Boris returns to Downing Street. Credit: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images
The last prime minister to dodge death while in office was Margaret Thatcher. The experience of almost being blown to pieces by the IRA in October 1984 did not notably soften the Iron Lady.
The morning after the bombing of the Grand Brighton Hotel, she took to the stage of the Tory Party conference breathing a message of pure defiance. “The fact that we are gathered here now — shocked, but composed and determined — is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” Indeed, her only concession to the attempted assassination of the cabinet a few hours previously was to omit from her conference speech a planned condemnation of large swathes of the Labour Party as the enemy within. Otherwise, the lady was very much not for turning.
A virus, however, is an altogether subtler and more insidious foe than a terrorist organisation. Covid-19 brings no demands, no ultimatums.
Boris Johnson, lying in intensive care three weeks ago and feeling the spider touch of the virus darkening and tightening through his body, would have experienced in the most personal and abject manner possible the threat that it presents to the body politic. Its workings are mysterious. There is still no clear picture of how it speads. Even in countries that cannot be accused of fiddling their figures there remains no certainty as to how many people are dying of it, let alone how many have contracted it. To fashion a policy to combat the virus, then, is not simply a matter of following ‘the science’. Even the world’s most brilliant epidemiologists know themselves to be groping after solutions in fog. There is no self-evident path to defeating SARS-Cov-2.
Which said, it is hard to believe that the Prime Minister, during the fortnight he has spent at Chequers recuperating from his brush with death, will not have been reflecting on whether, in the weeks before he was rushed to St Thomas’, he might possibly have done things differently.
The Government’s campaign against Covid-19 has not, it is fair to say, developed necessarily to Britain’s advantage. Far more people, relative to the size of the population, have died in this country than in Germany, let alone than in poorer countries such as Slovakia or Greece. Johnson’s initial attempt to square the competing demands of public health and the economy seems to have ended up inflicting avoidable damage on both. The gung-ho swagger that helped him to win the Brexit referendum and the last election proved altogether less successful against Covid-19. Today, as he returns to Downing Street, his own lungs bear the scars that prove it.
“Back to his normal, ebullient self.” So Matt Hancock described the Prime Minister on Friday. This may be true — and yet there were hints in the speech that he gave after being discharged from hospital that his personal experience of Covid-19 has served to recalibrate his take both on the virus and on those who are daily risking their own lives to fight it. His salute to healthcare workers seemed rawer, more personal, more emotional than his tributes to them had been before he went into intensive care. “It is thanks to that courage, that devotion, that duty and that love that our NHS has been unbeatable.”
Prior to falling sick, the only ideal that ever seemed to stir Johnson to matching flourishes of emotion was what he has always lauded as Britain’s “ancient and basic freedoms” — but this morning, standing outside No 10 on his return to Downing Street, he insisted once again that these had to remain prorogued, that the need to save the NHS from being overwhelmed had to come first. Before he fell ill, he had spoken in martial terms of sending coronavirus packing, as though it might have been General Galtieri or Jeremy Corbyn. Now he speaks of a victory that will be won by the NHS’s power of love.
Whether language like this will pacify the growing number of Tory MPs fretting that the economy as well as civil liberties are being sacrificed on the altar of saving lives the next few weeks will tell. So also will they be the test of just how far Johnson himself is prepared to go in maintaining the lockdown. History does not suggest that catching and surviving a disease during a time of pandemic necessarily precipitates any great process of conversion among political leaders. Instead, from the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who in 542 almost died of the plague to which he would give his name, to David Lloyd-George, who in the final month of the First World War went down with the Spanish Flu, and only just survived it, most seem to have carried on in much as they had ever done.
The celebrated example of a leader supposedly undergoing a dramatic change of character after an illness — one of which the classically educated Prime Minister will be more than aware — is not a model that he will be looking to emulate. In AD 37, a few months after becoming emperor, Gaius Caesar — ‘Caligula’ — fell dangerously ill. The Roman people, distraught at the prospect of losing their young and charismatic ruler, were thrown into paroxysms of anxiety. One of them, a wealthy businessman named Atanius Secundus, swore a particularly extravagant oath. Only restore Caligula to health, he promised the gods, and he would fight as a gladiator.
Naturally, he had not expected to be taken up on this vow. His aim had been merely to stand out from the other sycophants. Once back up on his feet, however, the Emperor took Atanius at his word. With a perfectly straight fact, Caligula ordered the wretched flatterer into the arena, there to fight for the amusement of the crowds. Predictably enough, paired against a trained killer, Atanius did not last long. The spectacle of his body being dragged away across the sands of the arena on a hook served notice to the Roman people that their young emperor had risen from his sickbed a dramatically altered person: no longer a man but a monster.
