There is a very simple psychological reason why Boris and his ministers are failing to understand how ruinous their restrictive laws and policies are for the rest of us -- EVEN IF (a big if) those laws and policies do perchance suppress spread of the COVID virus to some degree.
Government ministers, advisors, and the whole class of people involved in the work of governing feel, almost by definition, "at the top of their game." They feel important. Have you ever been among that crowd? I have. The atmosphere of ambition, achievement and ego is rather dizzying. These are people near the centre of power, and as they direct and redirect the energies of that power, they feel it passing through themselves, almost as if it belongs to them. It intoxicates. Very easily one mistakes oneself for a hero, a font of wisdom, a great helmsman of a great movement directed by oneself and followed by docile millions. Reality is not actually so.
In fact, the rest of us, who have no such pretentions and not even the basis for entertainment of such pretensions, live and struggle always with the unglamorous minutia of ground-level stuff. To us, practical stuff matters and grand theory less so, which is not to say our lives lack real glory, for the mundane and obscure in fact is full of all sorts of glory little heralded. In our lives, our paychecks are contingent on work; we can be made redundant for poor performance; we must persuade and shepherd others not with force but by reason and presence; children ask for peas, then refuse to eat peas, then cry with hunger; all around is some ambiguous longing. Those running Government are human, too, so share some of this, of course. But also they hold levers of great and coercive power, and that aforementioned sense of greatness courses through their sense of self.
No power of theirs is greater or more coercive than the criminal law and the judgements and punishments that flow from it: damn you for holding his hand, damn you for meeting her, damn you for hosting them, damn you for reaching out in need, damn you for reaching out in care, damn you for gathering to protest, damn your discretion, damn your reason. They wield profound power, and they feel this power they wield (along with a terrible dread they may someday be deprived of that power).
For them, a crisis, whether real or imagined, fills them with a sense of purpose and initiative. Their damning laws swell their sense of greatness. For us it is the exact opposite. Our sense of purpose and initiative, and our sense that we might do something great, are directly attacked and diminished by their damning laws. Hence, Boris speaks as if locking oneself in a room, binging Internet and getting fat is an act of heroism, an act of people's spirit, the very Dunkirk crossing of our time, the roaring of the lion -- but we all know it really a pit of Government-enforced impotence, inaction, and constant temptation to despair. In their fantasy, all those suicides, all those untreated cancer sufferers, all those unemployed: these are the heroes of our time, giving all with proud and selfless spirit. When people near power see the terrible statistics, something in the bad news causes their hearts to swell with pride at the greatness of people and the grandeur of Government's purpose. Indeed, the victims of their cruel fantasies are noble, for every person is noble notwithstanding all his or her flaws; each is the very image of God. But those in and near power do not see and do not honour the true nobility of those suffering from their bad laws and policies.
To both inflict suffering and venerate the sufferer is a perversion. Spare us any more of it. Boris, our lives are not the stuff of your glory; you do not know and are not honouring the real glory of people's lives. Though I fancy Her Majesty probably does. She no doubt prays.
