Nothing that Boris Johnson says is surprising anymore. Last week, the British Prime Minister was the only world leader who thought it necessary to inform President Joe Biden’s virtual climate-change summit that this was “not all about some expensive, politically correct green act of bunny hugging.” But Johnson retains the capacity to shock. On April 25th, the Daily Mail, a generally pro-Johnson tabloid, reported that, in October, the Prime Minister had said, “No more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”
The newspaper’s reporting, which was corroborated by the BBC, ITV News, and other British media, claimed that Johnson had made the remark after a meeting in Downing Street, when he was resisting a national lockdown to quell a second wave of coronavirus infections. According to ITV, Johnson was shouting, with his office door open, allowing a number of staffers to hear. The Prime Minister has denied using the words. The day after the story broke, his government’s chief trouble-fixer, Michael Gove, backed him up in the House of Commons: “I was in that room—I never heard language of that kind.”
The anecdote has emerged during a period of furious gossip and infighting among senior officials in Johnson’s government, much of which has centered on how the Prime Minister paid to refurbish his living quarters in Downing Street, a scandal that is becoming known as “cash for cushions.” It’s like a national case study in psychological displacement. People probably talked about home decorating during the Black Death as well. Whatever language Johnson used or did not use last fall, he delayed a second lockdown for several weeks, while it was obvious that the virus was spreading again. He was also slow to order a third, which began on January 6th. Of the hundred and fifty thousand people believed to have died of COVID-19 in the U.K., about sixty per cent died during the second wave of the pandemic, which accelerated out of control last December. The bodies piled high in their thousands.
Opposite the Palace of Westminster, across the brown swirl of the Thames, there is a makeshift memorial to those who have died. In late March, a group of bereaved families began drawing red hearts, in marker, on a Portland-stone wall that lines the Albert Embankment, on the south side of the river. When you cross Westminster Bridge, as I did one morning earlier this week, the hearts appear on the opposite bank as a dirty, bloody smudge on the gray, a narrow stain, improbably long, that someone has tried and failed to remove. Up close, many of the hearts are filled with names and dates of birth and messages of farewell, written by loved ones who have come to the wall: “Mum miss u loads”; “Auntie Christine”; “Sempre presente Papá.” Near one end of the wall, I met with Lobby Akinnola, whose father, Olufemi, died of the coronavirus almost exactly a year ago. There was a hum from a generator on the other side of the wall, powering a temporary vaccination center, on the grounds of St. Thomas’ Hospital. “It’s long, isn’t it?” Akinnola said, when we had walked a hundred yards or so and the hearts still stretched in front of us. “There’s that physical exertion that ties into the experience, almost. You’ve been walking for five minutes and you’re, like, I’m still not at the end.”
Akinnola’s father, who was known as Femi, died at home, in Leamington Spa, in Warwickshire, after being advised by National Health Service call-center workers to rest and take paracetamol. He was sixty years old. During the first wave of the pandemic, Femi had gone to work, as a caregiver for people with learning disabilities, wearing a scarf and gloves as P.P.E. His wife, Atinuke, who is a pharmacist, also contracted the virus. The couple had become bedridden and were resting in separate rooms. “My dad was never a person to avoid getting to hospital,” Akinnola said. “He was, like, Let’s go. Better safe than sorry. They reassured him, ‘Stay at home.’ And we were reassured, because he was reassured.”
After Femi died, Akinnola joined a Facebook group, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, for emotional support. Since last June, the group, which has thirty-six hundred members, has been campaigning for a public inquiry into the British government’s handling of the pandemic—a request that Johnson has so far denied. Akinnola, who is thirty, has a Ph.D. in bioengineering. “I am a bit of a logical person—I think, I hope,” he said. He told me that he failed to see the logic in refusing to examine what had gone wrong in the U.K., which has suffered one of the world’s highest mortality rates. “I don’t think anyone’s looking at this pandemic and being, like, No one should have died. It’s a pandemic—that’s gonna happen,” Akinnola said. “Our questions are, Why have so many people died? And, for me, that’s the concern: Why are you so reticent for us to find out?”
I asked Akinnola how he had reacted when he heard about Johnson’s supposed remark. “It’s weird,” he said. “It’s a mosaic of emotions, because part of me is, like, Yeah, of course he did. Boris Johnson says crazy things. He does. That’s who he is. So if he said it, like, O.K., yeah, fine. . . . But part of me is—it’s almost a thing of, like, What is wrong with you?” The National Covid Memorial Wall, which the campaigners expect to clean away at some stage, is an attempt both to remember the dead and to upbraid the living. From where we stood, the Palace of Westminster, partly wrapped in scaffolding, loomed along the opposite bank. The wall of hearts was noticeably longer. Akkinola said that there was a third feeling, mixed with his anger and indifference, in reaction to Johnson’s supposed callousness. “The other emotion that comes is concern,” he said. “This kind of idea of, Has this mentality been what’s been ruling your decision-making? Like, lockdown isn’t easy. It’s not. But I can guarantee you it’s easier than losing someone you love. As someone who has had to do both,” Akinnola said, “it’s easier than losing someone you love.”
