Johan Friedrich fecit-my stuff

As the world watches events in the United States, where the Americans have again landed themselves with the man-child president who behaves like a king, I thought of a time when the UK had endured a similar misrule.

Back in the mad days of Covid, I was an enthusiastic poster in the comment section of the Guardian. It was fun during that dark time and more important, let me vent my anger at how the government of Boris Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson was handling it all. Boris is cleverer than Donald Trump; after all, he has a classics degree from Oxford (and never lets anyone forget it). But, like Donald, Boris was indulged as a child, is pathologically lazy and can’t pay attention. When it really mattered during Covid, Boris was a dunce, unable to grasp any explanation of the science.

Early in the pandemic, Boris came under the spell of experts who advocated that the disease should be allowed to infect us all so that we could attain ‘herd immunity.’ Essentially, we were to be guinea pigs in a giant epidemiological experiment. The only other country wanting to go this way was Sweden. Boris gibbered about “letting [the virus] rip” through us to anyone who would listen, including the government chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Those of us who had got to eighty had “had a good innings”, said Boris and should accept our passing for the good of the country.

Boris thought his Churchill moment had come and that an exceptional trait in the British character would get us through the crisis differently to the rest of the world. Eventually someone got it into his seething head that unchecked mortality in this demographic might not only decimate the Tory electorate, but embarrass the country, so he smartly changed his mind. As he continued to do throughout the crisis. He later stoutly denied ever being in favour of uncontrolled infection at the peril of the old and infirm. At the Covid enquiry, KC Hugo Keith skewered him mercilessly with examples of him banging on about it. Bozza blustered and got petulant, like the spoilt child he is.

As we now know, while all this was going on, Boris and others around him thought the laws forbidding us from seeing our friends and family for company or even when they were actually dying, didn’t apply to them. Downing Street partied while the rest of us grimly locked down. Let us not ever forget it was the partying that unthroned Boris, as the trickle of advisers and allies abandoning him became a stream.

As the pandemic broke, our daughter had just qualified as a NHS paramedic. We knew how dangerous it would be for her. What drove me crazy was that the NHS had no proper PPE, but that no-one seemed to care. Within a few weeks of proudly starting her new role, she caught Covid. She went through her illness living alone in the borrowed house she had moved into from our home, to shield us from infection. She went back to work and relapsed, before finally getting back on her feet two months later and a stone and a half lighter.

The Grauniad comments section was crazy. There was some seriously intemperate stuff there – much of it from me – and I don’t know how the moderators kept on top of it all.

After a few yellow cards I was thrown off it for being disorderly and I have never been allowed back. Looking at the comments today it all seems a lot tamer than it was back in the wild times. Anyway, before I was banished, I had a glory day on 10th June 2020. I put a comment on the piece by John Crace and it went crazy. I got a thousand likes and you can still see it on the site today:  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/10/sloth-like-boris-johnson-escapes-capture-during-fleeting-appearance#comment-141476749

Here is my post:

“There are many examples in history of wise advice to kings or those who aspired to kingship. I wondered what advice, in times of yore, a wiser and less indulgent parent than Stanley Johnson might have imparted to Boris, at this stage in his kingship of his little part of the world. I think it might have gone something like this:

“From the Christian canon, fornicate not, be not a glutton, and be not proud. Shit not upon thy friends, or verily, even thy enemies, as ye ascend, for surely, they will shit upon thee tenfold as ye pass the other way. Treat the fair sex with chivalry and throw not wine upon their furnishings when in your cups.

“Prate not: eschew flowery modes of discourse and the speech of knaves, viz. ‘picanninies’ and such, and boast not that thy realm exceeds all other realms, for surely, thy subjects do don a clout one leg at a time, as do all other men. If thou knowest not whereof thou speak, say nought, especially of science and natural philosophy. 

“Speak the truth in all things, and reflect on the wise words of the pugilist sage, Michaelus Tysonius, who said ‘Yea, every man hath a plan, until he be smitten in the mouth’, for verily ye know the truth of this by now. Lastly consider the wisdom of the Buddha of the East, whose teachings to his followers can be condensed thus: ‘Try in all things not to be as a phallus’. Fare thee well, my son.”

It certainly seemed to raise a laugh. Ah well, I had a good run and it was fun while it lasted.