Way back in the pre-Covid-19 era, a cabinet-level politician en route to a television showdown confided that he occasionally fantasised about incurring an injury that would “force” him to rest at home for a couple of months. The injury had to be carefully calibrated of course. It would have to be sufficiently incapacitating to warrant bed rest – producing some sympathy votes on the side – but not damaging or painful enough to prevent a heroic comeback.
It’s a fairly common fantasy. My variation of it, usually conjured up while heading for a particularly woeful work assignment, was to be arrested for some inconsequential stand and dispatched to jail (a nice progressive one, possibly Norwegian). The whole idyll rested on the assumption that an excellent human rights lawyer would sort the whole thing out after six weeks or so.
Those jolly scenarios never factored in the possibility that the world around us would become completely unhinged. That the Great Acceleration would be poleaxed by the crudest of killer viruses, that doctors might have better things to do than patch up fantasists and that civil liberties might take such a knock that the fantasy human rights lawyer would never materialise.
Lounge around in pyjamas
On the face of it, this lockdown should be the reprieve many dreamed of. Many who can work from home and/or are deemed non-essential workers can lounge around in pyjamas. The homes are warmish; spring is here. They are loaded up with streaming devices, communications channels and books. Delivery vans still arrive with internet orders (weirdly) that are far from essential.
Junior Tory health minister Nadine Dorries – a woman with much time on her hands clearly – is musing on Twitter about how busy the maternity services might be nine months from now. The Tories love that kind of talk. Last December Boris Johnson predicted that Brexit would lead to a “big baby boom” and indeed he is now expecting another child.
Some things never change. Brexiteer ardour remains undimmed
On the whole, the language of lockdown is suddenly quite cosy.
In the shadow of grief, upended lives, separation and tragic death, we are taking back control, not by chasing imperial phantoms but by recognising that we are the weapons capable of facing down Covid-19. All else is damage limitation, undertaken by workers risking their lives for us.
We weaponise by ceding to demands that we confine ourselves to the home and are banned from public gatherings. Public buildings are closed to us and the pubs are shut. Emergency departments have emptied out to a worrying level; only nine patients were awaiting admission yesterday morning, according to the INMO. Who, six weeks ago, would have predicted that sentence?
Potential of a pandemic
It’s just one of the reasons why this reprieve can never be restful. The knowledge that we are doing the right thing by ceding civil liberties can never dilute the uncertainty, the hypervigilance, the sense that much of the world is run by feral autocrats and disaster capitalists excited by the potential of a pandemic. Courts are being shut down, elections put on hold, intrusive surveillance being imposed on citizens. On the face of it, we answer all those descriptions or will soon.
On Monday, a European Union state kicked democracy into the ditch and established a dictatorship. This is explosive. The Hungarian parliament suspended itself and granted prime minister Viktor Orban the power to rule by decree. Those following Hungary’s gradual descent into a police state over a few years will not be surprised.
In the US, Donald Trump said that desperate state governors must be “nice” to him to get help and suggested repeatedly that health workers were stealing surgical masks. His re-election campaign has told TV stations they could lose their operating licences for airing an advertisement criticising his actions in the crisis, according to Bloomberg.
In Brazil, president Jair Bolsonaro hit the streets of the capital ignoring the health minister’s call for social distancing, declaring “ We’re going to tackle the virus but tackle it like f**king men – not like kids”. How precisely do “f**king men” front up to a virus? How is it possible that people voted for such a man?
In the Philippines, where president Rodrigo Duterte once dismissed the country’s constitution as “a scrap of paper”, more emergency powers have been handed to him along with $5.4 billion to deal with the pandemic.
In Britain, a former supreme court judge, Lord Sumption, said that the UK was in danger of a becoming a “police state” amid reports of police monitoring walkers with drones and accusations of confusing rules and guidance.
But happily, some things never change. Brexiteer ardour remains undimmed. The “confusion”, as Michael Gove described it, over the UK’s non-participation in the EU ventilator scheme , was dismissed with his immortal explanation that there is “nothing we can’t do as an independent nation that being part of that scheme would have allowed us to do”.
Meanwhile, the Mail on Sunday (readership of about a million) ran a two-page splash under the headline, “Did Barnier infect Bojo?”. It took four journalists to put that together.
Never sleep.