Seeking sanity

Boris Johnson probably made an unwise move when he carried out regular coronavirus briefings flanked by two experts. It was a very public way of reinforcing something we already knew. In this situation any Prime Minister is merely a conduit for whichever form of advice dominates his political attention. When the coronavirus debacle turned up in the UK, the captain of the ship admitted publicly that he doesn’t know much about the sea.

This impression reinforced something else we already knew – there are many similar situations. It is  a core problem with government advisors and experts, those people who effectively run things but we never get to vote for them.

Ordinary folk are able to browse the internet in search of sane advice and that is not a suggestion that the advice Boris Johnson had to follow was not sane. With hindsight it was grotesquely over-cautious and grossly patronising but not insane. Almost insane perhaps, but with that same hindsight the advice clearly came from ludicrously cautious officials and/or experts rather than wider and more flexible consultations.

Yet we ordinary web surfers do not have to accept such narrow limitations drawn from a patronising perspective. We examine stories, scenarios, examples, contrarian opinions, data and experiences to gain a multifaceted view of anything we choose. If we wish.

Boris was not in a position to seek out the best pandemic advice because he had to go with what seemed to be the politically safe consensus and stick with it. He was in effect powerless and made the mistake of showing it quite clearly in his TV briefings. In other words we vote for the actors, not the people who write the script, run the show and take the money. Again this is something we already knew, but Boris made it far too obvious.

He now comes across as a man hoping for a spot of good luck while trying to make the coronavirus mess seem like a necessary mess. It wasn’t but in our political system it was. It’s a problem for modern democracies. The days when political actors had a hand in their own scripts are gone and we don’t vote for the script writers.