You can tell who the country trusts. People no longer look at Boris Johnson on TV and ask themselves why is this liar lying to me. They already know why. Boris lies because he knows no other way of interacting. Deceit is his default setting. It’s not just the past that is a foreign country; it’s also the present. Truth and Boris have never been on speaking terms. So when Chris Whitty and the prime minister hold a press conference together, there’s only one person to whom the country is listening. In the earlier days of the pandemic, the chief medical officer appeared rather starstruck by the Johnson swagger and the Downing Street setting and would automatically tend to defer to anything Johnson said. Even the stuff he knew was bullshit. But over the last nine months, the chief medical officer has wised up and is no longer fooled by the overbearing narcissist. Instead he speaks his mind. Wednesday evening was a case in point. Just as Johnson was talking drivel about people still needing to go out and about to parties – only don’t turn up to your own – despite the Omicron variant being far more transmissible than the Delta, Whitty went freelance. In his view the government advice didn’t go nearly far enough and was just plain bonkers. If you wanted an even chance of making it through to Christmas without getting ill – never mind stopping the NHS from being overwhelmed – then it was time to start cancelling some engagements and reprioritising your social calendar.
The reaction was almost immediate. Though many people had already decided to cut back their social events on the basis it’s invariably safest to do the opposite of what the government suggests, given that its health policy is driven by what the boneheaded libertarians on the right of the Conservative party will tolerate rather than the public good, a great deal more chose to follow Whitty’s advice and cancel Christmas parties and outings. It was no surprise then that Labour opted to table an urgent question, asking the Treasury for the government to do more on statutory sick pay for those off work and to offer financial assistance for the hospitality and entertainment industries. The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had a good excuse for not being in the Commons in person: she’s at home self-isolating. Rishi Sunak, not so much. He’s on a chill-out tour of San Francisco, seeing friends in Sausalito, the Napa Valley and Haight-Ashbury. Oh, and obviously working extremely hard. Mainly at distancing himself from Boris. He doesn’t want to be seen too close to the prime minister with the possibility of a leadership election in the offing sometime in the new year. Sunak and Johnson match one another in the self-serving disloyalty stakes.
In the absence of the chancellor, we got the hapless junior minister John Glen, who enjoyed a miserable 45 minutes being harangued by MPs from all parties. “It’s going to be fine,” he said desperately. Could everyone just please wait for the afternoon. To give Rishi a chance to wake up, fit in a yoga session followed by a tantric massage, and then make the 10-minute phone call with some unnecessarily stressed business dudes back in the UK. In the meantime, could everyone take some deep, Omicron-free breaths and realign their chi. Or kundalini. Or something. None of which remotely reassured anyone. Glen tried again, repeating what the government had done and dropping heavy hints that something would happen in a day or so once Rishi had completed his life-changing ayahuasca experience. So could people stop pestering the Treasury about their worries of going out of business. He was fed up with people always thinking primarily about themselves. That was the problem with society. Too much me, me, me. Om. People should just knuckle down and follow the government advice of going out and catching Covid. That’s what Boris wanted people to do and that’s what they ought to be doing. After all, that way no clubs and restaurants would be at risk. He would also like it on record he would be taking his team out for lunch on Monday in Salisbury. And could someone please keep the receipt. I’ve got news for Glen. Someone in his team would probably be cancelling the reservation as he spoke and he would be eating on his own. Not for the first time, I guess. All of this was too much for the increasingly unstable Steve Baker, who is turning into a one-man vigilante unit. On guard against anything halfway sensible. He wanted to know why “unelected” scientists, who actually know their subject, should be allowed to have a say in protecting the NHS. The people who should have the final say on public health were the politicians who were paid to make the wrong judgment calls. And if people died, they died. It was God’s way of punishing a decadent society that no longer trusted its own prime minister. Glen and the rest of the chamber stared at the floor in embarrassment. Brand Rishi – reassuringly expensive “sliders” available at £99.99 from www.dishirishi.com – wasn’t the only one to dodge a bullet in the Commons. Liz “call me ma’am” Truss, Sunak’s main rival for Boris’s job, was working on her Britannia-themed Instagram account, and so was unable to answer Tom Tugendhat’s urgent question on why Johnson had lied to him during prime minister’s questions about the projected 10% cuts to the Foreign Office. This time it was James Cleverly, who continues to be on a mission to disprove theories of nominative determinism, who had to clear up the mess. Read my lips, he said. There would be no 10% cuts to the Foreign Office. There could be 9.8% or 10.2% cuts. But definitely no 10% cuts. It was lame even by the normal standards of ministerial non-denials and it fooled no one. We had a government that not even the Tories could trust and we’d given up on the Brexit lies of the UK as a global superpower. Happy Christmas, Little Britain. • A Farewell to Calm by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.