Such, at any rate, was the story. In truth, like so much told about Caligula, it was a myth. Almost certainly, the emperor was no more a lunatic after his illness than he had been before, and the readiness of the Romans to believe it reflected a more general understanding of disease as one of the many expressions of a capricious and repeatedly brutal cosmos. This might express itself in a variety of ways: as a feeling of impotence before “Fortune’s rapid wheel, which is always interchanging adversity and prosperity” or, in its more sophisticated form, as a philosophy of retreat before the world, an insistence that the only true wisdom is to ignore the sufferings of others, to immure oneself within a pleasant garden, and to cultivate ataraxia, the absence of worry.
There was no place, in this understanding of the universe, for the kind of sickbed conversion that would become such a staple of Christian hagiography: the knight so mortified by an attack of acne that he gave away all his possessions; the invalided merchant’s son who was brought to devote his life to the sick. Certainly, there was no place in the world of classical antiquity for any conception of a national health service — let alone one powered by love.
“Salus populi suprema lex esto,” the Prime Minister is supposed to have declared at a summit of ministers and health officials on Friday — and then, for the benefit of those in attendance not familiar with Cicero, to have offered his own translation: “the health of the people should be the supreme law”. In fact, as Johnson would well have known, the Latin word ‘salus,’ which he translated as ‘health’, had a much broader range of meanings: ‘safety’, ‘welfare’, ‘soundness’.
Here, then, it may be, is as clear an indication of the Prime Minister’s new state of mind as we are likely to get: one in which admiration for the martial values of classical antiquity, rather than being subordinated to a new found passion for the NHS, has instead been seamlessly fused with it. What is the Latin for “Having one’s cake and eating it?”
Tom Holland is a writer, popular historian and cricketer. He is not an actor. His most recent book is PAX
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Subscribe“The Government’s campaign against Covid-19 has not, it is fair to say, developed necessarily to Britain’s advantage.” – This statement cannot be made at this time. We might not know the answer for several years. Those countries that have had and continue to have very sever lockdowns could have a wave after restrictions have been released (and reinstated then released again) which could be considerably more deadly than this wave.
We need to to get past this simplistic data processing and regurgitation if we are going to find a proper solution
Yeah, read about two paragraphs then got the message, Boris has bungled things and thousands have died because of it.
We will ignore inconvenient facts like our larger population than Italy or Spain, how densely populated we are, how London is a huge international hub, the probability that Germany is being canny with how it records deaths because there is no way the virus is being less lethal there, barring them finding a cure they are not sharing with the rest of the world.
Boris will continue to be Boris and true to himself, his manifesto and those who voted for him. He has no need to change because at all times he has followed the advice of experts.
Boris is nothing if instinctually aware of the mood of the country. He will reflect this in his rhetoric, and I think, as he is a pretty liberal conservative, in his policies
I thought the whole article snide and cheap and revealed more about the writer’s mind than Boris Johnson’s.
Dives in omnia?
I agree, these were my feelings on reading this.
Apart from the author’s wish to once again let us know his historical background knowledge-which hardly touches upon today.
This is a rather shallow and cheap write up, that betrays more of the author’s sensibilities-sic! than the Prime Minster’s,who I wish well !
Whenever I see the name Tom Holland I know snide and cheap can’t be far off . An utterly pointless article that even suggests a parallel between our prime minister and the emperor Calligula! Extraordinary hyperbole even for the screeching, hysterical Left. You can read this sort of nonsense in the Guardian every day of the week. Shame!
I disliked the author`s tone, from which I assume he is a long standing disliker of Boris.
Nonsense as one would expect. First off, it is too early to say which, if any, countries have the best policy. The virus holds all the cards and will make its way through the entire population in time. You can no more stop it than you can stop the common cold. Once demographics, cultural habits, population density and conformity to laws are allowed for the scatterplot is likely going to show little difference among nations.
Boris has always backed the NHS – last year he spoke of it as the whole population figuratively standing by your bed wishing you well. There is nothing un-Conservative about public healthcare. Adam Smith recommended it among services that were best not left to the private sector. A pity writers don’t do a little work before giving us their unoriginal opinions.
The weird thing is that what Labour call ‘privatisation’ – and therefore heretical – is the system that most of our European neighbours have, and which are considered as good as, if not better, than ours
I fear Unheard seems to be slipping into the current media trap of giving ‘really very, very clever’ writers a platform to sneer and undermine on a whim. I’m all for freedom of speech in all it’s forms, but cheap poorly informed carping in my view does not belong on Unheard.
Is there no balanced argument left anywhere?
“Having one’s cake and eating it?”
What a snide and cheap way to end an otherwise decent essay.
You must be a remainer, yes?
What???
I run my own software business, am proudly British, employ 7 people, I voted leave. Now please explain to me the logic of your comment / assumption. I am sure you see the joined up dots here. I am struggling.
