Psyche

At my physio appointment today she had me on the floor flopping and flapping around. I explained that rolling over in bed is still proving painful. Apparently when turning over I’ve got to treat my ribcage as if it’s a barrel and arch my back less.

When I returned from the physio studio, I saw this sticker on a random bit of chalkboard affixed to a building. ‘How does it feel to be the father of 100,000 dead,’ surrounding an image of Boris Johnson looking agonised.

I would definitely say that the Tory government’s response to the pandemic has been confusing, that we’ve inexplicably kept borders far too flexible and that public confidence in following restrictions has been lessened by hypocrisy from high profile figures.

But the point is that a strict response to coronavirus is always going to be at direct odds with the fact that in the UK many people don’t want to be too inconvenienced, will struggle to accept relative adversity and will engage in various levels of rule bending, ranging from outright denial of the virus to unnecessary trips to the garden centre. This would be true whether a leader had poured their heart and soul into the strictest response or was someone like Johnson who has been flubbering around doling out lucrative track and trace contracts to his mates.

Boris Johnson is an inadequate leader in my view and is the polar opposite (geographically, literally) of someone like Jacinda Ardern, in terms of being able to inspire his citizens. However the underlying history of the UK and the psyche of the people living in it were always going to make it difficult to enforce something strict and uniform. This difficulty is particularly acute for a Tory government, as lots of influential figures in support of that party are particularly vociferous about the notion of individual responsibility vs strict blanket rules. The government has simply not wanted to alienate the core of its base, especially those responsible for pumping out right wing soundbites.

The nation’s psyche is one that we all have bought into one way or another and which couldn’t be easily solved with a set of stricter policies or lockdowns, given the opposition that these would have received. So while Johnson is a toad, I don’t think it’s fair to malign him alone as the reason for the UK’s high death toll. He’s not responsible for the history of why we have a high life expectancy and a lot of vulnerable people, or why a lot of people are disengaged from or wilfully ignorant about the effect of coronavirus thanks to social media algorithms. This is a society we’ve all bought into and contributed to in various degrees, and I don’t exclude myself from any of these points.

The funniest moment of my day was when Hannah said the fact that a large proportion of the UK population watches The One Show ‘breaks her heart’. We were forced to watch it for a few minutes before Panorama started. It is very earnest (my word) and insipid (Hannah’s). Panorama was an interesting insight into the behaviour of anti-vaxxers and coronavirus misinformation. I think the increasing influence of conspiracy theories and the rejection of what should be accepted truth worry me as much as the coronavirus pandemic.