Porter’s Pensées

Of course I have no informed opinion about when to shut down the Lockdown, or any of the other matters surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic. I’m the last person to ask about matters of the body, for years having confused my stomach with my bladder. From this position of ignorance, I understand that much seems to depend on whether people who have had it once are thereafter immune and non-infectious. If they are, then obviously they should be allowed to wander, hug and congregate at will. But I don’t think the scientists have established that yet; and even if they do it will require a mass programme of testing to separate the healthy sheep from the sickly goats. The sheep could then be given badges or tattoos to wear in public. Any goats found among them would of course be rounded up and locked in cells.

As is usual in circumstances like this, when you’re dependent on others’ expertise, the temptation is to question the motives of the experts and their mouthpieces (in this case the politicians) rather than the evidence itself: the old ‘ad hominem’ approach. That after all is how most of Donald Trump’s supporters appear to proceed: by simply doubting or even rejecting out of hand everything that is said by the ‘fake’ media, or by the Democrats, or by experts, or by ‘the elite’, and anything that was done by Obama, simply because of who said it or did it, without stopping for a moment to examine the evidence or the arguments per se. (Sorry about the Latinisms, which won’t endear me to this kind of person.) We on the (British) Left tend to do this as well: to dismiss anything coming from the mouth of a Conservative, for example, as bound to be affected by prejudice or evil motives. ‘Look who’s saying it.’ ’Nuff said.

One of the motives being attributed to the Johnson Government by the Left is some version of ‘herd immunity’ (in Sweden, incidentally, it’s called ‘flock immunity’), which, by letting the disease run amok, will weed out the vulnerable leaving only the healthy surviving. I think that’s what Boris meant when initially he advised us to ‘take it on the chin’: a striking phrase, even Churchillian, but – like all his metaphors – it’s not entirely clear what precisely it’s supposed to mean. It’s said to have been suggested to him by Dominic (Demonic) Cummings, though there are of course precedents – TR Malthus and A Hitler being the most obvious ones. At present the ‘losers’ would include the elderly, and those with ‘underlying conditions’; which is why the disease is currently so rampant in retirement and care homes. The elderly, of course, tend to be thought of as economically ‘useless’, and even a ‘burden’ on society, which is why culling them would be of benefit to the nation, especially with the prospect coming up – we are told – of the worst trade depression in 300 years.

That would include me. I’m over 70 and with an ‘underlying condition’, which means I would be one of the first for the chop. Up to now I’ve rather basked in the position of doing my  patriotic duty by staying indoors and lounging on my sofa, with supplies being brought to my door by Tesco’s and good neighbours, so that I don’t get infected and infect others. But perhaps I should re-think. I might be doing more for my country by allowing myself to be culled.

Well, I’ve had a good, lucky life, and a longer one than I ever imagined possible (with my ‘underlying condition’). So perhaps I should volunteer. If so, however, I’d like to make a condition: that I take down certain others with me. I could make a list; headed of course by Boris, Nigel and Rupert, but probably a few hundred names long. My £950 p.m. pension would be a bit of a saving for the State, but probably not enough to make my death alone worthwhile. So: only if I can take those other bastards too. Is it a deal?

I have no memory of VE Day, though I was four and bit years old at the time. (The ‘and a bit’ is of course important at that age.) I do remember some things about the War years themselves, including the silhouette of a German parachutist coming down in a garden near to ours; but that must be a false memory because – although it happened – I was actually being born (feet first) at the time. Then I remember the blackouts; sheltering under our iron-reinforced dining room table as the bombs exploded around us, with my mother telling me ‘not to worry, they’re only fireworks’; and later being evacuated with my mother to a farm in Staffordshire, where the farmer’s wife insisted we only eat our ‘rations’ – I remember powdered egg in particular – rather than any of the fresh food that came from the farm. We were evacuated because we lived close to one of the Battle of Britain airfields. My father stayed behind to look after his school. Recently I saw a contemporary map showing where the V1s and V2s landed around us. Some of them were very close, and later we got compensation (I presume from Germany) for minor bomb damage to the house.

