The government’s mismanagement of the pandemic at each step, and its continuing to do so, seems to have not been noticed by most of the media. Even the revelations by an insider and observer of this incompetence, Dominic Cummings, has been met by a sort of malaise from the press and the corporate media and state broadcaster. Even the late secretary of state’s plans to give himself more powers and to open our confidential health information to commercial companies has been met with muted comments and resistance. So, it is extremely farcical that the fall of one of the chief architects of this failure who has so far been protected by the PM, should be felled by such a relatively much less minor offence, breaking his own lockdown rules by snogging or embracing or kissing his lover whom he has appointed as a non-executive advisor to oversee his performance. The same Secretary of state has recently been admonished for minor breach of the ministerial code through some commercial deals for which he stood to gain and got away with yet another apology, and this after a string of debacles including lack of PPI, the massacre of care home residents, the failure of test and trace, the culture of chumocracy with lucrative contracts awarded to his friends and so on.
In a very insightful article by John Hilley
“The ‘fading’ of great state crimes: why isn’t Johnson’s Covid failure deemed criminally negligent?” offers an excellent dissection of the way the media have protected the politicians from being made accountable for their negligence.
“While covering every daily aspect of the Covid crisis, and airing criticism of the government’s handling of it, our ‘all-seeing’ media remain collectively averse to calling out such failings as criminally negligent.
Instead, it has helped peddle a narrative of ‘learned mistakes’ and ‘recovered fightback’, serving to soften the harsh truth of government culpability. “
It is worth reading this whole analysis by this Glaswegian blogger who is a member of the Glasgow Palestine Human Rights Campaign
But the lesson here is quite clear, Johnson will eventually emerge from this seriously incompetent situation as a supposed saviour and his early and continued mistakes will be forgotten. Any enquiry will be led by someone sympathetic to the government, will be a whitewash because of the unprecedented nature of this pandemic which nobody could have foreseen. Such nonsense will of course be swallowed by the collective press and not probed. Meanwhile Johnson will have to look for another incompetent scapegoat to point the fingers at. In having to appoint his formidable opponent, Sajid Javid to the position of health secretary he may be signalling the beginning of losing his grip on the party, or alternatively in setting a trap for his adversary.