In 2019, Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’. I was surprised then to find that the doublet doom and gloom dated only from 1947, in the play Finian’s Rainbow. Three years after the 2016 referendum, Project Fear was still being applied to Brexit. Since then, to buy time in combating coronavirus, another project was launched to instil fear in the population. So, if they could, they stayed at home, petrified of Covid-19, and it proved hard to tempt them out again.
Now Brexit and the pandemic are dwarfed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since Vladimir Putin hinted he wouldn’t mind using nuclear weapons, Joe Biden has run around like Chicken Licken telling everyone that the sky’s going to fall on their heads if they so much as misplace a secondhand MiG.
In any case the destruction of homes, hospitals and churches is apocalyptic enough.
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