I agree. I didn’t like the drawling offhand put-down tone all through and your quote nailed it. This article is snide and cheap. Tom Holland has spoiled his credentials here.
Yes a very disappointing article by Tom Holland who normally enjoys his cake, being a fully paid up member of a partcular liberal elite and thus immune to twitter dog-piling; despite feasting on it by not being entirely predictable and even open minded about issues where dissent is not tolerated – even associating with those beneath the high-table salt, like Delingpole.
The comparisons with the technocratic paradise of Merkel’s Germany (a particular favourite of remainers) are especially irritating; as is the snobby and idiotically pedantic criticism of Boris’s alleged quotation of Cicero. Something you’d expect from a “classicist” at a former Polytechnic who calls themselves Dr X in the supermarket queue.
I fear the excellent Tom is slipping into the Universal Punditry Trap that has made such tiresome bores of “public intellectuals” as diverse as Mary Beard and Brian Cox.
Tom Holland is not, as I’m sure he would agree, a Classicist. He gained a ‘double first’ in the English tripos, at what some call “the other place”.
However he is certainly of the same ilk as Mary Beard, Simon Shama & Co.
The problem is that Boris is the anti-Christ and will never be forgiven for Brexit. Most of us have ‘moved on’, but for some that is truly impossible.
Mary was ZZ Top’s finest drummer. Unquestionably so.
Possibly one of the finest retorts ever seen in an online discussion
Sometimes the stronger man keeps a bit of his old philosophy, rather than throwing it all aside for the new. If you are correct, then Boris is being eminently sensible.
How strange, Tom Holland, to write that the C19 campaign’ has not developed necessarily to Britain’s advantage’.
This quote of course is a copy of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender address after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you, Tom, feel that the government has met so complete a defeat?
I make a simple vote for the Swedish approach. I do not want to deny my grandchildren their lives for the sake of mine and yes I want to be with them again. Equally I find the UK approach incoherent and very muddled, many self serving so called experts who can not even organise PPE and testing for front line staff. Let alone take action when they have modelled pandemic scenarios. Let’s get moving and reduce lockdown without further delay.
Speaking of Romans, this ‘byzantine’ nonsense is making me want to chuck my collected .epub drivel on the subject of the Basilea Rhomaion from the dismal Gibbon et al in my M$ Win recycler. The author here knows full well Imperator Justinian was a full Roman Emperor, spoke in his natural latin tongue not in greek; promoted and evolved Roman Law by codex — no “Basileos Iostinianos” title for him, we can be sure. ‘Byzantine’ my elbow.
And as someone who has lived with terminal big C (which is the current bigger C?) for some time, these moments of death guiding your hand and thoughts, are guaranteed to change our very being and dramatically at that. Who’d have thought?
Boris might be even more incensed today that the ‘other’ business of Government in late 2019 was derailed by the opposition/civil service muppets’ slow Brexit water torture tomfoolery — but he’s withstood every kitchen sink these pygmies have lobbed in his path.
We’ll see how he responds to future kitchen sinks, but trust me, the old Boris has gone for good. I wish him well.
Well said; For far too long the term Byzantine has held sway, when as you rightly say, we should talking of Rome and Romans.
There never was a Byzantine Empire nor a Byzantine Emperor or even a Byzantine Army. Their enemies always called them Romans and even at the last hour, on Tuesday, 29th May,1453, just before lunch, they were shouting we are Romanoi (even if that was in Greek!).
How did this error occur? Unfortunately a 16th century German scholar with the wonderful name of Hieronymus Wolf, started the rot by using it in his works and it rapidly spread across late Renaissance Europe for reasons to complicated to explain here.
However, true to form, it didn’t percolate into England until the magisterial works of the Lexicographer Dr William Smith in the mid 19th century.
What? No mention of Pericles, the muse of Our Beloved Leader (OBL)?
The parallels are obvious. OBL leads us to a brilliant victory in the Battle for Brexit, capped with a stunning Election triumph. Pericles similarly led the Athenians to Imperial greatness through sheer force of personality.
Then disaster strikes, Plague.
Pericles’s outstanding oratory in both his famous Funeral Speech and his later defence against alleged mismanagement of the Peloponnesian War, (as reported by Thucydides), remain unmatched.
However they set OBL a standard to emulate, for unlike Pericles, he has survived his Plague (so far).
I would like to see Freddie Sayers interview Prof Ferguson and question him on the accuracy or otherwise of his past modelling (bird flu, swine flu, foot and mouth and BSE), and on the assumptions used in his Covid-19 modelling.
I’m usually fan of Tom Holland’s writing but he’s just used this article to take cheap shots at the government.
