Wilful ignorance

If you don't have any skin in the game, the Covid enquiries have been riotously entertaining. Well, riotous may be over-egging an already fairly rich pudding, but there has been a degree of grim amusement. Watching all these minor characters from a fairly so-so season of " Britain, fucking hell" indulge in an orgy of incrimination, blame, self-justification and good old-fashioned chucking everybody else under the bus has come with a pleasurable frisson of schadenfreude,and how I enjoy applying those European words to the Big Brane of Brexit, the never knowingly undersworn Dominic Cummings, whose petulant, teenage-levels of resentment have been particularly amusing. The fucking around has occurred, now we get to enjoy the finding out.

I fully appreciate, however, that if you're one of the millions who lost a loved one, who missed a funeral, who stayed home and followed the rules, it might be less funny. If you're one of those who suffered as domestic abuse ran riot under cover of lockdown it will be kess funny still.  If you had to abandon a relative, lost your job, closed your business, got harassed by police when you just wanted to go for a walk, even just argued with a loved one about whether or not a trip to the shops counted as the day's exercise watching a parade of twats who all seem to be entirely unaware that the petty office politics they're squabbling about had actual, real world consequences might hit somewhat differently.  Because if we've learned anything from this unedifying spectacle, it's that they fucked it, lads. 

But is this something we didn't already know? Okay, some of the detail, like Johnson asking if you could kill Covid by blowing a hairdryer up your nose, is new. But the overall sense of chaotic, underprepared Government flailing helplessly around, well, I'm pretty sure I recall that from the time. I don't need a Covid enquiry to tell me that Boris Johnson is a disastrously self-serving, flip-flopping ditherer who'd rather be on holiday, or that Matt Hancock is possessed of a room temperature intellect and is a reflexively lying fuckweasel. This we already knew.

So it comes as a minor irritation to see the country's journalists reacting with ", shock" at these "revelations". Really, lads? You're "shocked" that Johnson thought Covid was "Just Nature's way of dealing with old people"? Were you not paying attention? Were you not THERE AT THE FUCKING TIME?

The cosy relationship between our politicians and our press is covered elsewhere in much more detail by people who do it a million times better. I recommend Mic Wright's "Conquest if the Useless"  newsletter, which is often very good on the subject. For myself, I will merely note that it stretches credulity beyond breaking point to see the likes of David Aaronovitch and Robert Peston furrow their brows as they think Big Thoughts about something which was screamingly obvious at the time, to wit, that we are governed by an incompetent clique of venal arseholes who have no interest beyond their own careers and an at best passing relationship with the truth.

Unfortunately, the press who are supposed to be holding them to account are the sort of easily fooled rubes that are bread and butter to any fast talking conman doing the cup and ball scam or three card monte, blinded by their own participation in what the media and political classes see as a great big game, but one which, for the rest of us, has actual consequences. Let the bodies pile high indeed.