As the Lock Rattles
John Lanchester
It isn’t always possible to draw a straight line from someone’s personal life to their public works. Johnson’s private life is his business. But one thing you can say about a man responsible for at least nine pregnancies by at least four different women is that he is prone to wishful thinking. That wishful thinking is the common theme in the government’s failures from spring 2020 to autumn 2020 to now. Boris Johnson doesn’t want certain things to be true, so he acts as if they can be ignored. That strategy has worked for him in domestic politics. It was at the heart of his advocacy for Brexit. But it doesn’t work in economics, and it doesn’t work in dealing with a pandemic. This is not to say that lockdowns are a panacea. They are clearly damaging, but there is a mysterious absence of evidence as to just how much harm they cause. I don’t mean economically – we can see the rough impact in the contractions of GDP all over the world – but to health and well-being.
