Boris Johnson sacrifices top scientific advisers on altar of Classic Dom
Yesterday I wrote that the best way to understand the state the country is in was to consider it a banana republic. I’d meant it as a joke, but at the Downing Street press conference , Boris Johnson went out of his way to prove me right. The UK’s very own dictator might not have much of a reputation left to protect, but Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance most certainly did.
Yet to save what now passes for his career, Boris went out of his way to trash the reputations of both the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser. Just as unbelievably, a plainly terrified Whitty and Vallance just stood there and took it. If either had a smidgeon of self worth, both would have walked out once the questions began.
It seems that many people have been making simple category errors with Boris. They have assumed that Dominic Cummings’s understudy has an intelligence and morality to compromise. That’s why more than 70% of the country had said that Johnson should do the right thing and sack his special adviser for breaking the guidelines and undermining the government’s public health message.
Yet the evidence all points to something more disturbing. That beyond an ability to recite the odd Latin phrase, Boris is actually quite dim. Worse still he is totally amoral. So the very idea of him doing the right thing is a complete non-starter.
Right from the start of the briefing, Boris set out to gaslight the entire nation. Things were great. Improving rapidly. So he was now in a position to re-announce some easing of the lockdown measures that he had already announced during the previous week.
Sure it might be a bit of a risk, as the track and trace programme wouldn’t be properly up and running properly till the end of June. But hey! The weather was nice and everyone deserved a break. And he really appreciated the sacrifices that everyone had been making so that Dom and his family could take a well-earned day out to Barnard Castle.
Even Whitty and Vallance appeared slightly taken aback by Johnson’s bullish optimism. Matt Hancock might have found it hysterically funny that the UK now had the worst death rate in the world during an interview with Kay Burley on Sky, but they both thought the situation was basically a bit shit and that we were a long way behind most other European countries.
It was when the questions started coming in that Boris went full psycho failed state. Given this was the first time that the CMO and CSA for England had been allowed out in public since Cummings’ moonlight flit to Durham had come to public notice, most journalists were keen to know if Whitty and Vallance endorsed Classic Dom’s course of action during the end of March and the first two weeks of April. But before either had a chance to speak, Boris effectively silenced them. They wouldn’t be commenting on this, he said, before preventing Laura Kuenssberg from asking a follow-up question by muting her.
Almost every other journalist had similar questions. And each time Boris either ignored them or just repeated that Whitty and Vallance couldn’t get involved in political issues. It’s possible that both men had only agreed to stand alongside the Great Dictator on the proviso they were allowed to say nothing. If so that was a huge mistake on their part, because reputations that had taken decades to build were shredded in a matter of minutes.
The whole point was that the scientific and the political have become entwined, not least because Laughing Boy had chosen to make it so. And the questions the scientists were being asked were matters of scientific judgement. Would they recommend doing what Classic Dom had done? Was that the public health message they wanted to put out to the country? Yet under a lot of pressure from Boris – you can add bullying to his character defects – they both played dumb. Better to have refused to prop up Boris than to have been used as mugs.
Whitty and Vallance weren’t even allowed to answer a basic question of whether they would recommend a 50-mile round trip with your child in the back of the car as a good way of checking if your eyesight was fit to drive. That was about as straightforward a scientific yes or no question as you could get. But still they didn’t dare say a word.
Other pressers have been tetchy and opaque, but this one had been a new low. Boris hadn’t demeaned himself because there’s nothing left to demean. But he had demeaned his CMO and CSA and he had demeaned the UK by treating its citizens with total contempt. In saving Dom, he has ruined what was left of his credibility. And all across the country, Tory MPs and Tory voters were beginning to ask themselves one simple question. Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?
