Boris Johnson looks shattered. The bags under his eyes have bags of their own. This is unsurprising: he is where the buck stops in dealing with a public health crisis on a scale not seen in this country for generations.
There is an additional reason, I suspect, for his mental turmoil. Inexorably, pressure is increasing on the Prime Minister to follow other European nations and introduce draconian measures to beat down the likelihood of mass infection with coronavirus — even if it means a loss of liberty on an unprecedented scale.
If there is one principle Johnson holds dear (and he does not have many) it is personal liberty. That, essentially, is why he is a Tory. Or as he put it in a 2006 newspaper column: ‘Lefties are fundamentally interested in coercion and control.’
Yet now, we are informed, the Government is preparing to ‘order’ citizens of 70 years of age and over to go into ‘quarantine’ for no less than four months.
In terms of the panic over coronavirus, Johnson told a group of business people in 2007 that as far as he was concerned, Mayor Larry Vaughn (as portrayed by Murray Hamilton, pictured) was the true hero of the film Jaws: it was ‘laudable’ that he strove to help the businesses of his seaside town in defiance of mounting hysteria over a number of shark attacks
It will be said it is for their own good. But it would be a strange sort of quarantine. That term has always described the forcible isolation of those who are actually infected during an epidemic, and who are being put under effective house arrest in order to protect others.
Furious
But this would be an enforced isolation of the uninfected elderly, justified by the figures from Italy, which showed fatalities grotesquely skewed towards those over 70.
Throughout his career as a journalist, and as Mayor of London, Johnson has always railed against laws depriving people of liberty for the sake of their own health. He was furious, as Mayor, when the Port of London Authority banned people from swimming in the Thames between the Barrier and Putney Bridge (on the grounds that this was a ‘dangerous stretch, with strong tides and eddies’).
Johnson, a keen fresh-water swimmer himself, raged: ‘We don’t need some bunch of well-meaning bureaucrats to click their fingers with an edict that sentient adult human beings must be kept out of the river. This is the kind of gratuitous legislation that is sapping the moral fibre of the nation.’
Susan Michie, 65, (pictured) a member of the Government’s (pre-existing) pandemic influenza advisory committee and Professor of Health Psychology at University College London
In similar terms, he criticised the then Conservative leader David Cameron’s support for Jamie Oliver’s campaign to make schoolchildren eat healthier food.
Some mothers had been seen pushing pies through the railings of a school, so their offspring could continue to have the food they wanted. At a Conservative Party conference fringe meeting, Johnson jibed at Cameron: ‘If I was in charge, I would get rid of Jamie Oliver. I say let people eat what they like. Why shouldn’t they push pies through the railings?’
Most relevantly, in terms of the panic over coronavirus, Johnson told a group of business people in 2007 that as far as he was concerned, Mayor Larry Vaughn was the true hero of the film Jaws: it was ‘laudable’ that he strove to help the businesses of his seaside town in defiance of mounting hysteria over a number of shark attacks.
Johnson acclaimed the fictional Mayor: ‘A gigantic fish is eating all [his] constituents and he decides to keep the beach open. It turned out he was wrong. But he was heroically right in principle.’
Very funny. But this has serious application to the real-life policy challenge of coronavirus. We could act like the Europeans, shutting down schools, almost all retail outlets, restaurants, you name it. But not only will this cause devastating financial hardship, with the destruction of businesses and countless jobs, it is by no means clear that such extreme measures will lead to fewer deaths, in the medium term, from coronavirus. Without doubt, it will demoralise the population, even if they can be persuaded (which is far from certain) to do exactly as ordered.
On the Andrew Neil Show (pictured), on Newsnight, on the World At One, to name just three of the many programmes on which she has appeared in recent days, Professor Susan Michie (right) has supported the Government’s policy of relative restraint
Few have been putting these points more authoritatively than Susan Michie, 65, a member of the Government’s (pre-existing) pandemic influenza advisory committee and Professor of Health Psychology at University College London.
On the Andrew Neil Show, on Newsnight, on the World At One, to name just three of the many programmes on which she has appeared in recent days, Professor Michie has supported the Government’s policy of relative restraint, with its aim of ‘smoothing’ the graph of coronavirus cases, rather than trying to stamp it out altogether with radical measures — only to face a sudden spike of infection when people re-emerge and re-congregate.
Extraordinary
When Ian Lavery, the hard-Left Labour MP and former President of the National Union of Mineworkers, tweeted that the ‘Johnson strategy’ meant ‘accepting the end of life for many elderly and vulnerable people’, Professor Michie tweeted back: ‘No, the opposite. The idea is to save the lives of elderly and vulnerable people.’
This spectacle of Professor Michie defending Boris Johnson’s policies (and therefore those of a Tory government) against the former NUM president is extraordinary. And here’s why: although it has never been mentioned in any of the broadcast interviews with the professor, Susan Michie is a leading figure in the tiny British Communist Party, of which she has been a member since 1978.
She was previously married to Andrew Murray, who, the Mail reported, ‘worked during the Cold War for the Soviet news agency Novosti . . . [and] has written in defence of Stalin and of the despotic totalitarian government of North Korea’.
Murray left the Communist Party in order to become an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. His ex-wife, while remaining in the CP, urged its members to support Corbyn. She made a speech to this effect in 2018 to fellow members at the Marx Memorial Library, while standing next to a bronze bust of Lenin. Michie began with the words: ‘We, the working class …’
Actually, Susan Fiona Dorinthea Michie is the granddaughter of the 2nd Baron Aberconway, an Eton-educated industrialist; and when her mother died in 2007, she left £52 million in her will. (There’s loads of brains in the family, too: her father, Donald, was a brilliant computer science pioneer who worked with Alan Turing as a wartime codebreaker at Bletchley Park).
I have been trawling Professor Michie’s Twitter feed over the past week or so, to see if there are signs of her true political views. It yielded one remarkable post in which she responded to someone praising China’s extreme measures of social control in dealing with coronavirus.
Draconian
Michie tweeted back: ‘China has a socialist, collective system (whatever criticisms people may have) not an individualistic, consumer-oriented, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neoliberal economic policies. #LearntLessons.’
It is all the more welcome, I suppose, that in her capacity as a senior member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), Professor Michie fully appreciates that the Chinese approach of enforced mass detention cannot be applied to a people — the British — who have always put the highest value on their liberties.
This may apply particularly to elderly folk who, confronted with an instruction to ‘self-isolate’ for many months, will argue they would rather keep seeing their families and avoid loneliness.
As 91-year-old Rosamund Davies told the Guardian: ‘At my age, the only people whose health I worry about are my children and grandchildren. If I catch this virus and shuffle off this mortal coil, then I’d be perfectly happy.’
The Prime Minister would naturally sympathise with that fierce independence of mind. So far, in a most unlikely double act with Britain’s only high-achieving Communist, he has held the line against draconian social measures in the fight against coronavirus. I for one will be sorry if our elderly are now ordered (rather than merely urged) to disappear for months — even if it is ‘for their own good’.