First of all the fall out on the economy damage will cause a great many deaths, perhaps more than the virus itself. That’s just simple public health modelling. Unemployment leads to more deaths or shorter lives, we know that. There are plenty of people who are enjoying this lockdown and there are plenty of people who haven’t been affected as yet. i.e. the media for one (there are others). Their voices seem to be heard disproportionately above the more rational ones. Time will catch up with this group and the for the others by the way if we don’t get back to work and they will served a rude lesson as well. If there are no businesses there’s no advertising and therefore no jobs, in the medias instance. The rest of us who have had our businesses ravaged by the lockdown are now looking at being forced to sack all of our staff. How lovely for those that have their jobs to be able to be so righteous. If we don’t get a balanced take on how to respond to this virus we wont need to worry as we wont have the resources in the future to respond to anything anyway. We need to wake up, this has become something else and not just about a virus. There are next to no infections in Australia yet we still have ridiculous authoritarian restrictions.
I think you’re being unfair to criticise Boris’ translation of ‘salus’ as ‘health’ – the health of the people in its broadest and most inclusive sense – spiritual, psychological, physical and economic – is precisely the concern of the government (and not merely the ‘health’ of its supporters). Good luck to him, and us all.
A more useful response to Freddie’s question comes from looking at the
context in which the two epidemiologists are situated. Sweden and the UK
could hardly be more different in their political culture. The UK is
highly polarised, with an adversarial political culture. Sweden is
famously more consensual, with a more inclusive political culture. The
implications of this are quite striking. The Swedish response to the
epidemic is to treat it as a problem to be solved, a challenge that
society can adapt to and mitigate its more severe impacts, without
alarmism. This is a measured response, very much in keeping with the
Swedish temperament and culture. The British response is simply alarmist
(as it is in most countries derived from the British adversarial
polity). It’s response is not to adapt to the presence of the virus; it
must be conquered, and then banished, and the state must lead the way.
If you’re not with us, you’re against us. Pick which side you are on.
The fact that it might not be possible to banish the virus or eradicate
it at all, does not loom very large in the British public response. This
fact in Sweden sits at the centre of the response. It’s a matter of
science in Sweden. It’s moral panic in Britain.
It may seem to a non scientist that there is not much to choose between them . And it may also seem to a non scientist that Ferguson’s caution is media training. To a scientist it looks like acknowledgment of uncertainty in the data and models, while Giesecke’s high confidence in his opinion (for which he advanced zero evidence, and appears to contradict available evidence) is harder to understand.
It may be that the Swedish strategy does turn out to be the least bad strategy, but that is not obvious at the moment. For example, NZ seems to have a very good chance of complete suppression. Should they give up? Should China? South Korea? If test and trace + social distancing has a chance of keeping R0 below 1, that is almost certainly a better strategy. If it fails, then Sweden it is.
Do you know how much money Bill Gates has donated to Imperial College?
$290M. That’s a lot of money, and buys influence and lots of it.
It’s corruption and should be seen as such.
It’s not quite a question of what sort of world we want to live in as we can only decide for our own country. Will New Zealand keep tightly closed borders? And can we even make a choice when so much is unknown? Can you develop immunity? Will the virus keep mutating ? We don’t even know how it is transmitting. Should our objective be to return to life how it was – surely that made the pandemic (and any future ones) possible. I think to truly “beat” the virus we will have to create a world lifestyle the like of which we cannot yet imagine.
I’d believe people at the coal face even more than academics whose modelling has been shown to be woefully woefully pessimistic.
Try Youtube. Type ‘stats, expertise and COMMON SENSE’ then sit back and listen for an hour as two doctors who run a chain of accelerated emergency care facilities in the US contemplate, in front of a group of local journalists, if the juice will be worth the squeeze.
It’s very interesting and of note is that the more general media have barely given them a mention when you know for a fact that, if they thought they were wrong or could spin anything into them being wrong, they’d be trashing them.
Goodbye
I have been reflecting on the amount of pointless ‘stuff’ I’ll leave behind if I fall victim to this wee virus – to be sold off in dodgy auctions/house sales for a fraction of its original cost, or bunged into a skip. If I had paid an extra 1% in VAT on all of it, to be spent on strengthening the NHS, we might have been better prepared for this crisis. Why is it so important to upgrade one’s mobile phone every 12 months? Perhaps we all need to review our priorities?
To keep the Chinese making them, to the first question.
It’s too late now, to the second.
Instead of trying to discredit the writer (serves no purpose) we could instead just focus on the arguments he is presenting. Do we agree? If not, why? Way more interesting than being personal.
Which do I believe? Whichever one wasn’t breaking his own rules to f*ck someone else’s wife.
I think this was a handy escape door for Ferguson. Think, as a pasty faced scrawny individual, what would you want to remembered for by your resignation ?,…… being a clandestine lover (of an attractive..ish woman)?……… or the man who destroyed his own nations economy ‘cos he got his sums wrong?. He knows he’s screwed up and this get’s him out of the spotlight ….. for now anyway..