But my main memories are of the immediate aftermath: returning servicemen; bomb sites to mess around in; bits of shells to collect; rationing still – no sweets for sale for years afterwards; Dennis Compton’s glorious, cavalier batting, reminding us of those brave British and Polish Spitfire pilots who had stopped Goering in his tracks in 1940; Attlee’s surprise election victory in 1945 – sorry, Winnie, we needed you in the War but it’s now time for the people to take over; and – mainly – the hope that sprang from all this. (I wrote about this in the TLS, 23 December 2016.)

The TV programmes about VE Day shown on BBC1 last night brought it all back to me, and, I have to admit, had tears welling up in my eyes at one point. That was when two Spitfires, lovingly preserved from the War years, were shown flying over the white cliffs of Dover (cue Vera Lynn) in tribute to those brave pilots who, 70-odd years before, had taken off from our local Airfield to push Hitler’s monstrous invasion back. That left us in Britain still alone and vulnerable, but free to fight another day, and to wait for the might of America and the USSR to finish the job. I still find Spitfires iconic.

That early experience has defined the War for me; together with the bravery of ‘ordinary folk’ during the monstrous Blitzes on London, Coventry, Hull and elsewhere, and the little boats that brought our soldiers back from Dunkirk. Yes, as a historian I realise that’s only part of a picture that by rights should also include the black market in Britain, famine in India, and the bombing of Dresden. But I like – could almost say ‘am proud of’ – the fact that it’s these aspects of World War II that appeal to most of us who are sometimes criticised for ‘going on’ about it; rather than our military victories, such as they were.

For people like me it was a democratic war – the pilots and the little boats; and with a democratic outcome: the Welfare State. Don’t let the Right take that from us.

If Boris Johnson thinks that Churchill’s main contribution to Britain’s War effort was to keep people’s spirits up, then I go along with him. Churchill was not a great military strategist (viz. Gallipoli, and a string of hair-brained ideas during World War II), and as a peacetime politician made a number of dreadful misjudgments (Gandhi, for example, and Tonypandy); but he was great orator, and by that means helped bolster ordinary people’s morale, possibly crucially, during an existential national emergency.

Boris is of course one of Churchill’s many biographers, and known to be a huge admirer. From the way he’s bounced back from his ‘brush with death’, and his girlfriend’s brush with birth, all chippy and cheerful and reprising his former colourful  way of talking, as well as the war metaphors he’s always been so fond of, it looks as though it’s this aspect of our heroic War Leader’s career he’s modelling himself on.

But he forgets. One of Churchill’s advantages in 1940 was that, despite having been so wrong about India and the British working classes in the interwar yeas, he had been right all along about the threat from Hitler (albeit possibly for the wrong reasons!), and in opposing his own party’s flirtation with ‘appeasement’; and so was bound to be more trusted  on these matters than were any of his Tory rivals. Boris lacks this advantage, as his own initial disastrous response to the Coronavirus threat clearly shows; and indeed his whole public reputation as a serial liar and deceiver must undermine any trust that people might otherwise have in him. He’s also nowhere near as serious  a public speaker as Churchill was; in fact he’s a very poor one, hesitant and bumbling. He’s known as a ‘card’, but even his jokes are pretty feeble – mainly public-school juvenile. So he’s got a lot of work to do before he can emulate his great hero convincingly, and be seen as the ‘saviour’ of his people in their present hour of need. – And that’s quite apart from his having a cabinet made up of lickspittle loyalists chosen only for their Brexitism, and who aren’t the most competent men and women that even the Conservative party has to choose from.

What was it Marx wrote – comparing Napoleons I and III? – ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.’ That seems to fit.

What is going to come out of all this? First, obviously, a thorough enquiry into the UK Government’s handling of the Coronavirus crisis, which ought to make it unelectable for many more years – but probably won’t. We’ve seen recently how insidious and powerful the forces of Reaction are, and how easily the democracy can be fooled.

