Watch and Learn

Nurses working in a South African COVID-19 clinic, based on a train, which travels to reach different communities. image - EPA-EFE taken from The Conversation article

 

 

There are many criticisms that one could level at Boris Johnson; his self-importance, inability to see a project through from start to finish, or in the case of Covid, simply exhibit a consistent approach from week to week. That he is a hypocrite with a slender grasp of reality and a willingness to say whatever is momentarily expedient to his current predicament, is evidenced for all, that are willing, to see. His underlying prejudices are a matter of public record, for him an unfortunate side-effect of his being a 'journalist'; his words and opinions are enshrined in the man's own columns for anyone to read. That some of those opinions are deeply racist has been much reported and his Telegraph columns quoted at length by many commentators. I won't bother re-airing the phrases he used, offensive as they are: just Google his column and you'll find them all online.

Aside from the deliberate offence intended to those outwith his social milieu - his audience falls into a largely white, male, middle/upper class and Anglo Saxon profile - his biggest sin is simply that of being a bad writer. His rather slim and stylistically clunky Telegraph column came in at around eleven-hundred words. A week. For which he was paid £275,000 a year: each column still took him two to three hours to write. Read some of his output and judge for yourself whether that represents value for money or not.

However, above and beyond all of his journalistic faults, his tainted opinions and his chaotic approach to just about everything - I have nothing against creative chaos, but the keyword there is 'creative', an adjective I have a real struggle with applying to Johnson, is his class and empire-centric weltanschauung that refuses to accept that nothing outside of his WASP bubble is worthy of consideration: the context and origin of his innate prejudices. Joe pointed me to a piece in The Conversation this morning, reflecting on the developed world's attitude to, and performance; or lack of it, in dealing with the pandemic. It points out that all comparisons and references are made within and between Europe and the US, blithely ignoring the successes, not only in the treatment and suppression of the virus; but crucially, in the procurement of vital supplies and equipment to those ends, in most of Asia and Africa. That they have largely been spared the full-on effects that Europe and the US have experienced, is obviously down to a complex of factors, both epidemiological and geographical as well as performative; rather, it has been the response to the disease that has been most impressive, whilst being largely ignored by 'the North'. Supply chains have been working smoothly, without the underhand use of un-tendered-for contracts [see yesterday's piece on Serco for example] and general political graft. If this Prime Minister could just accept that there is world outside of London and the Home Counties that actually does function rather well, despite its not being run by the old boy network, then we might swallow our nationalistic hubris, take the lesson for what it is and just get on with the job at hand, instead of ping-ponging back and forth in the feedback loop from hell.