24 The Sunday Times May 1, 2022COMMENT
T
hursday’s local elections will
provide the biggest test of politi-
cal opinion since the December
2019 general election. More than
4,000 councillors will be elected
in England, including in every
London borough. In Scotland
and Wales every local authority
seat is being contested, and in Northern
Ireland every seat on the assembly is up
for grabs. Each of these elections will be
influenced by local issues, but they will
add up to an important national story.
It would be easy to see these elections
as simply a report card on Boris Johnson,
Partygate and the cost-of-living crisis.
That, however, is too glib. The prime min-
ister is not the only politician to have a
keen interest in Thursday’s outcome. The
Tories are due a kicking, and will probably
get one, though its scale has yet to be
determined.
There was a time when a bad perform-
ance in these elections was expected to be
Johnson’s swansong. But, despite serious
missteps stretching back many months,
including the Owen Paterson affair, the
funding of the redecoration of the Down-
ing Street flat and an ill-disciplined and
law-breaking culture in No 10, it would
take something seismic this week for that
to be the case.
Johnson’s “greased piglet” powers of
escape have come to his rescue again. He
has performed well in the face of the Rus-
sian invasion of Ukraine, even if the Home
Office bungled the early stages of the re-
fugee problem. The Tories argue that the
cost-of-living crisis is a global phenome-
non and the prime minister has got all the
big calls right. The former claim is true;
the latter, as our investigations have
revealed, more debatable. The thing hold-
ing Tory MPs back from rebelling against
their leader — that, after Rishi Sunak’s fall
from grace, there is no obvious successor
— will be as true in a week’s time as it is
now.
That is why these elections are as
important for other parties as they are for
the Tories. Sir Keir Starmer has put him-
self on the map in recent months, and
now only a tiny minority think Jeremy
Corbyn is still Labour leader. Desperate to
lose his “Islington remainer lawyer” label,
he has finally started to provide opposi-
tion to a Tory government that, admit-
tedly, is adept at shooting itself in the foot.
Labour under Starmer, however, is still
a work in progress. Though the party haspulled itself up from the humiliation of
2019, voters are uncertain about what he
stands for and whether he can ever bring
the missing ingredient of charisma to his
leadership. Labour is ahead in polls, but
not by as much as it might be given the
government’s almost daily woes. Starmer
needs a good showing this week.
Whether Labour has any chance of
regaining power at the next general elec-
tion also depends on what happens in the
rest of the country. In Wales Mark Drake-
ford’s cautious leadership looks likely to
stand the party in good stead this week.
Scotland is another story. Fifteen years
after Alex Salmond scraped in as first min-
ister, and nearly eight years after Nicola
Sturgeon succeeded him, the SNP’s domi-
nance of Scottish politics continues. The
SNP’s failure in the 2014 referendum,
when it set out a half-baked programme
for independence, a position that per-
sists, has done little to impede the party’s
rise and rise.
Nor, it seems, are voters ready to pun-
ish the SNP for its failings on health, edu-
cation and crime, failings that are the
responsibility of Sturgeon and her dep-
uty, John Swinney. As long as there is a
government in Westminster to blame and
the independence fires continue to burn
strongly, the SNP will defy electoral grav-
ity in a way it does not deserve.
If Scottish politics is different, the dif-
ferences are even greater when it comes
to Northern Ireland. This week’s elections
could elevate Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill
to first minister. Older readers may
remember a time, between 1988 and 1994,
when the voices of Sinn Fein representa-
tives, including Gerry Adams and Martin
McGuinness, were banned from being
broadcast. But McGuinness became dep-
uty first minister and met the Queen, and
Sinn Fein is on the brink of power. It is also
in pole position in Ireland, though elec-
tions there are not due until 2025.
Though Sinn Fein now puts on a mod-
erate face, its rise, unsurprisingly, is going
down very badly among the province’s
Protestant majority. There is worrying
talk, not all of it idle, about a return to vio-
lence. The Democratic Unionist Party, still
furious about Brexit’s Northern Ireland
protocol, is under pressure from its grass-
roots to force No 10 to rip it up. It all
amounts to instability, which in Northern
Ireland is never good. These elections
matter, and far more than simply as a ref-
erendum on Partygate.Covid lockdowns are, thankfully, becom-
ing a distant memory in this country, and
long may it stay that way. It is a very differ-
ent story in China, where the pandemic
started more than two years ago and
where it is now exerting the biggest effect.