Otherwise the best that people are hoping for seems be that things return to ‘normal’; but that’s unlikely, and in any case would be undesirable, in view of the fact that pre-Coronavirus ‘normality’ wasn’t, by most rational ways of looking at it, ‘normal’ at all. The whole history of Britain over the past 50 or so years has revealed scales of inequality, corruption, personal ineptitude and constitutional disfunction that no-one devising a society rationally, or a government that serves its citizens fairly, would contemplate for a moment. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that our system has evolved, over the centuries, rather than being properly planned and embodied in a written constitution; with all the untoward and undesirable features that evolution so often entails. (Look at wasps.) Not that written constitutions are necessarily more reliable. (Look at the WASPish USA.)

When we’re able to return to the drawing-board, if  that day ever comes, there are certain major changes that will have to be made. Here are a couple. (I’ll add more at a later date.)

One is a thorough rescue effort for the National Health Service, whose inadequacies have been so bleakly revealed by the Coronavirus crisis; most of them caused by Tory underfunding and privatisation. They have also been exacerbated by the Conservatives’ immigration policies, at the behest of the Brexiters, which are depleting the numbers of overseas medical, nursing and care staff upon whom the NHS disproportionately depends, and whose literal sacrifices – of their lives – for the health of the nation are now well known. The NHS has been shown to be – as we always knew it was – the British institution most loved and championed by the general population. From now on there can be no more Osborneian financial decimation, and no more talk  – even – of privatisation. The rich, and the not-so-rich but pretty comfortably off, must have the taxes squeezed out of them to restore the NHS to what Nye Bevan’s ideal for it always was. The health of the people should be regarded as a basic responsibility of government, not to be hived off to profiteers like the tax-dodging Richard Branson. (The cheek of the man – asking now for the government to bale out his airline!) Putting Branson’s nose out of joint will probably get any government bold enough to do it widespread popular support.

Secondly, we must take a look at the kind of people we are choosing to govern us. In my view, if they are to represent the people, they must have done ‘proper’ jobs before coming into Parliament. Writing opinion pieces for newspapers isn’t a proper job. Most of the journalists who rise high in politics today have merely commented on the world of those who do have proper jobs. They’re often just down from Oxbridge, and without having worked at anything more practical and serious in their young lives. Their main political experience – I’m talking of the Tories now; Labour has its own limitations in this regard – has been through Public school and university debating societies, which invariably value style over substance. All the laurels go to the (supposed) ‘wits’. (I know; I was at Cambridge.) Superficial ‘wit’ can then serve them well in national politics, as we’ve learned from the example of the clown we now have at the head of us. I have nothing against Public school Old Boys coming into government; but their Public school and Oxbridge education can’t be the sum total of the experience they bring with them. It wasn’t in Clement Attlee’s case, for example, who by virtue of his service after Haileybury in the First World War – rather more distinguished than Churchill’s: he rose through the ranks – and his immersion in social work thereafter, qualified him to be Prime Minister far more highly than Boris. There has to be a process for screening the Johnsons and Goves out. How that can be done, short of abolishing the Public schools entirely, could be the subject of another State Commission.

Then there’s our electoral system, on which I’ve already pontificated (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/); the press; education; the peculiar nature of present-day capitalism; women’s rights; and a few other things, on which I intend to pontificate later on. (Watch this space.) It has all got  to change. People usually equate ‘normality’ with what they’ve been used to. But there are other and better normalities than – for example – the Blair-Cameron consensus we used to live under. Living in Sweden as I do I’m particularly aware of that. Sweden may not be a perfect model for Britain –  I don’t think it is; but it shows that other normalities are possible.

Either main party could achieve this. The Tories have changed their spots before now, usually in the interests of survival. But Labour, if it can resume the habit of winning, would obviously be the best bet.

In case anyone’s interested, here’s the original version of my review of Khalidi’s book on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which will appear shortly – slightly edited – in Jacobin.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance. 319pp, illustrated. Profile Books, 2020.

Imperial historians know what colonialism looks like. The history of modern Israel clearly fits that category. That’s why Leftists, who have always been in the forefront of the international anti-colonial struggle, are more likely to support the Palestinians in the present dire conflict between them and the Israeli state. It has nothing to do with ‘anti-semitism’ in the proper sense of the word.

