which Johnson has long abandoned. She has offered plain reasoning for her decision and avoided triumphalism or promises of better times ahead. The Scottish Parliament Elections next May are set to be consequential for the future of the union.
This should have been a honeymoon year for a Tory leader who won a large parliamentary majority last December. Instead, as the trade negotiations run down to the wire, he has failed “to get Brexit done” as he promised. He has split his parliamentary ranks by breaking another manifesto promise on foreign aid, threatening to break international law and the confused imposition of Covid Tiers across the regions of England.
Conservative rebels are not sated with the political blood of the leaders they’ve already slain. There is talk of a move against Johnson next year if things don’t improve. Johnson has time on his side however; four more impregnable years in office, unless he repeals the Fixed Term Parliament Act, as he is planning to do. Labour also needs time to establish itself in the public mind as an alternative party of government and to find a way to overcome the electoral hurdles in Sir Keir Starmer’s path, many of them erected by his own side.
If the pandemic eases, and vaccinations are rolled out effectively, the government hopes for a relaunch rooted in the “levelling up” agenda. A marker has just been put down with the early announcement of what may be Rishi Sunak’s first considered, rather than emergency, budget for 3rd March. Tensions remain between the Chancellor’s fiscally Conservative instincts and the cash it would cost to truly level up between north and south, rich and poor.
So, is a Scrooge-like re-birth of our Prime Minister possible? Boris Johnson is more like the incorrigible Pickwick than Ebenezer. His blend of braggadocio, cronyism, carelessness with facts and attempts to be on both sides of a question have been no surprise to those who tracked him closely on his road to Number Ten – many of whom doubted that he has the qualities to be a good Prime Minister.
This year the nation may find itself joining Sir Michael Caine in “when the love is gone”, the newly rediscovered song from The Muppet Christmas Carol. It was cut because the producer Jeffrey Katzenberg thought it was too “sophisticated emotionally” for children. Taken back to Christmas Past, Scrooge croons with bitter tears to the image of his discarded fiancée, Belle, of “a time when I was sure that you and I were truly one, that our future was for ever and would never come undone.”
“Bah Humbug!” or “God bless us everyone!”, according to your taste. I wish a Happy New Year to all Reaction readers.