Our account today by Mike Liu, one of
more than 25 million Shanghai residents
now locked down — and one of 340 million
people in the People’s Republic who have
been subject to lockdowns in recent
weeks — makes sobering reading.
The Shanghai lockdown is a dystopian
vision of forced imprisonment, deep wor-
ries about whether food will be available,
3am knocks on the door for compulsory
PCR tests and the ever-present dread of
being shipped off to one of the city’s quar-
antine centres. The Chinese authorities
are doing it because they can — it is a meas-
ure of their control over their own citizens— but also because they see it as the only
way to pursue a “zero Covid” strategy that
most experts outside the country regard
as scientifically illiterate.
That strategy is closely associated with
Xi Jinping, for whom any policy shift
would be seen as a humiliating admission
that the West has got it right on Covid and
China badly wrong, with consequences
for its people and economy.
Protests are quickly stamped upon, as
they are in Hong Kong, which is rapidly
becoming a shell of its former self. Good
leaders are flexible. Deng Xiaoping, the
leader who set China on the path to great-
ness, is reputed to have said it did not mat-
ter whether a cat was black or white, as
long as it caught mice. Sticking with zero
Covid may not stop Xi remaining presi-
dent for life. But it exposes his inade-
quacy, inflexibility and sheer inhumanity.China’s zero-Covid policy
shows zero humanity
There is a moral contract between dogs
and their owners. We should look after
our pooches with care and kindness.
Dogs, in their turn, should be proper
dogs: loyal, boundlessly enthusiastic and
(this is crucial) cheerfully contemptuous
of the pretences of polite human society.
Proper dogs roll in smelly puddles.
They poke their noses in socially un-
acceptable places. They are rough, tough,
unruly little jesters who disregard the daft
trappings of civilisation. So we greet thenews that they are now expected to wear
sun cream (SPF 30 or above, vets say) with
a deep groan. They are already subjected
to ludicrous hairstyles in kitsch grooming
parlours and made to wear preposterous
coats to match their preposterous own-
ers. What other indignities must they bear
this summer? Please, not dogkinis.
We reluctantly bow to the vets and con-
cede that sun screen may occasionally be
advisable for some. But do apply it out of
sight of other canines. A dog has his pride.The dog that got the sun cream
ESTABLISHED 1822This week’s elections are far
more than a poll on Partygate
Dominic Lawson
Another TCM Covid-19 remedy, Lianhua
Qingwen (made of apricot kernels, liquorice
root and honeysuckle, among other things),
was handed in quantity to Hong Kong when it
was hit by the Omicron variant. The territory’s
Beijing-approved chief executive, Carrie Lam,
declared “heartfelt gratitude” to Beijing for
supplying the stuff, adding that it “may have
better effect than western medicine”.
In fact, because older Hong Kong Chinese
were even less vaccinated than those on the
mainland (65 per cent of its over-80s were un-
jabbed, compared with just 6 per cent in
Singapore), the death rate from the March
Omicron outbreak was the highest recorded
anywhere in the world since the outbreak of
Covid in 2019. At one point almost 300 a day
were dying from Covid. That may not seem
colossal, but if the same rate were applied to
the Chinese mainland, you would be looking at
almost 60,000 deaths a day.
Then you understand why the lockdowns
being applied by the authorities are so
inhumane in their ferocity (for example
causing a woman in labour to lose her child
after she was denied entry to hospital
because her negative Covid test was “four
hours too old”).
They are also central to the political survival
of President Xi, who has staked his reputation
on “zero Covid”. Xi has repeatedly trumpeted
the genuinely impressive claim that China, the
world’s most populous nation, has
experienced fewer than 5,000 Covid deaths,
compared with almost a million in the US. This
intended proof of the superiority of the
Chinese approach rests in part on
manipulation of death rates: at a time when
Shanghai had reported hundreds of thousands
of infections, it still claimed there had been
zero deaths from the outbreak. Associated
Press quoted a city health official, on condition
of anonymity, admitting that “the criteria for
confirming cases and deaths are very strict and
susceptible to political meddling”. No kidding.
The whole affair has shown the
consequences of making medicine a nationalist
— as opposed to national — endeavour. Thus the
insistence on sticking with inferior Chinese
vaccines and the refusal to license superior
foreign ones. Thus, too, the otherwise
incomprehensible persistence with Xi’s
“treasure house of Chinese civilisation” — TCM
— in treating Covid-19.