Rashid Khalidi’s new book, part history, part politics, part personal reminiscence – he was involved in many of the later events described here – retails the story of the century-long conflict between Arabs and Zionists since 1917; not exactly impartially, as it’s told from a Palestinian point of view, but fairly in view of the overwhelmingly pro-Israeli narrative that has generally prevailed until recently, and which has needed to be counter-balanced, especially in Israel’s patron-state, the USA.  ‘Colonialism’ is the theme that runs right through the book, prompting parallels between Zionism and many of the now notorious European examples of the phenomenon in Africa, India and south-east Asia. Of course these weren’t quite so notorious when they happened, which was precisely when the idea of European Jews ‘colonising’ Palestine first took hold, with Zionists unembarrassed about using that word for it. It is only later that colonialism fell out of favour, which is why Israel now prefers a narrative that places them as the original indigènes of the country (with their title granted by God, no less), and the Arabs as the invaders. Either that, or sees the whole country as essentially empty of anyone but wandering tribes and savages: a terra nullius, therefore, like pre-settlement Australia or North America, which the Jews could ‘raise in civilisation’ (a common imperialist trope); and certainly never the ‘nation’ that many Palestinian Arabs claimed. The first part of this book contains plenty of evidence for those wanting to dispute either of these views.

The rest of it is an account of the one-sided ‘war’ between modern Palestinian nationalists on the one hand, and Jewish Zionists and their powerful allies – first Britain, then the USA – on the other. Most of this is pretty well-known by those who have managed to free themselves from the Hollywood Exodus image of the creation of the state of Israel, but is given added immediacy by the personal experiences of the Khalidi family recounted here. The main villains, as one might expect, are the Zionists who insisted on taking over the whole of Palestine for their new, ethnically-based state; together with the original British mandatories, the successive US governments which backed them, and the neighbouring Arab autocracies which, for reasons of their own, were – Khalidi maintains – almost equally complicit. The Palestinians should have expected more help from them. But their own leaders were equally culpable, due to their fratricidal divisions, personal failings, and lack of the diplomatic and propagandist skills that the Israeli side possessed in abundance. It could also be that the sheer ruthlessness of the Israeli armed and intelligence forces cowed them, as it was intended to: indiscriminate shootings and bombings, planned assassinations of Palestinian leaders, torture, mass imprisonment, exile, many of them recounted here; and their clever spread of disinformation in the West. Two forms of the latter were the over-identification of the Palestinian cause with wider phenomenon of Islamicist ‘terrorism’, in order to discredit it; and the deliberate confusion of anti-Zionism with the stain of anti-semitism, which of course no-one on the Left, especially, wanted to be tarred with. (This may have played a part in Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the British general election of December 2019. At any rate, that is what at least one Mossad agent claimed.) The Palestinian cause had nothing like the expertise or the money that the American pro-Israeli lobby could draw on, from the Jews living there. Rashid Khalidi knows all about this, as an American resident (and indeed citizen) himself for most of his professional life. (He is presently the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia.) Perhaps they should listen more to him.

At the end of this book he expresses the hope that the tide of opinion might now be beginning to turn in a Palestinian direction, at least among young Americans and Israelis – he cites the ‘BDS’ movement in American universities – which could augur happier times for the whole region. Widely-publicised Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank will have had much to do with this shift in opinion, contributing to the remarkable transformation of Israel in many people’s esteem over the past thirty or so years from victim (after the Holocaust) to villain. Maybe simply acknowledging these would help; as Khalidi himself fully recognises the Jews’ sufferings in the past as a powerful reason for their wanting a nation of their own, and Israel’s present fears of its neighbours, though he believes these are exaggerated. Nonetheless he thinks Israel must abandon full-throated Zionism – the ultra-colonialist Eretz Yisrael which is clearly still Netanyahu’s ultimate dream, for example – and recognise that the Palestinians constitute a genuine ‘nation’ too. That would pave a way to the ‘two-state’ solution that Israel has always disdained, but which the PLO came round to accepting relatively recently. It would also however require that the Palestinians recognise, on their side, the reality of Israel’s ‘national’ credentials, in spite of their having less credible historical roots – unless you’re a Bible fundamentalist – than are often claimed for them. As Khalidi points out, no-one disputes this in the cases of other comparatively recent settler states, like Canada and Australia. (There’s the colonial parallel again.)

