When PM Johnson was taken into intensive care last week, No 10 told us it was just a precaution and stressed several times during his spell there that he wasn't on a ventilator and was simply receiving normal oxygen treatment. This morning he says he 'owes them his life'. Next week we will probably get the story of how he was up to his neck in muck and bullets, battling ISIS and COVID-19 single handed in St Thomas's hospital. It will be a tale that grows in the telling.
But onto other things.
I love reading Fintan O'Toole. The Irish Times columnist is always able to throw a different light on something, to look at it from a different point of view. Perhaps being Irish and watching what happens in Britain from across the Irish sea gives him an insight which is hard for anyone living here to see. This week's column is an exampe.
He looks at coronavirus through the prism of British exceptionalism, a topic which I know fascinates him because he has written about it several times. He is able to recall examples of it everywhere, including in the 2011 London riots when looters formed an orderly queue to get through a broken shop window in order to loot the stock. And I could believe it. We have a certain self-image of ourselves don't we? Even rioters.
What sparks it off was Johnson's announcement of pub and club closures on March 20th and The Sun's reporting of his words:
"The Sun reported the prime minister’s remarks rather differently: 'Mr Johnson said he realised it went against what he called ‘the inalienable free-born right of people born in England to go to the pub’. In this version, the freedom to go to the pub was conferred by genetics and history, not on the 'people of the United Kingdom' or 'the British people', but on 'people born in England'. It does not apply to Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish people and certainly not to the 9.4 million people living in the UK who were born abroad. It is a particular Anglo-Saxon privilege."
It was of course nonsense, although being English myself I hardly noticed what he was saying and I doubt that anyone else 'born in England' did either. This is how far we've come. O'Toole goes on:
"There is, of course, no ancient and absolute right to go to the pub – inns and public houses have been regulated in England at least since the 15th century. But what Johnson was really evoking was a very specific English sense of exceptionalism, a fantasy of personal freedom as a marker of ethnic and national identity."
O'Toole seems to think this fantasy exceptionalism shaped our response to Covid-19, allowing Britain to treat it differently to every other country suffering from it, simply because they thought the virus would recognise our innate superiority. If so, it didn't last long. We soon changed tack and followed the herd and abandoned the herd immunity idea.
And he references a book by Daniel Hannan: How we invented freedom (yes, that really is the title):
"The exceptionalist “freedom-loving instinct” has little to do with history and much more to do with current politics, specifically the politics of Brexit. Johnson described as “magnificent” a 2014 book by the arch-Brexiter Daniel Hannan called How We Invented Freedom – “we” being the Anglo-Saxons. Hannan expressly reclaimed the idea of exceptionalism, the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons being the exception especially to European slavishness. Brexit, as he argued, was one imperative of this dichotomy. Tragically, a notion that the UK could ignore the World Health Organisation and do its own thing with the virus was another."
It strikes me that he has a point. There is a certain strata of English society (it is an English phenomenon isn't it?) which actually believes all this stuff, the kind of thing public schools pump into the veins of the children of the wealthy.
They tried to do it in secondary modern schools in the 1950s, but it was hard to believe in British exceptionalism on a Nottingham council estate while living a hand to mouth existence playing with trolleys made out of scrap wood and rusty pram wheels. The British film industry also played a part in building a myth too. Films with Kenneth Moore and Jack Hawkins, square-jawed and stiff upper lips, recalling our war exploits which completely ignored American or Russian involvement and also British failures like Singapore or the Dieppe raid. Where failures couldn't be ignored they were turned in victories, Dunkirk being the best example.
Before that the exploitation of half of Asia and great swathes of Africa for several centuries was portrayed as something to be proud of. As schoolboys in the 1950s we sat in classrooms surrounded by maps of the world with huge areas of pink denoting far-flung regions of the British empire. Europe, right on our doorstep, was a strange, fiddly wilderness of foreigners speaking languages we didn't understand or want to understand. It was a sort of superior insularity that created the sense we were somehow different and better than everybody else.
I used to think that British exceptionalism would die with Brexit, now I think it is Brexit that will kill it.
