Day: 25 July 2020

Boris Johnson is Mistaken About His Mistakes PM: "I didn't have a clue about the virus back in March and I still don't Laura." In an interview with Laura Kuenssberg for the BBC to mark his first anniversary of becoming Prime Minister, Boris Johnson admitted to having made mistakes in his initial response to the pandemic. Unfortunately, they were the wrong mistakes. I think it's fair to say that there are things that we need to learn about how we handled it in the early stages… There will be plenty of opportunities to learn the lessons of what happened.Maybe there were things we could have done differently, and of course there will be time to understand what exactly we could have done, or done differently.We didn’t understand in the way that we would have liked in the first few weeks and months.The single thing that we didn't see at the beginning is the extent to which is was being transmitted asymptomatically from person to person. That wasn't clear to us or to anybody.What people really want to focus on now is what are we doing to prepare for the next phase. Not clear to anybody? What nonsense is this? There was plenty of speculation that the virus could be transmitted by asymptomatic carriers from almost the first moment it was ...

By Guy de la Bédoyère Victorian state premier Daniel Andrews is watching you Speaking as a historian there is little about the lockdown that has surprised me, not least the way in which so many people have blithely accepted the restrictions to their freedoms on the basis that this way they will be saved from a terrible fate. I’m afraid there are too many historical precedents. One of my former colleagues has a nurse for a daughter and she has thrown herself with characteristic zealotry into the role of being the mother of a saint. Not only has she busied herself at her sewing machine churning out scrubs but also proclaimed her righteous joy in the ostentatious wearing of masks. She does this, she says, not because she’s scared, because she isn’t (so she says), but because of her solidarity with the legions of angels in the NHS, “it’s the right thing to do”, and she is doing it for the wider good of the community. She might as well have called the latter Volksgemeinschaft. There is an ominous and crazy religious tone to all this, and she is not alone in exhibiting an inclination to participate in Covid Cult Culture. Masks have rapidly become the symbol of moral superiority, amounting almost to being a badge denoting membership of the ...