Cast your mind back to Christmas 2020. We, the great unwashed of the United Kingdom, were made to work at home, prevented from meeting indoors—even on Christmas Day—and there were ridiculous limits on the numbers meeting outdoors. Going to a pub or a restaurant, already a miserable experience with masks, one-way systems and lashings of hand-gel, was impossible over most of Christmas. We were explicitly told that Christmas parties were not to take place. People died alone in hospital and care homes. According to Julia Hartley-Brewer on talkRadio on 8 December around 20,000 people have been charged with breaking Covid-19 restrictions in the United Kingdom and millions of pounds worth of fines have been issued.
Meantime at 10 Downing Street, dead-centre of our increasingly risible government, staff and journalists were whooping it up at a Christmas party. If life was fair, this should be the straw that breaks the back of our blond buffoon of a Prime Minister, coming as it does on top of other Covid-contraventions including a scandalous visit to Barnard Castle by a senior government adviser, ministerial groping by Matt Hancock (perhaps his dyslexia prevented him from understanding his own instructions?) and a highly questionable Christmas visit to 11 Downing Street (the PM’s residence) over Christmas. But life is not fair and now they are laughing at us. This is simply crass (‘showing no intelligence or sensitivity’) hypocrisy by the government and everyone who attended the party on 18 December.
There are denials aplenty, including at Prime Minister’s Questions by Boris Johnson. He claims to be shocked by the release of a video of a mock event where Allegra Stratton, then Prime Minister’s Press Officer, took questions from some other officials about a party which had taken place. Watch the video yourself and come to your own conclusion. Mine is that the contents clearly confirm that the alleged party took place. Boris Johnson, no stranger to accusations of lying, stands accused again. Inside sources have confirmed that the party took place. The PM vacillates between the above denial that the party took place, on the one hand, and that ‘all the rules were followed’, on the other hand. It can’t be both.
The government’s mendacity is matched only by its audacity. While our lords and masters demonstrate that they do not believe in the necessity for Covid-19 restrictions and refuse to follow them (they just expect us to) they prepare to inflict more misery on the British population again this Christmas. Plans are afoot to make us work from home again, the travel industry is back on its knees and their Covid scaremongering over the Omicron variant—currently infecting less than 0.0005% of the population and having killed nobody—is leading to mass cancellations of Christmas meals and events leading to severe and possibly fatal consequences for the catering and entertainment businesses this year.
This government long ago lost any credibility it had. If any moral authority remained over Covid-19 restrictions, that no longer exists. In my view, we are not merely entitled not to follow any of the forthcoming and ongoing Covid-19 restrictions, we are morally obliged to ignore them. The Prime Minister promises that heads will roll if the party that didn’t take place turns out to have taken place. There is only one head that we want to see roll, Mr Johnson…yours!
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