The Media, Johnson and Covid: ‘An Orgy of Narcissism’ that Killed Thousands

The Covid Inquiry shows how Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are morbid symptoms of a sick system, with the media at its heart, writes Peter Jukes

It was the worst of times. I was still ill from an early dose of COVID-19, vitiated by a fever, strange dreams and a constant popping sound in my head when I was interviewed by PoliticsJOE in mid-April 2020 about a speech Boris Johnson had made two months earlier.

In his first landmark public statement since his hard Brexit departure from the EU at the end of January 2020, the then Prime Minister made his first reference to the Coronavirus in a speech on February 3 2020, just as the first cases of Covid were confirmed in the country.

“We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric,” Johnson told his audience in Greenwich “when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as Coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange.”

The UK would be the country “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion,” Johnson said with a familiar Etonian flourish.

To me, this was ‘a smoking gun’ because it revealed the ‘take it on the chin’ comments, dismissed by organisations like Full Fact as any kind of plan, was indeed the strategy.

And in Greenwich motivation was transparent – money: the desire to avoid lockdowns or ‘market segregation’. The whole tenor of Johnson’s thinking suggested a terrible choice was being made at the highest levels of government; the gross elevation of Gross Domestic Product over the lives of the producers of value – i.e. us, the people of Britain.

Knowing by April thousands had already died as a result of Covid, I asked the PoliticsJOE presenter whether he would “prefer a 25% cut in your salary or lose a parent?” It was a simple question, and anyone with an ounce of humanity could answer. But all hell broke loose.

I was accused of misinterpreting Johnson’s speech, of ‘rocking the boat’, and being a ‘scaremongerer’ and borderline conspiracy theorist. I got caught up in a mass attack on sceptics, scientists and independent journalists summed up in one Telegraph headline: “Those questioning the Government’s coronavirus strategy are not only wrong, they’re a danger to the rest of us.” Number 10 were so incensed they approached PoliticsJOE and demanded some kind of right to reply to my video.

It’s no consolation, but we now, thanks to Boris Johnson’s senior communications advisor at the time of the pandemic, that it was exactly the other way around. Lee Cain told Baroness Hallett’s public inquiry into the handling of the Coronavirus crisis, that the Telegraph was directly involved in shaping Boris Johnson’s Coronavirus strategy in the autumn of 2020. According to Cain, the prime minister “prioritised the views of the Telegraph over the science”.

Evidence submitted to the Covid Inquiry by Boris Johnson’s former aide Lee Cain

So we can safely say that Johnson’s former employers in the Telegraph were not only wrong, but they were a danger to the rest of us. They directly influenced the disastrous response to the second wave of Covid in late 2020, which led to even more unnecessary deaths, and an even longer lockdown well into the spring of 2021.

This isn’t the benefit of hindsight. This was observed by thousands in real time. Keir Starmer called for a circuit-breaking lockdown in the half-term of October 2020. Hundreds of scientists pointed out where the Government was going wrong.

It’s still disturbing to recall this moment. As someone who had for a decade recounted how the press had lied and cheated, monstered minorities and political opponents: hacked, blagged, and burgled targets of their prurience or ire, the idea they would risk our lives and add thousands of additional and probably avoidable coronavirus deaths to the tally, was unthinkable.

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The Herd Instinct and Herd Immunity

For anyone who had seriously followed the career of Boris Johnson, his disastrous handling of this country’s biggest post-war civil crisis was predictable. Lazy, venal, chaotic, full of self-important rhetoric but completely unable to manage anything except pie-in-the-sky projects that never got built, Johnson was always going to behave following the cultural norms of what I called ‘Bullingdon Club Britain’ – partying, looking after friends, waving wads of money in the face of the public, making rules for others they would gleefully break: libertinism and self-interest disguised as liberalism and fun.

As his Vote Leave campaign had proved four years earlier by lying and breaking electoral law, or his attempts to unlawfully prorogue Parliament the previous autumn (to the delight of his hedge fund donors like Crispin Odey), Johnson was never going to change just because a national crisis came along.

However, most of the media hoped he would. And this is the real crime, and the real concern: what made the press so compliant and toadying, and what’s to stop them from facilitating another disaster like Boris Johnson in the future?

One example of this is Plan A – herd immunity – which emerged on 12 March 2020 thanks to a Spectator article and ITV piece by the broadcaster’s chief political editor, Robert Peston. “Johnson, Cummings and Hancock want UK people to acquire “herd immunity” to Covid19,” he tweeted. To which I plaintively replied (going down with Covid myself): “Robert. Did you challenge them over ‘herd immunity’. This is available through vaccination, not mass infection”.

“Get covid and live longer”. A message sent by Boris Johnson during the pandemic

I’m no epidemiologist and have a layman’s grasp of serology and viruses, but it didn’t take much to look up other experts and check the medical books. “Herd” or “population” immunity was a concept applied to vaccination programmes for well-known and relatively stable viruses like Rubeola which causes measles. It was completely inappropriate for a novel coronavirus and with no vaccine. How could you predict future immunity to a mutating virus which was only a few months old?

Again, I got the predictable backlash, but fortunately, thousands of scientists made the same point and wrote a letter to the Government about the disastrous plan. The result? Predictably the government media apparatus lied, and denied it had been seeking “herd immunity” even though these were the words its scientific advisors had used in the media, and both Johnson and his health secretary Matt Hancock had told the Italian government (to their shock and horror) they were pursuing it.