It’s still not known whether the bat and
pangolin-grinders behind this vast industry are
responsible for the original outbreak. But this
profoundly superstitious practice has left
China with no defence against Covid other than
mass incarceration.
[email protected]T
he first country to experience
Covid-19, and the one that invented
the defence strategy known as
lockdown, is the only country still
practising it. But the Chinese form is
so much harsher than the British
version, it is almost misleading to use
the same term. In Shanghai, the
biggest city now enduring the experience,
millions have been physically barricaded into
their homes, some crying out that they are
starving. Those reporting infections are forced
into vast quarantine camps. Vital office
workers have been confined to their
skyscrapers, sleeping at their desks for over a
month now.
It is in starkest contrast to the rest of the
world, which has moved to a policy of “living
with Covid” — largely thanks to the remarkable
success of vaccines produced by the US and the
UK. But it is not just a natural appetite for
ferocious social control by the Chinese
Communist Party that has kept it wedded to
what it calls a “zero Covid” policy. Its own
vaccines, such as Sinovac, are considerably less
effective, especially against new Covid
variants. They are better than no vaccine, but
another problem is that the lowest take-up has
been among the eldest, who are most
vulnerable to the disease. About 40 per cent of
Chinese over-80s are unvaccinated.
They are also — which is no coincidence —
the section of the population most faithful to
traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Here is
where things become strangely circular, and
not in a good way. Although there is increasing
suspicion in the West that the Covid-19
pandemic can be traced to a leak from the
Wuhan Institute for Virology (home of the
world’s largest collection of bat coronavirus
samples), the most common alternative
supposition is that it stemmed from the way
bats, among other exotic critters such as
sea horses and pangolins, are used in vast
quantities by practitioners of TCM.
This view was expounded by the British
prime minister in characteristic style 15
months ago: “Like the original plague which
struck the Greeks, I seem to remember, in book
one of the Iliad, it is a zoonotic disease. It
originates from bats or pangolins, from the
demented belief that if you grind up the scales
of a pangolin you will somehow become more
potent, or whatever it is that people believe.”
Boris Johnson did not use the words
“traditional Chinese medicine” but still caused
fury in Beijing, especially because President Xi
Jinping has promoted TCM in his own country
and for export as a “treasure of ancient
Chinese science and the key to the treasure
house of Chinese civilisation”. The state-ownedEnglish-language newspaper Global Times
quoted a chief physician at a hospital affiliated
to the China Academy of Chinese Medical
Sciences, to the effect that Johnson was
“shifting the blame to traditional Chinese
medicine” in an “effort to divert public
attention” from what it described as Britain’s
failure to “contain the virus”.
Since then Chinese companies have
developed what they claim to be effective TCM
treatments for Covid-19 (not made from
crushed bats or pangolins, but herbal in
nature). The most comprehensive review of the
academic literature on these remedies, by
three Britain-based medics (Yangzihan Wang,
Trisha Greenhalgh and Jon Wardle) in the
Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice,
concluded: “Of 607 articles identified, 13
primary studies met our final inclusion criteria.
No study convincingly demonstrated a
statistically significant impact on change in
disease severity.”
This verdict has made no difference to the
vast sums of money to be made in China both
by the manufacturers of these “remedies” and
by those speculating on the shares of such
businesses, which have soared on Chinese
stock exchanges in the wake of successive
outbreaks of the virus in Hong Kong and more
recently, once again, on the mainland.
Last week the Financial Times published an
eye-opening investigation under the headline
“China Covid-19 tsar pushed treatments
without revealing business ties”. This revealed
that Zhong Nanshan, head of an expert group
at the National Health Commission, the body
charged with the official recommendations of
Covid treatments, has close business links with
firms producing TCM “Covid remedies”,
including the treatment known as Xuebijing, a
compound of various herbs. Without declaring
those interests, Zhong co-authored a study
which asserted that “conventional therapy
combined with Xuebijing injection can
significantly improve the clinical prognosis of
patients with severe Covid-19”.Y
ou know how as a child you go
through a short-lived phase of
collecting, say, pigs, and there’s
always someone who doesn’t get the
memo when you move on, and keeps
giving you pig-shaped merchandise
until the end of time? You’re too
polite to explain, and it’s too late in
the day anyway, so you just smile and say thank
you. I sometimes worry about this scenario in
relation to the Queen and Cliff Richard. It is
entirely possible that, making small talk one
day in 1963, she mentioned in passing that
she’d quite enjoyed Summer Holiday at the
cinema — and has been living with the
consequences ever since. “Wonderful news,
Ma’am. Sir Cliff is available,” could very well be
a variant on, “Do you see? It’s a mug with a
curly tail for a handle! I thought of you
immediately.” Let’s hope her heart genuinely
thrills every time Cliff pops up to serenade her.
