Boris Johnson should not be forgiven for his handling of lockdown. He needlessly criminalised everyday behaviour when voluntary guidelines would have sufficed. Nannies were prosecuted for delivering birthday cards to children; friends were apprehended for meeting up in the park. Meanwhile, the officials who had created these rules flouted them regularly.
Johnson wrongly denied that his staff were having parties. But compared with everything else that went wrong during that period, his false denial is trivial. It is surprising, then, that the House of Commons seems obsessed by it, rather than by the collapse of the democratic apparatus during lockdown, or the fact that the government was allowed to deploy emergency powers long after the crisis had passed.
There is little interest, too, in why mental health problems have increased, with 5,000 new claims for overall sickness benefit being made every day. We are told these details are due to be addressed in the official Covid inquiry, which may or may not appear before the end of the decade. Our politicians have absolved themselves of the need to answer hard questions.
Rishi Sunak needs to inspire a newfound seriousness in his MPs
Instead, they’d rather play games with the former prime minister, hoping to seek advantages for themselves while obsessing over incidental details. Johnson admits he misled parliament. He was punished for the mayhem he presided over by being thrown out of office in disgrace. To go over the former PM’s political corpse with such determination simply shows the power he still holds over his opponents. If MPs showed half as much interest in the fate of the 140,000 pupils now chronically absent from school, parliament could hold the government to account and speak up for the voiceless.
With politicians seemingly happy to ignore the effects of the lockdowns they voted for, how do they now spend their time? One preoccupation is the new law being passed to prohibit the import of animals killed by trophy hunters in Africa.
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