Boris broke the rules he made and must go
On June 23, 2020, Boris Johnson justified the extension of a ban on playing cricket to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Other socially distanced sports, like tennis, had resumed. But as he explained to the House of Commons: “The problem with cricket as everybody understands (is) that the ball is a natural vector of disease.” The English summer was well under way – the parks full of bare arms, bucket hats and tinny speakers, but alas, no cricket. And as the writer Neville Cardus once told us: “There can be no summer in England without cricket.” Well we did get our cricket eventually and the summer was rescued – excellent weather in September did mean that a lot of play was fitted in.
Nevertheless, I remember how annoyed I felt when Boris called the cricket ball “a natural vector of disease.” I am willing to bet good money that virtually no one has ever contracted a respiratory virus from a cricket ball anywhere, in any time, in any place. I was annoyed too at the tone Boris had taken – he hadn’t argued from a sense of principle that cricket might lead to more people gathering after matches and therefore might lead to more disease transmission. He had invoked a faux-scientific justification to hedge the argument in his favour. “We’ve been round it many times with our scientific friends,” he told the House sagely. It took a couple of weeks for a scientific study to emerge that concluded that no, really, the ball was not a vector of disease. By that time, the story had disappeared from the papers.
I’m not making a point here about Boris’ capacity to fudge the truth and get away with it – in the pandemic era, many politicians, of all temperaments and backgrounds, drew on poor advice or invoked “the science” to justify politically inflected decision making. I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the date of his appearance in the House of Commons – just four days after the Prime Minister’s birthday, which falls on the 19 June. Boris Johnson has today been fined by the Met for attending a birthday party thrown for him in Number 10 in the afternoon of the 19th.
The record does not show whether birthday boy Boris worried whether his cake might prove to be a “natural vector of disease”.
In one striking government advertising campaign, produced in 2020, billboards were erected telling the public to “always keep a safe distance” and “never bend the rules.” The operative words here being “always” and “never.” Not sometimes or when you feel like it or it’s fine if it’s your birthday. Throughout the height of the pandemic period, even quite fleeting human interactions were labelled a danger to public safety. The public was reminded constantly that following the rules to the letter was an absolute non-negotiable and that the stakes of ignoring the spirit of the rules were extremely high.
That the leadership of this country was not able to follow those same rules, even though they had very, very good reasons for doing so – being outed in the press, for example, shows how crudely difficult that task was. Boris broke the rules but he also presided over a culture in which many officials and political appointees broke the rules too. He made the rules; he bent them and broke them and his colleagues bent them and broke them too. It’s just not cricket. He has to go.