Roger Watson
Boris is gone, down the road, an ex-politician who eventually fell on his sword…again. There are some notes of sympathy among commentators for him, mainly about the nature of his departure. Forced out by the blob, his one time Chancellor and his former Tory pals, people are raising questions about who runs the country; as if we did not know. Whatever the blob and the bubble have done to Johnson pales into insignificance with what they and Boris did to the country for the best part of three years during the universal outbreak of the sniffles.
Many column inches, including in these pages, have been devoted to the time of Partygate. ‘The mick’ was certainly taken out of the British public through these events but, again, they were minor infringements if measured on a scale that also measures the crime against humanity that was lockdown. The real point about Partygate and all that ensued—including Boris’s resignation as Prime Minister—was that ‘the rules’ of lockdown imposed on the public were plain wrong. That, and the fact we now have ample evidence of the damage they inflicted, should be the focus of attention, not the bread and circus sideshow about the fate of Boris Johnson.
However, apart from the above reasons there should be no sympathy for Boris. Whereas some like to point out that he was reluctant to impose lockdown; the fact that he was, and then he did, makes his crimes even greater than those of his international peers. If he had an ounce of courage and any genuine concern for the people he was supposed to be looking after, he should have stuck to his guns, stood up to the civil servants, medical dictators, epidemiologists and assorted scaremongers and refused to lockdown.
Of course, the public whipped up into a Covid frenzy would have turned against him for this. Everyone whose granny succumbed to a respiratory infection would have been dug out by The Guardian (and most likely The Daily Telegraph) and paraded on the mainstream media to shame him into submission. Still, he should not have crumbled. The singularly unconvincing time when he disappeared from the public eye to (not) be admitted to ICU was another pantomime in which he participated. If the PM can be at death’s door then what chance did the rest of us have? Remarkably, Sweden seemed to get by without any of this performance and came out of it all very well.
Boris compounded his capitulation to the medical panic mongers by doubling down on dissent. Each day more revelations come to light, but those of us who spoke out against this from the start were well aware that this was happening; we are only hearing about it now because the great and the good (and the very few among them) who did speak out now realise it. Those of us who suffered social media pile-on, hate emails, shadow bans, blocked postings, questions from our employers and investigation by our professional bodies were only too aware what was happening. Boris doubled down on his initial mistake of imposing lockdowns and permitted all of this to happen.
So, why is he ‘the worst’? Was he worse than the toothy tyrant in New Zealand? Did he surpass the evil of Justin ‘Blackface’ Trudeau in Canada? How did he compare with the likes of Desperate Dan Andrews in Victoria, Australia? Well, he may not have come down as brutally on the population as they did (excepting a few pensioners at Trafalgar Square), lockdowns may not have been as prolonged, and he may have pulled back from the extreme over some measures related to vaccine mandates. But he was still the worst. Ardern, Trudeau and Andrews were genuine enthusiasts for the Covid measures. All they needed was an excuse to clamp down on the basic freedoms of their population. They owed it to their masters at the WEF to implement what had long been planned. They were, genuinely ‘following orders.’ Boris did this voluntarily and against his will. That, in my book, is more reprehensible.
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
