30 The Sunday Times December 19, 2021COMMENT
F
or tens of thousands of hotels, res-
taurants, pubs, theatres and
cinemas this should be a time
when the crowds flock in and the
tills ring. All that began to change
last month when stories emerged
from South Africa of the new and
more infectious Omicron variant
of Covid-19.
The result, for most of these businesses
and the people working in them, has been
heartbreaking, a second Christmas in suc-
cession that, rather than setting them up
for the coming months, has deepened
their problems. Some will not survive this
latest setback.
For Rishi Sunak, who thought he had
put most of his massive support for busi-
ness during the pandemic behind him,
this creates a dilemma. The chancellor,
forced to cut short a trip to California, was
criticised for being out of the country as
the Omicron wave raged. That is harsh.
His responsibilities are for the economy,
not public health.
Sunak will almost certainly be criti-
cised again if he does not reach deep into
Treasury coffers to provide more support
for the economy as Omicron bites. Having
begun the task of repairing the public
finances, after spending roughly £400 bil-
lion on pandemic support, he now faces
demands to turn the taps back on.
We should not, despite the problems
now being faced by hospitality, arts and
entertainment, be too gloomy. Professor
Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for
England, wrongly criticised by some of
the more knuckleheaded Tory MPs for
spreading gloom, has said that while there
will be a very rapid rise in Omicron cases
as we move towards the peak, case num-
bers will subside equally quickly.
Predicting the course of this pandemic
is fraught with danger, but there is reason
to hope that, just as Omicron came upon
us in a rush, so within a few weeks the dan-
ger from it will be, if not over, subsiding.
The context of this wave, it should be
remembered, is one in which a high pro-
portion of the population is vaccinated,
increasing numbers have received a
booster dose and plenty of people have
some natural immunity as a result of hav-
ing had the virus.
Indeed, for all the government’s mis-
steps and failings, for which punishment
by the voters of North Shropshire was the
least the prime minister could have
expected, the vaccine programme contin-ues to be a remarkable success, with the
proportion of the population aged 12 and
above who have received a booster fast
approaching 50 per cent.
That is as much due to the efforts of
hundreds of thousands of vaccinators and
other volunteers rising to the challenge as
it is to a lever being pulled in a chaotic
Downing Street. We are witnessing an
enormous national effort, which should
make us optimistic about what this coun-
try can achieve when faced with a huge
challenge.
We should also avoid the temptation to
descend into deep gloom about the econ-
omy. We are coming to the end of a year in
which the country has bounced back
strongly from last year’s woes. The latest
compilation of independent forecasts
from the Treasury suggests the economy
will have grown about 7 per cent this year,
its best for decades. The average new fore-
cast for growth in 2022, made since Omi-
cron emerged, is a healthy 4.7 per cent.
The chancellor’s interventions during
the pandemic, most notably the furlough
scheme and its equivalent for the self-
employed, have left us with an unemploy-
ment rate of just 4.2 per cent, barely above
the pre-pandemic level. This is comfort-
ably the mildest unemployment hangover
to follow any modern recession. Instead
of a surge in the number of jobless people,
a bigger problem for many sectors of the
economy, including hospitality, is short-
ages of workers. There is no case for re-
introducing the furlough scheme.
Omicron is an undoubted setback for
the country. We are, however, in a better
position to face it, thanks to the vaccine
programme, than we were a year ago, and
despite the new variant there are reasons
to be cautiously optimistic about next
year. The experience of the pandemic has
been that each successive wave, whether
accompanied by formal restrictions or
not, has had less effect on the economy.
So, while there is a case for limited and
targeted help for the worst-affected sec-
tors, the chancellor should tread care-
fully. If we have to live with Covid, as the
experts say we will, then we have to
expect further waves. The response to
them cannot be that the government steps
in each time to massively prop up busi-
ness. It has already done that, but on a
temporary basis. We must not create an
economy permanently dependent on
state support. Sometimes you have to be a
little cruel to be kind.One of the worrying consequences of the
pandemic, which is being exacerbated by
Omicron, is the effect on our children’s
education. Nearly 3 per cent of pupils
were absent from school on December 9,
the latest date for which figures are avail-
able, most because of confirmed or sus-
pected Covid. That number is likely to
have risen further, and there are also sig-
nificant coronavirus-related absences
among teachers and teaching assistants.