The United States remains a problem. Quite apart from the powerful ‘Israel Lobby’, which one hardly dares to mention these days for fear of being labelled anti-Semitic, Khalidi makes the interesting suggestion that Americans might not be quite so repelled as other countries by Israel’s continuing expansion of its ‘settlements’ in the ‘Occupied Territories’ – one of the international community’s main gripes against it – in view of their own history of colonial settlement in the west of their own continent, which is not only tolerated in retrospect, but has even been made the stuff of heroic legend (all those ‘Westerns’), to a degree that Europe’s colonial exploits never have. For these and other reasons, Palestinians should stop regarding the USA as a potential mediator, and instead treat it ‘as an extension of Israel… which would represent its real position at least since 1967’. All previous agreements should be scrapped, and negotiations begin de novo. By that time, with the balance of the world changing as it seems to be doing now, we may reach a position in which other rising powers, more favourable to the Palestinians, will have more clout in Middle Eastern affairs. Khalidi suggests India and China. He seems to have given up on the USA.

‘Perhaps’, Khalidi concludes, ‘such changes will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve.’ That would make a happier conclusion to this distinctive episode in the history of European colonialism, than any of the hoped- and feared-for alternatives. It would also make things easier for non-Jewish philo-semites, like the present reviewer, who find the conduct of the present Israeli state so upsetting to our instinctive sympathies. Jews, we think: ‘you’re better than this’.

In any case anyone who wants to learn about the course of the Israel-Palestine conflict up till now, and is open-minded, should read this book. It comes over as a brilliant synthesis of high scholarship and experience, fair-minded despite its overtly Palestinian leanings, and highly readable. Americans and Israelis especially should read it, including the younger, more liberal ones, into whose hands the fates of both of the legitimate nations in this region must now pass. Please don’t let this go on for another hundred years.

As if coronavirus weren’t enough to worry about. (Especially for us oldies, who are so much more vulnerable to it. I’m half-expecting to be struck down at any moment; and even if not, my generation looks like having to endure self-isolation for far longer than anyone else – another four months at least, and possibly to the end of the year. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51895873.)

On top of that, however, comes disturbing intelligence about the Labour Party; on which Lefties like me would ordinarily be relying for some measure of salvation in the present situation, but whose upper echelons are currently wracked with internal divisions, and with evidence of some quite despicable right-wing (or ‘Blairite’) plots against its leadership – including that ‘anti-semitism’ canard – during the last election. Not only that, but its new leader appears to have abjectly surrendered to the Jewish Board of Deputies on that last question, which some of us, from a socialist-internationalist and pro-Israel but also pro-Palestinian and anti-‘Zionist’ perspective, feel is pretty important, to say the least. (See  https://www.timesofisrael.com/keir-starmer-elected-uk-labour-chief-apologizes-to-jews-for-party-anti-semitism/. )

I voted for Starmer in the leadership election, and am sticking by that – for the time being; but only because I’m convinced of his socialist instincts in other matters; impressed by his previous career in the public service, as a human rights lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions, no less (which is why he’s a ‘Sir’ now); and believe he may have the kind of ‘gravitas’ that will impress voters the next time around. It’s going to be difficult for the Tory press to paint him as a traitor, a Soviet spy, a terrorist sympathiser, and a poor dresser. Which is not to say that it won’t dredge up something unflattering from his past. Perhaps as DPP he let off a murderer or two, on good legal grounds but against the lynching instincts of the mob? And after all, aren’t the judiciary ‘enemies of the people’? But we’ll see.

