Read on Twitter
BORIS& #39;S FATE: A THREAD
Have we lost our sense of proportion over what constitutes a tragedy?
The hospitalisation of the Prime Minister last week managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain.
1/
Have we lost our sense of proportion over what constitutes a tragedy?
The hospitalisation of the Prime Minister last week managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain.
1/
A request by moral authorities for a moment of respect for Mr Boris Johnson, the news of whose transferral to ICU had broken earlier in the day, was largely and ostentatiously ignored.
2/
2/
Yet the fact that such a tribute was demanded in the first place emphasised the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood.
3/
3/
There had been a decades long silence for the victims of Mr Johnson in Tory shires, not offering them the same respect offered annually to the million-and-a-half British servicemen who have died for their country since 1914.
4/
4/
No one can make light of the appalling fate being suffered by the Johnson. His hospitalisation, his witnessing of the painful death of his fellow countrymen and his own hideous capitulation to the virus that he spread provide an object lesson in human depravity and barbarity.
5/
5/
But we have lost our sense of proportion about such things. There have, as many correspondents have pointed out this week, been no such outbreaks of national mourning whenever one of our brave doctors is killed serving his country on the front line.
6/
6/
The extreme reaction to Mr Johnson’s transfer is fed by the fact that he is a Tory. The Tory party has a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic mismanagement — its voters were, fundamentally, on the wrong side when Britain exited the European Union
7/
7/
and an excessive predilection for corporate welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Tories. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it
8/
8/
Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.
9/
9/
The deaths of more than 5000 British citizens is undeniably a greater tragedy than the potential single death, however horrible, of Mr Johnson.
10/
10/
but that is no excuse for Tories& #39; failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by Johnson& #39;s Herd Immunity strategy, such as when he mindlessly tried to carry on shaking people& #39;s hands, even when he knew they had Covid-19
11/
11/
The people pointing this out became convenient scapegoats and whipping-boys for daring, albeit with some of them doing so in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.
12/
12/
Now, part of the disproportionate convulsion of grief for Mr Johnson is prompted by the assertion that the Prime Minister doesn& #39;t have the victim’s ‘blood on his hands’. That is patently nonsense.
13/
13/
None of us can say with perfect confidence how we would behave in such circumstances, and facing such psychological pressures, but in so far as they chose to expunge Mr Johnson or the British government of any blame, they were wrong.
14/
14/
He himself has blood on his hands. The truth is that Boris Johnson sought to make a living by undertaking work in one of the most responsible roles on the planet.
15/
15/
He proposed "taking it on the chin" against the express advice of epidemiologists all over the world. He chose to mimic the inaction of a populist American president and seemed unconcerned about everyone& #39;s personal security.
16/
16/
His motives and misjudgments do not lessen the horror and injustice of his potential death; but they should, without lessening our sympathy for his family or the rest of his victims, temper the outpouring of sentimentality in which many have engaged for him.
17/
17/
It is a form of behaviour that was kick-started in this country after the death of an even more ambiguous figure, the late Diana, Princess of Wales. As a manifestation of our apparently depleted intelligence and sense of rationality, it bodes extremely badly for this country
18/
18/
Mr Johnson might not have read the last entries in Captain Scott’s journals, but they have a resonance for him: ‘We took risks. We knew that we took them. Things have turned out against us. Therefore, we have no cause for complaint.’
19/
19/
Captain Scott’s mentality used to be the norm for chancers and adventurers. Now, after generations of peace and welfarism, and in a society where the blame and compensation cultures go hand in hand,
20/
20/
our modern-day buccaneers seem determined to go about their activities not merely unprepared for the likely consequences, but indignant about them.
21/
21/
It is time we recognised that, in such a situation, it is not a breach of natural justice that the Lone Ranger does not come galloping over the horizon; it is exactly how life is.
22/
22/
In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of national manslaughter by Mr Johnson.
23/23
23/23
The first person to figure out which writer/editor/publication inspired this wins a prize
