The Times - UK (2020-08-01)

China has left West behind

in 21st-century gold rush

Roger Boyes

Pages 32-33

Nigel Farndale Notebook

Brits would

rather die

than make

any fuss

E

veryone has their own idea

of what defines Britishness,

but high on most lists must

surely be a love of fair play

and compromise. A little

further down we come to a fear of

showing off and making a fuss.

I was reflecting on this with my

friend Chris the other day as we

walked along a coastal path. He had

once been scrambling up a cliff with

his friend Hugh, he said. Not serious

climbing, just a bit of fun as a short

cut, while wearing brogues and

carrying shopping bags. Hugh got

properly stuck and, knuckles white

and bleeding, implored Chris to go on

ahead and call the coastguard. Chris

was too embarrassed, too British, to

make the call. Hugh eventually

made it to the top unaided but

was not a little miffed.

I understand Chris’s inaction.

I once got a fishbone caught in

my throat and, eyes watering,

quietly excused myself and

disappeared to the

restaurant’s loo to cough

it out. I later read that

most deaths in British

restaurants occur in

the loos for this

reason. In America,

diners immediately

stand up and point to

their throats and

someone nearby

obliges with the

Heimlich manoeuvre.

Sticky situation

O

ne of the most

remarkable examples

of our fondness for

not allowed to say any more. Part of

me is glad that the young bore on

about these things. It’s healthy for

them to want to establish their own

identities, even if it was my

generation that invented political

correctness. John O’Farrell captures

well the confusion it caused us in his

memoir Things Can Only Get Better.

Young, right-on men in the 1980s

were nervous about trying it on with

women (never “girls” or “ladies”) for

fear of appearing sexist. Giving

flowers, meanwhile, was not only

patronising and sexist but probably

fascist too. For me, this confusion

extends to barbecues. I still cringe

when men who never help in the

kitchen for the rest of the year stick

out their chests and take control of

the barbie in the summer. “Man.

Cook. Meat. On. Fire.” Their

womenfolk watch on, sipping “lady

petrol”, as Jeremy Clarkson calls

rosé, and whispering “Aw, look at

him. So happy. Bless.”

understatement must be that of

Brigadier Tom Brodie who, at the

height of the Korean war, was in

charge of a battalion of the

“Glorious Gloucesters”.

Outnumbered eight to one, they

were stranded on every side

and under a hail of communist

bullets. Intending to

convey that their

situation was desperate,

Brodie radioed his

American superior at

UN HQ and reported

“Things are a bit

sticky, sir”. Oh good,

the American

general thought, the

Brits are holding the

line, no need to

reinforce or

withdraw yet. It

proved to be a

heroic last stand,

with two VCs (one

posthumous) awarded.

It occurs to me now

that there might have

been an element of this British fear

of making a fuss behind the PM’s

decision to delay slightly the start of

lockdown.

Slice of life

B

oris credits his fiancée Carrie

with encouraging him to lose

weight. I feel solidarity with him

on this score. My wife and I were

flicking through the papers and, after

reading about a missing person, I

asked her when she would notice if I

had gone missing. “When I put a

family-sized pie out on the table and

found there was still some left at the

end of the meal,” she replied.

Barbie dolls

Y

ounger readers may be

intrigued to know that back in

the 1980s it was compulsory for

every office desk to have a “You

don’t have to be mad to work here,

but it helps” mug on it. The modern

equivalent would be “You don’t have

to be woke to work here, but it

helps”, because mad is a word you’re @nigelfarndale

so patients who have Covid can be

separated from those who don’t;

quick turnaround saliva tests will

allow the rapid sorting of patients.

Doctors also know much more about

how to treat it, while the government

is learning more about what makes it

spread. Test and trace shows where

most people’s contacts with an

infected person are and it has

revealed that the biggest issue is two

households meeting; which is why

socialising will be stopped before

shops are closed again. There is,

though, frustration that test and

trace doesn’t yet offer detailed

enough data to go for truly local

lockdowns rather than having to

shut down whole cities.

The cocktail of winter weather,

mass unemployment — the Office

for Budget Responsibility predicts

that joblessness will peak at the end

of this year — and lockdown has the

potential to be toxic. One secretary

of state fears “there are the

ingredients for social unrest. It is

going to be much harder to enforce a

lockdown in the depths of winter”.

Five months from now, parks won’t

offer the safety valve they did in

April. Now that the country knows

what it is facing, the government

must be ready for the challenges

ahead. There will be no excuse for

being unprepared for the concurrent

crises that are coming this winter.

