Of all the factions and cliques in and around the modern Conservative party, none is grimmer than the small gang who think that Boris Johnson is the victim of conspiracies involving the fabled “blob”, and that the condition of their party – and, indeed, the country – would be a thousand times better if only he was still in Downing Street.
Even now, a hardcore of Johnson cultists still reportedly think he could sooner or later return to the Tory leadership. A few of his other disciples acknowledge – for now, at least – that such dreams are probably over, but still devotedly try to defend him. The latest nadir was reached last week, after news broke of his referral to the police by civil servants in relation to even more alleged breaches of Covid regulations.
One Johnson ally told the Daily Telegraph that if “the government has tried to report Boris to the police for entirely lawful activity” (“Team Boris” seems to suspect the involvement of deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden and the paymaster general, Jeremy Quin), Rishi Sunak may face a spate of byelections. Three Tory MPs could trigger them by summarily standing down: the former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, the COP26 president Alok Sharma, and Nigel Evans, the Tory MP for Ribble Valley. Just to underline the principled nature of any such move, all are said to be nominated for peerages in Johnson’s resignation honours list.
Clearly, these people have never understood – or have chosen not to see – millions of people’s deep moral outrage about Partygate, which looks set to increase. But there are even bigger oversights at the heart of the Johnson cult, which also seem to be evident in politics and the media more widely. In Westminster, news about his alleged lockdown antics inevitably generates a huge amount of noise – but in doing so, it heightens the sense that there are stories about Covid and its legacy that we have still barely heard.
If you know any teachers, one story will probably be very familiar: a chronically overlooked crisis in attendance, behaviour and attainment that shows few signs of going away. The relevant statistics for schools in England are shocking: according to figures released last week, since the autumn of 2019, the number of children absent for more than 50% of school time – these are the kids colloquially known as “ghost children” – has doubled, to about 125,000. Rates of “persistent absence”, defined as missing more than 10% of school, have soared from 13% to 24%, which means that 1.7 million children in England are regularly not in the classroom. These numbers are much worse in places with high levels of poverty and deprivation: Newcastle, Bradford, Middlesbrough.
Teachers I know talk about kids who seem to be neither in school, nor entirely out of it, drifting in and out of lessons on a whim; this highlights what happens when young lives have been subjected to long months without any structure. There is a lot of concern about a big uptick in disruptive and challenging behaviour. This year’s GCSE outcomes will presumably highlight how these problems blur into levels of formal attainment, and whatever the government’s attempts at helping kids catch up, the signs are not exactly promising.
Clearly, every absent, underperforming or anxious child is indicative of a level of social damage that still seems to be barely registering. In January this year, an estimated 2 million people in the UK were experiencing what the government calls “self-reported long Covid”. In 2022, 2.5 million people said they were not working because of long-term sickness, an increase of about 500,000 since the pandemic began. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of people newly awarded disability benefits doubled: about a third of the new claims were for mental or behavioural conditions, but among those under 25 that figure rose to 70%. The most visible political response to all this so far has been the government’s tightening of benefit sanctions and Tory calls – linked to the party’s angst about immigration – for the benefits system to punitively push people into work, which is a good indication of Conservatism’s current ethical bankruptcy.
At the most recent count, there have been 226,622 deaths in the UK with Covid mentioned on the death certificate, which entails a terrifying number of people who have experienced the effects of bereavement, often in the most impossible circumstances. Through 2020, 2021 and beyond, friendships slipped, and millions of people’s loneliness deepened. Grandparents and their grandkids were stuck in the midst of a particularly awful predicament: the time eaten up by lockdowns was an eternity to most children, and equally soul-sapping for people approaching the end of their lives. Throw in Brexit, inflation and all our other national problems, and you have an instant picture of why this country feels so disoriented and exhausted.
In that context, carrying on like Dorries et al and desperately defending a former prime minister who blithely made merry while other people’s lives fell apart is the symptom of a moral rot. But their behaviour also highlights the continuing absence of our collective Covid experience from the political conversation. Self-evidently, policy responses to what the pandemic has caused remain woefully unsatisfactory, but the vacuum is even more basic than that. Partly because the Johnson period left the ruling party in such an awkward position over Covid – do not forget: Sunak was issued with a lockdown fixed-penalty notice – we hear almost no attempts to even speak meaningfully to the country about what it is still going through.
There has been at least one impressive exception. In January 2022, Keir Starmer addressed the House of Commons, as a limited version was published of Sue Gray’s official report about Partygate. The worst of the pandemic, he said, had been “a collective trauma endured by all, enjoyed by none”. He continued: “Every family has been marred by what we have been through. And revelations about the prime minister’s behaviour have forced us all to rethink and relive those darkest moments.”
“Many have been overcome by rage, by grief and even by guilt,” he said. “Guilt that because they stuck to the law, they did not see their parents one last time … Guilt that because they did as they were asked, they did not go and visit lonely relatives. But people should not feel guilty. They should feel pride in themselves and their country, because by abiding by those rules they have saved the lives of people they will probably never meet. They have shown the deep public spirit and the love and respect for others that has always characterised this nation at its best.”
By his usual standards, that was a moving, eloquent speech. With the opening of the Covid public inquiry finally looming, he should return to it, and develop its themes. But anything he says should start with one key insistence: that until we have talked about what Covid has done to us, and finally resolved to do something about it, the UK being anywhere near its best will be a dim and fading fantasy.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
