The UK press is once again awash with the latest revelations of the Johnson’s regime’s boozy misconduct and its entitled, unending contempt for the nation. The Prime Minister, his aids, senior civil servants and their minions have persistently flouted the national COVID rules they themselves put in place, most frequently at farewell parties. This was best captured in reports that on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, a Downing Street staffer was dispatched with a suitcase to fetch more booze from the nearby Co-op on The Strand in central London
What everyone is missing is that the real scandal is not the flouting of COVID rules at illicit parties during a pandemic, but that the stand-in PM and his Downing Street staff were running the country pissed. And that also this may not be confined just to times of national emergency, what with the general sense of partying and joie de vivre such disasters tend to raise in decent people. No, as reported in The Guardian, according to a senior Tory who previously worked at Downing Street, “opening a bottle of wine at the desk was not unusual if people were working into the evening, particularly on a Friday.”
It would be interesting to see the statistics on surgeons and aircraft engineers who write reports and recommend measures with a bottle of wine on the desk. The aftermath of such conduct may not be as immediately apparent in governance as with a plane crash or an increase in operating theatre deaths, yet it would be there, perhaps in a recommendation to delay critical lockdowns that, though they lower the death toll, nonetheless make it more difficult to nip to the local booze store.