The fact that damage is being done is
not in doubt, as an Ofsted report found
last week. Persistent absence from school
is leading to gaps in children’s education,
particularly in literacy and maths. Chil-
dren starting school, or moving between
primary and secondary school, were
found to be suffering particular problems,
with “lower starting points” than usual
and greater difficulties in settling in.“Children have missed out so much
already,” Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s
chief inspector, said. “And some pupils
remain persistently absent from school
for a variety of reasons. So, as we face fur-
ther turbulence, we must do all we can to
make sure children are able to continue
learning in their classrooms.”
She is right. Some head teachers are
preparing for another year of disruption
and cancelling mock exams planned for
January, as we report today. But it is vital
to minimise that disruption. Most schools
have stayed open: 99.9 per cent according
to the latest figures. Ofsted inspectors also
found, encouragingly, that schools were
working hard to get back to pre-pandemic
attendance levels and were making
progress in helping pupils to catch up.
That has to continue. Keeping schools
open must be a national priority.Omicron must not be allowed
to keep children out of school
We are often told that Christmas has
descended into mindless consumerism,
so the letters sent to Santa (or, at least, to
an enterprising business that fills in for
him) come as a pleasant surprise.
As we report today, there is little of the
cheeping plastic tat that one might
expect.
Instead, children’s present requests
range from the frugal (a satsuma) to the
prosaic (a sticky-tape dispenser) to the
mildly alarming (a real shark). Top of thelist is, endearingly, a simple teddy bear.
The next generation has its heart in the
right place.
We hope Santa brings something for
every reader. However, rumour has it that
he will visit only boys and girls who have
been good this year. A source at the North
Pole informs us: “He’s making a list; he’s
checking it twice. He’s going to find out
who’s naughty or nice.” Perhaps our sub-
scribers in Westminster should not get
their hopes up.An easy ride for Santa
ESTABLISHED 1822Business can’t expect endless
gifts from Sunak’s sack
Dominic Lawson
who raised the question of whether the
government, advised by him, had been
“prioritising Covid over cancer”. He replied:
“This is sometimes said by people who have
no understanding of health at all... and
when they say it, it is usually because they
want to make a political point. You ask any
doctor in any part of the system, and what
they will tell you is that what is threatening
our ability to treat cancer is that so much of
the NHS is treating Covid.” For saying such
things Whitty has been traduced by some
Tory MPs as a sort of socialist ideologue who
actively enjoys recommending social
restrictions.
One cabinet minister, who had been making
Whitty’s point to the “rebels”, told me they
typically responded: “You are no longer a
Conservative.” Yet Conservatism has always
been opposed to ideological purity
outweighing the dictates of common sense: it is
why it has been such a successful political
party. For the great majority of British people it
is Whitty who represents common sense, not
Sir Desmond Swayne. To denigrate the chief
medical officer (a man who has spent many
weekends treating Covid patients in hospital,
on top of his advisory day job) is, on political
grounds alone, unfathomably stupid.
The lesson to be drawn from the
Conservative debacle in the North Shropshire
by-election is obviously that the voters were
disgusted by the revelations of partying in
Downing Street last winter, when the nation
was being told by the PM to do no such thing.
But please also observe that the Reclaim
Party, co-founded by the actor Laurence Fox
specifically to defend the right of people to
ignore any and all Covid restrictions, polled
abysmally. Its candidate, the former MEP
Martin Daubney, who vigorously campaigned
against the lockdowns (as he had every right to
do), got just 375 votes.
The Tory MPs who voted against the
government in the Commons last week might
log that figure, or indeed the letters from
readers in Conservative-supporting
newspapers after that vote saying things like, “I
never thought I’d see the day when I’d
congratulate the Labour Party,” and, “I hate to
admit it, but we are fortunate to have an
opposition that is prepared to put people’s
safety above party politics.”
Above all it is absurd, since the government
has adopted an advisory rather than
compulsory approach this time round, that its
“rebels” have proved themselves unable to
take yes for an answer.
