Just Put Me In The Fridge

Prince Charles has Covid-19.  Obviously, he managed to get tested straight away, and will presumably receive the best of care. 

    None of that surprises me.  However it seems to have absolutely astonished some of our more right-wing commentators, among them Allison Pearson, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Piers Morgan, the only person who has managed to make a British Prime Minister take refuge in a fridge (as far as we know).  Much squawking and fluttering of feathers and demanding to know why HRH gets a test when our brave girls and boys on the medical front line can’t.

    Excuse me?  These are people who support a system based on privilege.  They make a lot of their considerable livings from spouting about the royal family, whom they regard as having a divine right to be media lab rats.  And yet it seems to astonish them that with great privilege comes…even greater privilege.  The privilege to get the best of everything, no matter how scarce the worst of everything is for the rest of us.

    No, I’m not that naïve.  Of course they’re not astonished.  And doubtless they will be using their own lesser level of privilege to get whatever they can and sod off plebs.  It’s just another example of the venality of some of our spouters-in-chief.  They don’t give a monkey’s armpit about the boys and girls on the front line, but the bandwagon they’re jumping on at the moment is ‘we love our brave doctors, nurses, paramedics, care workers etc etc’ because bugger me, Tristram, they might be needed.  Not for us, of course, Tris, because we’ve got our own private provision, but the staff might get the bloody virus, or if enough people not like us get it, our private provision might be purloined to help the great unwashed.

    Last year, the Royal College of General Practitioners withdrew Hartley-Brewer’s invitation to speak at a conference, after seeing a tweet in which she said she could not see anything wrong with the predictions for the future made by Enoch Powell in his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.  This was not, she insisted, meant to imply any sort of moral approval of Powell.  Let’s just leave that last bit to one side, and look at the predictions themselves, which Powell, in 1968, envisaged for the turn of the century.  Has immigration resulted in rivers of blood?  Nope.  Has immigration meant our country has heaped up its own funeral pyre?  Not that I’ve noticed.  Have we lit the gunpowder and blown ourselves up?  Er, no.  Have we callously and illegally deported people of colour who have lived, worked and paid taxes here for pretty much their whole lives?  Bingo. (Powell didn’t actually say that last one.)

    Julia, honey-bunch, this may come as a surprise to you, but the whole point about predictions is that they’re supposed to come true.  Or at least have some vague resemblance to something it is credible to believe may happen in the future.  And, please, make it clear whether or not the doctors who successfully had your invitation rescinded and whose demands you described as ‘pathetic’, are now to be regarded as our brave boys and girls on the front line. 

    Allison Pearson has a star-studded history in the last year alone, having falsely stated that a man who berated Boris Johnson about the health service was a Labour party ‘plant’ (no apology or retraction), falsely stated that a picture of a child lying on a hospital floor, because there was no bed available, was ‘staged’ (no apology or retraction), and referred to Rebecca Long-Bailey as an ‘Alien’.  Allison – send me your email address and I’ll forward the links for Full Fact and Snopes, the fact-checking sites.  Just in case you’re afraid that our brave boys and girls are cobbling together their own protective gear, in the absence of the real thing, simply for Labour Party cameras.

    As for Piers Morgan – oh come on, we all know about Piers Morgan.  Wanted to be David Frost but ended up as Uncle Knobhead.   

    Our Prime Minister, of course, came from this posse of journalistic jackals, all possessed of a good education, a facility with words and no bloody principles whatsoever other than self-preservation and advancement.  And that’s the fix he’s now in.  Unlike Pearson, Hartley-Brewer, Morgan et al, he can’t stick his finger up to see which way the wind’s blowing, and then jump on the nearest wagon heading in that direction.  He can’t flourish a quote from Churchill or Plato to make his pals bray with delight.  Most of his mouth-frothings have exactly the same intellectual heft as Lorem Ipsum, the dummy text that looks like Latin but is complete gobbledegook.

    Although I am not a monarchist and although, honestly, I would cross the road to avoid Prince Charles, even without the requirements of social distancing, I hope he’ll be OK.  I hope the Queen doesn’t get it.  I hope everyone’s all right.  I don’t want anyone to be ill.  (Although I’m struggling to extend the same goodwill to Harvey Weinstein, who has apparently been assaulted by a virus which didn’t care whether or not it had his consent.) Perhaps, when All This Is Over, we could tackle those other pandemics – hypocrisy, opportunism and plain, barefaced lying.

    Have a nice day, and stay safe.