Some left-leaning socialists – a few, I hope – are already threatening to leave the party because of him. These are the purists,  who won’t settle for anything less than ideological perfection, and who in the past have often been accused of preferring to be right and forever in opposition, rather than to sully themselves and win. I’ve never been one of those, always opting for the prospect of half a loaf rather than none. It might be different if there were another radical party one could jump over to. (I once foolishly thought the Liberal Democrats might fulfil that role, on the only occasion when I forsook Labour, under Blair.) But there isn’t.

That’s basically because our electoral system makes it almost impossible for our politics to adjust to new movements of opinion, by spawning and nurturing new parties that properly reflect these views. Compare Sweden’s ‘proportional’ system, for example, which is far more flexible.  (I’ve blogged on this before: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/.) I know it would be a wrench, especially to politicians who have done well out of the existing system; but abandoning – or at least modifying, as I propose there – our ‘first-past-the post’ model might have gone a long way to solving many of the Left’s political problems over the last few years. But that’s in the future, hopefully.

In the meantime we socialists will have to stick with Starmer. You never know: circumstances – like the coronavirus – might push him and the entire country to the Left; just as our last great national crisis, World War II, did. Just now we’re in an unprecedentedly dirty political world, with Murdoch, the Daily Mail, the ‘Israel Lobby’, Machiavels like Cummings (where’s he hiding just now?), and congenital liars like Johnson manipulating us all. You can’t overcome all this, without becoming just a little besmirched. Starmer’s stance on Israel might be a necessary smudge. At the very least it should keep the anti-anti-semites off our backs.

On the other side of the pond Bernie Sanders, my American political hero, and a soul-mate of the sainted Jeremy Corbyn, is clearly thinking along the same lines; as is shown by his recent exit from the Democratic race and backing for the centrist Joe Biden instead. But then American radical Democrats have nowhere else to go, either. It’s that bloody ‘First Past the Post’, again. (In their case, of course, it resulted in the election of a rogue President on a minority of votes.)

Yesterday I cast a slight doubt – and I thought at the time a possibly unworthy one – on Boris’s claim to have come though a potentially fatal episode of the Coronavirus last week. It appears that I’m not the only one with suspicions. Mine were rooted simply in Boris’s notorious tendency to lie about almost anything. This morning, however, I found this article on the web, which elaborates our doubts: https://www.worldoftrash.co.uk/did-boris-johnson-fake-having-coronavirus/. I’d not come across ‘ABZ’ before, and don’t usually accept sources like this: it does look a bit ‘conspiratorial’, doesn’t it? (I notice that the Google moderators have suspended it temporarily – but see comments below); but it raises some interesting questions. Has anyone noticed him coughing? Nuff said.

17 April: of course not. As has been pointed out to me, too many people, including the staff of St Thomas’s Hospital, would have to have been in on the deception. I never really thought this. But in view of his past, Boris only has himself to blame if he arouses such suspicions. And he still might have been exaggerating his closeness to death: ‘it could have gone either way’. It will certainly have worked out well for him, if (1) it gets him some sympathy, and (2) it keeps him out of the public firing line for a while. Whatever his other qualities, as a ‘national leader’ he doesn’t exactly inspire trust.

It’s difficult to plot Boris Johnson’s trajectory from now on. After a week dicing with death, as he likes to put it: ‘it could have gone either way’ – I’m sorry to introduce a note of doubt there, but we all know what a congenital liar he is – he’s out of hospital and resting at Chequers, with the good wishes of his grateful people – well, the Daily Telegraph, at any rate – ringing in his ears. (Here’s the Telegraph at its most fawning, just a few days ago: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/04/10/boris-near-deathsent-shiver-nations-spine/).

His ‘brave’ battle with the grim reaper – leaping into the front line with nary a thought for himself – might be bankable. Forget that it was basically his own fault that he caught the virus: contravening his own advice about keeping his distance from people by shaking hands with patients he claimed were corona sufferers, and then boasting about it. Images of the weeping bearer-to-be of his love-child could garner him some sympathy. Admirers have been emphasising how hard he has been working on all our behalfs since becoming prime minister, burning the candle at both ends, without a holiday even. (What about that long New Year’s break on Mustique?) His recent experience apparently shows how ‘tough’ he is, which is what we want in a ‘leader’, isn’t it? – as well as demonstrating to the nation at large how serious this virus is: ‘for the first time’, claims his silly father. In fact most of us didn’t need a family member to be stricken in order to realise the gravity of the situation.