[email protected]A
s some of you may have noticed, my
column didn’t appear in the last
issue. I had hoped to use the week’s
leave to indulge in seasonal partying.
But the hosts of most of the festivities
in my diary cancelled, citing
Omicron. Having had the booster
vaccine last month, I was up for
socialising. Not so the majority of my intended
hosts, who perhaps felt more responsibility in
that role.
But the main point, in terms of politics, is
that these cancellations predated the
government’s advice to be — in the words of
Boris Johnson — “cautious” in the face of a new
Covid variant of extraordinary transmissibility,
against which the first two vaccine jabs would
be much less protective.
As in the period just before the government
announced a lockdown in March last year, the
public to a great extent decided,
autonomously, to restrict their social
engagements: then, too, restaurants and
theatres endured devastating mass
cancellations well before they were closed by
government decree.
This time — rightly, in my view — Johnson has
not imposed any mandatory restrictions,
instead counting on a mixture of self-restraint,
pre-existing immunity and an accelerated
booster programme to keep Covid hospital
admissions at a level the NHS can handle. He
has abandoned the idea of requiring those who
have come into contact with someone with the
Omicron variant to isolate themselves — they
just need to test, so no pingdemic. The only
significant new regulation the government has
proposed is that certain places where people
congregate, such as nightclubs, should require
attendees to produce evidence either of
vaccination or of a negative lateral flow test
(free from chemists).
Yet approximately half of the Conservative
backbenchers voted against the measure last
week, which got through with the support of
Labour. Some of the remarks made by the
“Tory rebels”, as they are routinely called,
were dumbfounding. David Davis, a former
cabinet minister, said: “The one thing you
would think you have control of in a civilised
society is your own body and any medical
actions taken to it.” But we are not following
Austria, which has authorised fines for those
refusing the jab. And even in that case — the
most anti-antivaxer policy in Europe — no one
is losing control of their own body. Nor are we
following Singapore, where vaccine-refusers
have to contribute to the cost of their treatment
in hospital should they be admitted with Covid.But Davis seemed sensible next to some of
his colleagues. Sir Desmond Swayne told the
Commons that the government had been
“letting loose the dogs of war” and that the
renaming of Public Health England as the
“Health Protection Agency” (actually not its
real new name) was the product of “Stalinist
minds”. Swayne went on to declaim: “We
decide what our risk appetite is and what we
are or are not prepared to encounter.
Notwithstanding the carnage on our roads,
which is certainly killing more people than
Covid at the moment, some of us will still
decide to drive.”
In the most recent annual figures 1,390
people were killed on our roads; the typical
daily toll is about four. The peak daily Covid
death toll — out of a total so far of nearly
150,000 — was 1,820. These are facts instantly
available from the staff at the excellent House
of Commons library, should Sir Desmond find
researching via Google too tedious.
As for limitations on our freedom of choice,
are we to take it that Swayne is opposed to the
regulation that we are not allowed to drive a
car if we have imbibed much more than a
glass of wine? Does he consider that to be a
grotesque infringement on our personal
“risk appetite”?
Then there was his colleague Marcus Fysh
MP, who in his opposition to the measures told
Radio 5 Live: “We are not a ‘Papers, please’
society. This is not Nazi Germany.” Strangely,
Fysh does not seem to oppose the
government’s plans to make citizens produce
some sort of photographic identification
before they can vote. Regarding his idiotic
insinuation of Nazi tendencies on the part of
ministers, it’s worth pointing out that the
actual Nazis relaxed vaccine mandates (in such
matters the Führer had more in common with
the health cranks than what we now term
“conventional medicine”).
As for our present-day chief medical officer
for England, Chris Whitty, he was devastating
last week when answering a Conservative MPI
love a good obituary, but you always have
to read between the lines. Even then the
experience isn’t as satisfying as it might
be, because while people’s glorious
achievements are indeed glorious and it is
good to celebrate them, you never really
find out what the person was like as a
human being, other than, invariably,
quasi-saintly.
Now try this, from last Wednesday’s
Fayetteville Observer (in North Carolina). It is
about Renay Mandel Corren, who died aged 84,
and is written by her son Andy. “The bawdy,
fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling
Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has
kicked it,” it begins, and goes on to note that
she would be mourned “in the many
glamorous locales she went bankrupt”.
Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, “where
she first fell in love with ham, and atheism”,
Corren moved to North Carolina, “where
Renay’s dreams, credit rating and marriage are
all buried”. I’m going to have to quote at length
because the obituary, which went viral, is just
so good: “Renay has been toying with death for
decades, but always beating it and running off
in her silver Chevy Nova,” it says. “Covid
couldn’t kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia
twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast
cancer twice, two mastectomies, two
recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage
to a philandering sergeant major, divorce in
the 1970s, six kids, one caesarean, a few
abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist
of Spring Lake, NC, or an affair with Larry King
in the 1960s.”
And so it goes on for 1,000 words, penned
by her “favourite son ... the gay one who
writes catty obituaries in his spare time, Andy
Corren, of — obviously — New York City”. It
ends with details of the funeral service, “a very
disrespectful and totally non-denominational
memorial, most likely at a bowling alley in
Fayetteville. The family requests absolutely
zero privacy or propriety, none whatsoever,
and in fact encourages you to spend somegovernment money today on a one-armed
bandit, at the blackjack table or on a cheap
cruise to find our inheritance.
“Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.”
Don’t you feel you know Renay now? Don’t
you wish you’d met her (maybe with a
“Goodness, is that the time?” get-out)? Don’t
you want to know more about the affair with
Larry King? She also played cards “like a
shark”, didn’t cook or clean but “was great at:
dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty
jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying
dirty magazines”.
The closest we get to this sort of thing in the
UK is bone-dry profiles of the few remaining
English eccentrics. They are all entertaining
to read but suggest the subject lived in a
vacuum, being magnificently themselves to the
delight and amusement of everyone, which is
never the whole picture. Apart from anything
else, many eccentrics are monstrous narcissists
who aren’t fun to live with, as is true of lots of
remarkable people. Either that, or they’re so
ambitious and career-obsessed, so greedy and
venal, that everything else falls by the wayside.
You never get any sense of that, or of what
these eminences were like when they were not
being eminent. Did they play with their
children? What made them laugh
uncontrollably? Was their marriage happy? Did
they have affairs, and if so with whom and for
how long? I ask this last one because I’ve
noticed that sometimes eminent men haveaffairs that last decades and are clearly
meaningful but are either ignored entirely in
their obit or glancingly mentioned in one
condescending sentence — it’s one of the few
remaining areas in which dismissing women
as bits of fluff is still acceptable. This is also true
of wives who weren’t the first or last. What
about the middle wives? Nobody goes to the
bother of marrying someone if their heart isn’t
in it at the time, and their choices are
illuminating.
And what about hobbies: why are they
always charming and gentle things such as
gardening and chess? As well as liking bowling,
Renay Corren played cards, “laughing with the
boys until the wee hours”, and enjoyed
smoking weed.
Above all, I always want to know what the
person’s children are up to, since there is no
better way of getting behind the public façade
of a famous person — or of an ordinary one,
come to that. I have been reading the most
enthralling non-fiction book I’ve read in years,
a history of the Sackler family called Empire of
Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is
actually about much more than the Sacklers
and the vast wealth they made from creating
the opioid OxyContin (buy someone the book
for Christmas — they’d have to be dead not to
be gripped. It’s like Succession but even more
jaw-dropping, and real). In Empire of Pain the
children’s lives — their tragedies and
malfunctions as well as their survivals — form a
parallel story all on their own.
It is of course understandable that when
somebody dies, family members should want
the best possible version of that person to be
remembered. The question of whether their
loved one was actually good, as opposed to
good at what they did, is addressed only if they
were so bad that not mentioning the badness
becomes ridiculous. But these whitewashed
reminiscences feel chilly and distant. What
shines out from Andy Corren’s obituary of his
mother is pure love.
@IndiaKnightIndia Knight
The death notice of an 84-year-old grifter felt like a love letter from her son
A warts-and-all riposte
to the lifeless obituary
The PM can rely on us for common sense on Covid, but not his own MPs
In obits, dismissing
women as bits of fluff
is still acceptable
Swayne claimed our
roads were killing
more than Covid
Johnson is dogged by
rebels without a clue