Who wants to pull Al Johnson down, and why? I’m no friend of the Prime Minister and would gladly have seen him fall in March 2020 when he launched his Maoist plan to close the country, trash our liberty and wreck the economy.
But at that time, and for months afterwards, I had almost no allies at all.
Gosh, if someone had called me in May 2020 and said ‘Downing Street is holding boozy parties while Johnson is ordering the nation into strict isolation’, I’d have welcomed the leak and used it to try to destroy a policy I always saw as wrong and out of proportion.
But nobody did call me, even though lots of people must have known then.
It is only now, when Johnson has finally stood up to the panic-mongers and begun to liberate the country, that the leaks have come.
And for once there is an actual difference between Labour and the Tories. And in one official tweet by the Labour Party, you can see what it is.
The tweet was issued by the Labour Party on January 13 and has attracted remarkably little attention.
In truth, it should have led every bulletin and been on every front page, for it takes you directly into the mind of Sir Keir Starmer and all the other lockdown fanatics, in a way never previously possible.
It approvingly quotes a nurse, whose name is given as ‘Jenny, NHS nurse’. She says: ‘I remember May 20, 2020 vividly. I spent hours on the phone to a man who was in the hospital car park, utterly desperate to see his wife.
‘He begged, wept, shouted to be let in but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else. She died unexpectedly and alone, as the Government had a party.’
I feel sorry for ‘Jenny’, because she was deluded by fear propaganda and did not really know what she was doing. But I still think that what she did was terribly wrong.
If I had prevented a husband from seeing his dying wife ‘for the greater good of everyone else’, while the poor man begged and shouted for mercy, I might now keep quiet about it.
Even more, I might feel a deep sense of regret and shame that my self-righteous officiousness had so utterly blinded me to the simple human necessity for kindness above all.
God knows we are all capable of appalling cruelty, but it is never worse than when we think we are doing it for a good reason.
This is why all Utopias end with the idealists arresting and then killing those who will not conform to the new paradise. The fanaticism of the Covid authoritarians is frantic mainly because they think that what they are doing is unquestionably right.
And it is these zealots who now seek to destroy Johnson because he has finally deserted them and begun to rediscover the world of proportion, reason and kindness, in which a man who wishes to see his dying wife is not left howling in tears, alone in the car park, but is granted his wish.
For that simple difference between the two sides in this row, I back Johnson against Starmer – because I have to and if you are wise, you will too.
You don’t want people like Jenny running the Government.