It’s hard to see what practical advantage this will give him in the Brexit negotiations when (if?) they come; but it may deflect some of the criticism that is bound to be directed at him when (if?) the virus passes, and we need to take a reckoning of everything that went wrong: from the crucial delays in ‘testing’, and the shortage of medical equipment, back to the way his Conservatives had so gravely and deliberately weakened the NHS and the social services over the past ten years. On his ‘release’ Boris paid fulsome praise to the NHS that had looked after him, as has just about every Tory spokesperson over the past few weeks: right against the grain, one suspects, for those ideological privatisers. (It sounds forced.) That is almost bound to accrue to the benefit of the Health Service in the future. Johnson also singled out for praise the two nurses who had tended him in ICU, one from New Zealand, the other from Portugal. Did he realise that these are exactly the kinds of ‘immigrants’ that are going to find it harder to come to Britain under legislation his government plans to introduce soon? (They would fall short of the personal income barrier that will be imposed.) The NHS, of course, is heavily dependent on foreigners to be able to function. All the doctors and nurses who have died of Coronavirus in the last couple of weeks are from abroad – most of them with brown skins. Their faces are plastered over all the papers – except the Telegraph, perhaps. (It’s a shame that one of Boris’s nurses wasn’t a ‘picanniny with a water-melon smile’; or a ‘pillar box’, to use two of his choicest slurs for brown-skinned people.) Will the Conservative government, and the awful Priti Patel in particular, take a lesson from that, too? In that case both the NHS and multiculturalism could benefit from the present crisis, and in particular from Boris’s brief flirtation (if true) with Death.

I wouldn’t be surprised. Johnson is at bottom an empiricist, or a ‘chancer’, if you prefer, just as his hero Churchill was. Churchill, remember, revised his opinion of workers and their trade unions when he saw how much they – and Ernie Bevin in particular – loyally contributed to the War. As peacetime prime minister he did nothing therefore to reverse the social revolution that Attlee’s government brought about, like – for example – dismantling the NHS and the Welfare State. It’s clear – isn’t it? – that after the present sort-of-War, neither Britain nor, probably, the world is going to be able to return to the status quo ante – ‘normality’ as it has been understood over the last few decades – without huge changes; some of them presaged, of course, by Attlee’s spiritual successor, Jeremy Corbyn. Boris’s ideological – and indeed intellectual – emptiness may enable him, after a crisis comparable in some ways to World War II, to embrace some of those changes, in the pursuit of a new ‘social conservatism’. If Churchill could do it, and after him Macmillan, then Churchill’s pasteboard successor should be able to as well. (On the other hand, Churchill had  just won a war. We still need to see whether Boris can win this sort-of-one.) The change will start with a full embrace of the NHS.

Of course there are alternative scenarios. Let’s hope that a new cuddly Fascism – the trend that looked possible before this bug hit us – isn’t one of them. It’s all up for grabs. And of course we could have both Fascism and  the NHS. Isn’t that what ‘National Socialism’ was?

I feel better prepared for the present situation than most. That’s due to my long guilty obsession with Science Fiction, and in particular 1950s SF and disaster movies. Our current situation continually reminds me of the opening scenes of many of these: deaths, deserted streets, an unseen enemy, and arrogant and obstinate politicians; until at last the scientist-hero – often a mere teenager – comes to be taken seriously, and the world is saved.