James Forsyth is political editor of

The Spectator

Matthew Parris is away

If you think this is bad, just wait for winter

Local lockdowns are one thing but when unemployment and flu rise, a new minister will be needed to help deal with the crisis

would be Theo Agnew, a junior

minister at both the Treasury and

the Cabinet Office. He is one of

Whitehall’s doers. He played a vital

role in the early months of this crisis

in harnessing the private sector to

the national effort. He knows his

way round Downing Street, he was

made a non-executive director at the

Department for Education when

Dominic Cummings and Michael

Gove were there, and as a peer he

won’t be seen as a threat by other

ministers. The knowledge that he

had No 10’s backing would be

enough to give him sufficient

authority to knock heads together.

Some steps have already been

taken to get ready for winter. There

are plans to give the flu vaccine to

half the population. To help the NHS

cope, makeshift A&Es are being built

One thing Boris Johnson can say is the

NHS has not so far been overwhelmed

Brexit transition period. The cabinet

is assessing how ready the state is to

handle multiple crises at once. “The

question we’re asking ourselves now

is will our systems struggle or will

they just not be able to cope,” one

minister tells me.

The public have, so far, been

remarkably understanding of the

mistakes made in the handling of

coronavirus: the Tories are still

comfortably ahead of Labour in the

polls. There appears to be a mature

acceptance that in dealing with a

new virus, mistakes were bound to be

made. But voters will be much less

forgiving come the second wave.

They will expect the government to

have worked out what to do. If it

cannot handle the second wave

better, the government’s reputation

for competence will be shredded.

You can see the nervousness about

this in the way that it is taking

dramatic action at speed and with

little notice. Just look at the sudden

local lockdowns and the quarantine

imposed on those returning from

Spain.

Boris Johnson should appoint a

minister for winter. Their job would

be to get the British state ready for

the biggest challenge it has faced in

peacetime. They would make sure

departments are doing what is

needed, prevent the turf wars that

flared up back in March, and ensure

that information flows around the

system. There are already complaints

from ministers in the “outer cabinet”

that the slimmed-down Covid

cabinet committees make decisions

without realising the knock-on

effects they have in other areas. At

the same time, I’m told too much

government data remains in

departmental or organisational silos,

hampering its response.

The ideal person for this role

‘H

e’s got a vision of a

bustling Oxford Street,

Christmas lights and all

that. He thinks a big

Christmas would be

good for the country, not just

psychologically but economically.”

This is how one figure in No 10

explained to me Boris Johnson’s

speech two weeks ago in which he

set out his desire to end social

distancing by November.

But in the last fortnight, the mood

has darkened in government. There

is nervousness in Whitehall that the

Office for National Statistics survey

data, which is regarded as the gold

standard for knowing whether the

virus is in retreat or not, is showing a

general uptick. The slew of local

lockdowns in the northwest

announced late on Thursday are an

attempt to deal with this problem in

one of the worst-hit regions. But

given that there seems to be a broad

increase in the virus, these local

restrictions may not be enough and

more national measures may be

coming soon. “The last month has

been the easiest it will be,” warns one

of those at the heart of the

government’s response.

“This is going to be a very nervous

month in terms of tracking the

virus,” one cabinet minister tells me.

Another minister is even more

despondent, simply declaring that

“the second spike has started”.

What most worries ministers,

though, is what all this means for the

winter. August should be the most

straightforward month for dealing

with this virus. People are happy to

socialise outdoors, the NHS isn’t

under pressure from flu and there

aren’t hundreds of thousands of

people with a cough and a fever as

there will be come November.

Equally, the tightening of

restrictions now raises questions

about the reopening of schools in

September. Johnson is determined

that this will go ahead but there are

beginning to be murmurings that

children might have to go back on a

part-time rota system.

There has long been worry about

another wave of the virus coinciding

with the winter flu season. The

Office for National Statistics

research showing that England had

the highest level of excess deaths in

Europe in the past six months tells

its own story about the government’s

handling of the virus. But one thing

Boris Johnson can say is that the

NHS was never overwhelmed. We

did not see scenes of people dying in

hospital corridors in the way we did

in Lombardy and New York. A

combination of a bad winter flu

season and Covid would threaten

that record.

But the alarm in government is

that flu and Covid is just the half of

it. This winter the government could

be dealing with flu, Covid, flooding

— remember, the promised extra

flood defences have not yet been

built — mass unemployment and all

the issues arising from the end of the

One secretary of state

sees ‘the ingredients

for social unrest’

Voters will be much

less forgiving when the

second wave comes

Comment

James

Forsyth

@jgforsyth

the times | Saturday August 1 2020 1GM 25