It has just occurred to me - and quite why only now - that 2020 has been the most ridiculous soap opera ever. All we’ve lacked is the dead Bobby Ewing miraculously revived and taking a shower. We began this arch annus horribilis still scratching our heads as to how a comedy politician could have become prime minister, assembling a cabinet of apparent toadies hell-bent on “getting Brexit done” above all other priorities, as if one of Batman’s various nemeses had been installed and gathered together a cast of cartoon super villains to see out their agenda.
However, when the pandemic unfolded (or, in other words, we caught what the rest of the world had been getting since January and February), we entered into the new distraction with stoic uniformity. In an unusually warm, blue-skied spring, we stood on our doorsteps on a Thursday at 8pm, applauding essential workers in the ever-lightening evenings. We endured the first lockdown because it was the right thing to do and, if you were lucky enough to have a garden, “working from home” from a lawn chair with a cooling refreshment at your side wasn’t exactly a hardship. Some of us, however, had to shield or at least remain inside, denied any human contact due to a clinical vulnerability that even the scientists didn’t, then, fully understand, while hospitals started to fill up. But, still, we endured it. Then summer entered the final straight of August, and if we were able, we took off to Cornwall, or the Lakes, or anywhere where, again with agreeable weather, we could at least enjoy the placebo effect of taking a holiday somewhere.
However, 2020’s scriptwriters are of a fiendish creed. Just as we think Den and Angie are getting on again, the former turns up at the Queen Vic with divorce papers on December 25th. “Happy Christmas, Ange!”. Effectively, that’s what Boris Johnson did yesterday. Just three days before he’d been mocking Sir Keir Starmer’s seemingly grinchish call for Christmas to be cancelled, only for the prime minister to do it himself, anyway. I think only Liverpool won the Lack Of Christmas Spirit award by a higher margin, spanking Crystal Palace 7-0 yesterday. Those writing that script are having devilish fun. One minute it’s all talk of vaccines and “sunlit uplands”, and Boris is invoking Churchill [again] with his Dame Vera Lynn rhetoric, the next, we’re all contemplating what to do with the mountain of excess food bought for a lunch that will now be spent by small bubbles (and without the squeak, too). Not even 24’s Jack Bauer faced as many ridiculous changes of circumstance.
I’m not going to even pretend to have better knowledge of this virus than the experts. And I’m certainly not going to second-guess the wisdom of those bunkered in 10 Downing Street 24/7 trying to figure it all out. But there’s something fundamentally wrong. It’s called expectation management. I’ve learned, in my 32-year professional PR career, that managing your stakeholders’ expectations is the key. It’s not about keeping people happy, either. Just better informed and better prepared. Even in crisis situations, where situational fluidity is the enemy, you prepare for it. Or at least give the perception of doing so. Right now, the British government is giving the impression of being unprepared for anything. At risk of being simplistic, the feeling we all get is that the medical experts and scientists say one thing, and Bozza takes the populist view for fear of ruining everything. And, yet, in not taking unpleasant decisions soon enough, he’s done exactly that. How many people were still out shopping yesterday, believing that there were still a few more days until Christmas, only to get the newsflash on their phones that 16.4 million people in London, the south-east and eastern England would now be banned from mixing indoors for at least the next two weeks, as of a minute past midnight this morning? All this because of a ‘mutant variant’ of the coronavirus, VUI-2020/12/01 which, it is claimed, was first identified as long ago as September, and which has proven to be 70% more infectious than previous strains, even though it did not appear to cause higher death rates or be any more resistant to vaccines.
“When the virus changes its method of attack, we must change our method of defence,” Boris intoned from No.10 yesterday. “And as your prime minister, I sincerely believe there is no alternative open to me.” This from the man who, on Wednesday during Prime Minister’s Questions, made the comment to Starmer: ”I wish he had the guts to just say what he really wants to do, which is to cancel the plans people have made and to cancel Christmas.” And, yet, that’s exactly what Johnson did yesterday. It’s not, either, the first U-turn he’s made like this.
The narrative from the outset is that everyone is learning as they go, which is fair enough. To tap into Boris’s Churchill fantasies, we’re not in the same kind of conflict as an actual war. In 1940, Britain had the combination of resilience, the Royal Air Force, radar and an intelligence network - all the apparatus of conventional war - to keep the enemy at bay. Today, it’s the combined excellence of a medical, scientific and pharmaceutical community, in principle in concert with politicians and a civil service that should be able to draw on the best strategic and tactical wisdom to make informed decisions. Which makes you wonder why, when VUI-20/12/01 has been known about for weeks (and only last weekend was ringing very real alarm bells within the Department of Health & Social Care and, in particular, on Matt Hancock’s desk), it took a full week of everyone doing their Christmas preparations (as well as a House of Commons ding-dong which Boris chose, as per usual, to treat with typical flippancy), before the tough decision was made to bugger up Christmas for almost 30% of the English population, and severely restrict millions more?
I get it that the script for 2020 has been peppered with devilish twists and turns. I see councils - like Bromley’s - having to issue three different tiering instructions in the space of 10 days. I get the science: hospitals in London and the south-east are already filling up, and the entire premise for lockdown in the first place - protect the NHS from being overwhelmed - is getting close to prophecy becoming real, and it may well be that Boris has made the only decision he could have done. We’ll cope - we always do: we’ll change our plans, and we’ll put up with eating Pot Noodles on Christmas Day because it was too late to get an Ocado delivery in and Tesco Express round the corner had nothing better. And, yes, we’ll bunker at home watching crap TV, revelling in a Blitz spirit of “it is what is”. But that won’t help my near-91-year-old mother, whose Christmas is going to be a pretty basic affair (even if her stoicism, honed during her own very real wartime evacuation as a ten-year-old, is probably more robust than anyone else in the family). Because, with a little more expectation management, we could have planned ahead, rather than wait for the curtain to be brought down halfway through the performance.
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