I’m not saying that all this is truly prescient: for a start I can’t see the scientist-hero emerging anywhere on the horizon just now. And the wilder theories behind a lot of these old films – superior races deciding that humanity doesn’t deserve to survive, aliens taking over human bodies, viruses arriving in asteroids, H-bomb tests releasing the earth’s inner core, the evil billionaire behind it all; or modern conspiracy theories like David Icke’s idea that it’s all an American or Jewish or alien reptilian shape-shifter’s plot against us; or religious ones, that the coronavirus is  God’s punishment for abortion or homosexuality or being nasty to Trump, or whatever – are clearly not to be taken seriously. (But you never know. Every sceptical person ought to leave a one per cent opening for some of these possibilities in his or her mind.) But it’s the first half-hours of most of these films that strike me as a good mental preparation for what we’re seeing now. Sci-Fi has always taught me that even the basic and most taken-for-granted things in life don’t always have to be the way they are – or were. (That’s helped me as a historian, too.) So it’s no surprise to me that the whole natural world – including the ‘natural’ laws behind capitalism – seems to be collapsing about our ears now. Where is that adolescent scientist when we need her?

It’s that guilty passion of mine that is making me look forward to the ‘classic’ SF season that the ‘Horror’ TV Channel has announced for the Easter weekend. I just hope that the genuine classics of the 1950s and ’60s get in there, and not just Star Wars and Star Trek. The former at least were cerebral. They made you think. And prepared you mentally for the spookily deserted city streets of today.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad election to have lost after all. Just think what the Tory press would have made of all this state dirigisme if it had been ordered by that commie Jeremy Corbyn, instead of by the cuddly Boris – now making the ultimate sacrifice for his people by dying (or probably not) in hospital. Dulce et  decorum est… That may be his lasting claim to fame, if he snuffs it now. Otherwise he’ll go down in history as the upper-class liar and cheat who couldn’t be relied upon for anything, and simply wasn’t fitted to see the country through this unprecedented crisis, which requires judgment and intelligence, rather than the blind optimism, public school jokeyness and mere cleverness which have always been the trademarks of our new ‘world king’.

Of course none of us non-experts can say whether the government’s strategy for combatting the coronavirus was or is the right one. We’ll have to await the dreadful denouement, and the count of each country’s bodies, before we can begin to tell. The provisional judgment, however, seems to be that the British government was at least late to do the things that the WHO recommended from the beginning: ‘test, test, test’; and may even have been wrong-footed by Demonic Cummings’s Malthusian advice to let the disease rage through us – ‘take it on the chin’, in Boris’s own words – so weeding out the old, weak and useless in the population while letting the young and fit recover and gain immunity in order to keep the economy going. Boris is also coming under criticism for boasting of ‘shaking hands’ with what he believed to be coronavirus patients in a hospital, directly against his own government’s advice. That’s how he may have caught it. (His dad didn’t help by insisting that he would be going to the pub whatever the medics said.) Whatever the public’s instinct may be to get behind any government in a time of national crisis, this lot will be unlikely to come out of all this well.

But of course no-one in the government foresaw this (though they might have been expected to do so, in general terms), or was chosen or elected for his or her competence in a crisis situation. They were elected, and then appointed to the cabinet, on the basis of their loyalty to Boris and to the cause of Brexit, which of course has been the only political issue over the past three years, and one which – it has to be said – now appears depressingly trivial in the light of recent experience. ‘Deckchairs on the Titanic’ come to mind.

It’s because all ministers are aware of these criticisms, and might even accept them underneath, that the Government’s daily televised press conferences are so toe-curlingly defensive these days. ‘We’re working like blazes – are following the scientific advice – have tested a few – are ordering PPEs even if they haven’t arrived yet – are doing as well as any other country – can’t be blamed for running down the NHS because nations with better NHSs are getting infected too – just trust us…’; all of which comes over as a pitiful attempt to protect their political reputations, whatever the truth may be. It’s a bit like Trump’s line in America, albeit not quite so brazen as his. Let’s hope Trump gets it too. He after all claimed the coronavirus was fake news at first – a Democratic trick to get him impeached. (‘Me, me, me’, all the time.) So if he got it, it wouldn’t be undeserved. Not too seriously, though; it would be better if he felt really nasty but then recovered, to go down to an ignominious defeat in the November polls. The same goes for our Boris. Get well, you bastard.