Covid Denial Syndrome: Brexit drove the Left mad, the pandemic has demented conservatives

How much more of the madness can we stand? For how much longer must we put up with the insane prescriptions and relentless whining of people who have lost all contact with reality? You might say we have endured more than four years of rampant derangement and you would be right, insofar as Brexit triggered the initial outburst of collective insanity, but that was last year’s shriek du jour from behind the walls of Bedlam: it was the liberal elite confronting its own mortality.

But the current tsunami of irrational, self-pitying, vituperative entitlement has been unleashed from precisely the opposite quarter: it is the howl of rage from people seemingly incapable of confronting their own, or anyone else’s, mortality – the so-called conservatives who have collectively succumbed to CDS, or Covid Denial Syndrome. What, they want to know, is all the fuss about? How dare the government prevent them from having a score or more guests for Christmas dinner? What freeborn Briton would stoop to wearing a mask? Are not the pandemic restrictions reminiscent of the worst excesses of Cromwell and the rule of the major generals?

Much of the conservative commentariat has lost its collective mind. A glance at the headlines on opinion pieces in the conservative house newspaper The Daily Telegraph will give a flavour of received opinion in the wilder reaches of right-wing thought: “Beware Boris, the rage of people reaching the end of their tether could end in your tears…” “Parents will never forgive the Government if it closes schools again…” “It’s not up to the Government to cancel Christmas…” “The PM must set an end date to the inevitable cycle of lockdowns…” “Failed cycle of lockdowns is precisely why Parliament must step in…” “The PM has plunged the country into crisis with his Cromwellian assault on Christmas…”

Have the people who are writing this solipsistic drivel any idea of how badly they are discrediting conservative thinking in the eyes of the public? In this squaring up by Union Jack-waistcoated John Bulls against a tyrannical government, one actor is missing: the Covid-19 virus. This deadly virus has so far infected 78 million people globally – 2.1 million in Britain – and killed 1.7 million, 68,000 of them in this country. Those figures are almost certainly a huge underestimate. Recently, the virus has mutated, with credible evidence of increased transmissibility.

The public is badly scared: opinion surveys showing the kind of percentages that politicians would kill for as statistics of support for their own party clearly demonstrate the public wants to be protected and will endorse strongly restrictive measures for that purpose. But what do those who purport to speak for the tradition of Burke and Adam Smith (a moralist as well as an economist) advise? Business as usual, or at least a free-range existence not far short of normality.

Parents have no right to blame the government if it should deem it necessary to close schools again: killing someone else’s granny because it is inconvenient to find childcare is neither ethical nor community-minded.  As for “Parliament must step in”, we witnessed it doing that, in a Brexit context, for four years and the prospect of allowing it to bring similar anarchy to the Covid crisis is beyond nightmarish. And will the newly re-energised virus suspend further expansion while Sir Bufton and his grandstanding colleagues prose on self-regardingly and hymn “the privileges of this House”?

The full scale of the unreality of the reaction to the crisis is illustrated by the demand for the Prime Minister to “set an end date” to lockdowns. An end date can only coincide with the taming of the virus. How is that to be predicted? Should Boris send Lord Frost to negotiate with the virus? What planet do these people inhabit? These ravings are an expression of the disorientation felt by those who are unused to having their plans, their interests – their “rights” in propagandist terms – disrupted or overridden. The plaint of these singularly un-conservative conservatives could be summed up in the wail of Kevin the Teenager: “It’s not fair!”

Boris Johnson has not ruined Christmas: the virus has. The Prime Minister is trying to prevent Christmas being followed by an unprecedented surge of prosperity for the funeral industry. Boris deserves severe criticism, but not on the grounds invoked by many of his opponents. He is not the Grinch who stole Christmas, he is a frightened and weak politician who is out of his depth in the face of an unprecedented crisis.

His fatal mistake was to promise the country a relaxation of pandemic precautions to “save” Christmas. He treated the public like children, promising that, if they were good and masked-up, Father Christmas would shower them with largesse over the festive season. Even at the time, to any thinking person, that seemed crassly irresponsible. To endure pandemic austerity for weeks and then throw away all the ground gained in a Christmas splurge was never an impressive programme.

Boris Johnson should have told the nation that this was an extremely serious crisis and that nothing in the foreseeable future, including Christmas, could operate as normal. Instead of imitating his hero Churchill and promising blood, toil, sweat and tears – an agenda that instinctively appeals to the masochistic instincts of Britons – he made a pledge he could not possibly keep and is now suffering the opprobrium of broken promises.

But if there is one thing Boris is not, it is a reincarnation of Cromwell. On the contrary, he is the least Cromwellian and most cavalier (not always in a good sense) politician one could ever imagine. He is not locking people down out of malice or power mania, but to repair his own mistakes.

Beyond the conservative commentators, many Tory MPs have, from the start of the crisis, left themselves open to the charge of being more concerned about the economic than the human costs of the pandemic. A back-to-work-at-any-cost mentality may strike some of the public as unhappily reminiscent of parliamentarians’ support for sweatshop or colliery owners in times past. The working class, which still exists, despite sociologists’ cancellation of it, is hardest hit by this crisis and has a right to support from the paternalist tradition in the Tory Party. That support has, to some degree, been forthcoming and Johnson deserves credit for that.

What will not impress the public is pompous calls for MPs to be given an opportunity to do to the pandemic precautions what they did to the Brexit arrangements last year. “I want Parliament to be recalled so we can scrutinise properly in a democracy decisions that are being made which affect our economy radically and our liberty.” (“Nurse, Sir Desmond Swayne is out of his bed!”)

The endless whingeing about “our liberties” is as inane as the sentimental “It’s the young people (i.e. those least at risk in a deadly pandemic) I feel sorry for.” What happened to the Dunkirk spirit? Has it been expunged by nannying and political correctness? How did Britain react in another crisis, in 1940? Did people demand a suspension of the blackout over Christmas? Were there demonstrations against compulsory gas masks? As for the mental health of youth, some young men were so insane as to clamber aboard Spitfires and take on a militarily massively superior enemy.

If conservatives do not recover a sense of reality and the ability to think clearly, all the advantages presented to them by the implosion of the liberal-left in Brexit insanity will be lost, along with the future direction of national affairs.