Boris Johnson’s Macron-esque pettiness

How we all hollered with outrage in May when Emmanuel Macron closed France’s borders to people arriving from Britain on the dubious basis that Britons, and Britons alone, were in danger of infecting France with the Indian variant. I believed, and I still believe, that Macron and his government were in part motivated by Brexit — it was part of our ongoing punishment for daring to vote to leave the EU. It certainly wasn’t justified on scientific grounds: if Briton had more recorded Indian variant (or Delta) cases than other European countries at the time it was largely thanks to more samples of Covid being sequenced here. Some countries, France included, were not analysing more than a tiny fraction of cases.

But the unfortunate truth is that our own government is every bit as petty — perhaps even more so. First, it kept European countries on an ‘amber list’ even when they had dramatically lower infection levels than Britain.