Poor her, if not, because he’s on the bill again
for her Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
I have concerns about these plans, which on
paper sound like a dream you might have if
you’d eaten too much fondue and banged your
head quite hard on the way to bed. There is
going to be a four-day bank holiday weekend
with a giant pageant in four parts on the last
day. The first part is called For Queen and
Country, involving a military parade and
hundreds of horses. This seems entirely on
brand: so far, so good.
Then there’s something called The Time of
Our Lives, which will celebrate 70 years of
culture, music and fashion. Rich pickings
there, you’d have thought, with the UK leading
the way in those particular areas for decades.
We are promised contributions from Shirley
Bassey and, yes, Cliff Richard (air punch from
the Queen, one hopes), but where is Paul
McCartney? Where is Mick Jagger? There will
also be Daleks and Sinclair C5 tricycles.Perhaps the 21st-century end of things,
including the outsize cultural contribution of
black artists, has yet to be announced.
The third bit, Let’s Celebrate, is about the
Queen herself and tells her story in 12 chapters.
It will feature corgis — the organisers should
have got Jeff Koons to reprise his flower-and-
topiary Puppy at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and
plunk it in the Mall — and more horses. Part of
it will be enacted in carnival style. One segment
will portray “the animal kingdom’s response”
to the Queen’s ascension to the throne in 1952
when she was on safari in Kenya. If you’ve
always wondered what the zebras had to say,
it’ll be a red-letter day for you.
The final part of the pageant, Happy and
Glorious, will be a musical finale in front of
Buckingham Palace. This is the traditional
concert bit, the part where you expect the
Queen to be at home with her feet up and her
earplugs in. If so, she will miss Ed Sheeran,
Alan Titchmarsh and Basil Brush, among other
stars of stage and screen.
As the celebrations gather momentum, Tom
Cruise has even been lined up to co-host an ITV
special with the actress Dame Helen Mirren.
Why? Nobody knows. Doing what? Top secret.
It makes the imagination run riot. Could aHollywood heart-throb pull off any kind of
majestic role, with such very modern teeth?
Are these events magnificent enough for the
occasion? Are they weighty, sonorous, regal;
equal to her majesty’s long and devoted reign?
Pageantry aside, they feel slightly end-of-the-
pier to me. Still, these things are often all right
on the night and it is possible that everyone
watching will be drunk enough to love every
moment. Besides, if the Queen genuinely
adores Shirley Bassey and Basil Brush, good for
her: you know what you like by the time you’re
96, and it’s nobody’s Platinum Jubilee but hers.
For a unifying cultural moment, though, my
money is on street parties and smaller local
celebrations. At platinumjubilee.gov.uk you
can see a map of national events — beacon
lightings, hog roasts, community picnics, tree-
plantings, services of thanksgiving, tea parties,
exhibitions, bonfires, concerts, town hall
celebrations, village shows, competitions,
bingo. Just looking at the events listed gladdens
the heart, because they represent the rare
intersection of a nostalgic, dream version of
Britain and a modern reality that is still elastic
enough to accommodate it. It is this, I think,
that most honours the Queen — her subjects,
whether flag-waving monarchists or not,
downing tools and putting out the bunting, real
and metaphorical, to acknowledge her long
and remarkable reign.
The Queen, who has begun using a stick,
cannot be expected to put in an appearance at
all the official celebrations: we’ll quite
understand if the best she can manage is a
wave from the balcony. Then she might go back
inside, chuckle at Basil Brush and observe with
a sigh that Cliff Richard is there — again. She
can then turn her attention to the ordinary
people celebrating her longevity. The big
celebrations are one thing, but it’s the little
ones that matter.
@IndiaKnightIndia Knight
The Queen knows the best jubilee party will be the one in your street
After 70 years, Her Maj is
due a holiday from Cliff
A nationalistic reliance on duff remedies has led to Covid incarcerations
Why is Tom Cruise
involved? Nobody
knows. What is his
role? Top secretIt is not known
whether the bat and
pangolin grinders
caused the outbreakChinese medicine
has blighted billions