We now know, thanks to the Hallett Inquiry, that Plan A – let the virus rip and then gain ‘herd immunity’ by September 2020 – was the main strategy for nearly three months until real data about the spread of COVID-19 showed it up as anathema. The catastrophic 7.2% death rate in Bergamot, Italy, when health services were overwhelmed, caused a screeching reversal of policy and a late lockdown. At this rate of replication, there would be hundreds of thousands of deaths in a few weeks. And indeed, despite the late lockdown, the UK had some of the worst Coronavirus fatality rates in the world, particularly among healthcare workers.

But that’s not the worst of it. As Byline Times has documented, the ‘ghost’ of herd immunity haunted official pandemic policy. As the second more deadly wave of Covid loomed in the summer of 2020, when there was no excuse and most of us understood the death rates and possibilities of more deadly mutation, there was a mass campaign to minimise the effects and dangers of coronavirus, which was eagerly taken up by the media.

The spurious Great Barrington declaration, which Nafeez Ahmed revealed was funded by dark money and climate change-denying networks, was given credence and validity. Sweden, even though it had much higher death rates than its neighbours, was vaunted as a model. Social media influencers – even some writers who had written for the paper – started claiming there could be no second wave. Free Speech Union founder Toby Young opinionated about ‘T-cell immunity’, leading a movement that claimed that Coronavirus restrictions, rather than an attempt to save lives, were some dark conspiracy to control the country.

Who knows why these claims of a ‘scamdemic’ were so popular? Like climate change denial, there’s little doubt that interested parties whose businesses may have suffered during the lockdown were helping to fund opposition to them – even though the result of a late lockdown in around Christmas 2020 would be even longer and devastate their firms.

It was this movement to minimise the virus, amply relayed on the pages of the Telegraph and Spectator, which was – according to the evidence at the Hallet inquiry – a key factor in making Johnson dither. His then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, encouraged this life-threatening disinformation, by inviting the Great Barrington Declaration group of fringe scientists to brief the Prime Minister that autumn.

The effects of Covid disinformation that summer before the deadly second wave shouldn’t be underestimated. I infected the brains of friends of mine, journalists and editors I like and admire, who also started muttering about ‘over-reaction’ that the ‘virus wasn’t so bad’ and that ‘civil liberties’ were being threatened. But the right to life is the first freedom. And where are the civil liberties of those extra 100,000 British citizens, buried in silent funerals that winter and spring?

People were rightly incensed when it was revealed, nearly two years later, that Johnson and his officials were partying in Whitehall and Number 10 when those long terrible lockdowns took place and they couldn’t attend the funerals of their loved ones. But where’s the anger against the media for pressurising Johnson to ignore the science and put us in that terrible place?

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Scapegoats and the Real Corruption

In one of his more telling messages to Dominic Cummings as his former advisor left Number 10, Boris Johnson complained that the infighting during his tenure was a “totally disgusting orgy of narcissism.” Though there have been two new tenants in Downing Street since nothing much has changed when it comes to the media.

Given their complicity in the disaster of the pandemic, it’s no surprise that the right-wing press has ignored the revelations of the Covid Inquiry. Both the Telegraph and the Mail have omitted any mention of their baleful role from their front pages and instead focused on the ‘misogyny’ of former chief advisor Dominic Cummings.

Even the Guardian, nominating ‘Eight shocking revelations from Cummings and Cain at the Covid inquiry’ conveniently forgot the disturbing role of the Telegraph revealed by Lee Cain, or Cummings’ reference to alleged “corruption” between Boris Johnson and Evgeny Lebedev, over government financial support for the Evening Standard.

There’s too much in the Lebedev/Johnson allegations to go into here. They deserve their right of reply despite the qualified legal privilege of the Hallett inquiry, and the relationship between the son of a former KGB colonel and the former prime minister deserves a movie. (Like this one, here). And we should be careful not to fall into the press’ habit of personalising institutional wrongs. Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie Johnson, Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings are convenient scapegoats for a wider dysfunction and a deeper malaise.

Certainly, the Evening Standard shouldn’t be held up in isolation when it comes to press corruption. Whatever the backroom deals, with ‘bungs’ disguised as ‘Covid subsidies’, all the big newspapers, including the Guardian and Mirror, were happy beneficiaries of sponsored content and advertising from Johnson’s generosity with taxpayers’ money which could have been between £100-200m over two years – a kind of ‘VIP lane’ like the PPE scandal.

That, plus removing VAT on online sales and advertising, boosted the revenues of the mainly offshore, billionaire-owned press by billions. But where will the public find out about these largesse with the public purse? Certainly not in the papers, members of the NMA cartel, who received it.

This is how corruption grows, spreading from compromise to compliance, to complicity. This is why Johnson is not solely to blame for the Coronavirus catastrophe. As his biographer Sonia Purnell has often pointed out in these pages, a whole media-political class enabled Boris Johnson’s meteoric rising, that ends up crashing to earth like an asteroid in some disaster movie, causing a tsunami of corruption and debt, devastating our public services and our international reputation.

From Brexit to Covid, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and hundreds like them, are morbid symptoms of a sick system. At the heart of that sickness is the media, the supposed immune system of our body politics, which once infected leaves us open to all manner of other ills.