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The moment a British prime minister put the whole nation under house arrest

Boris Johnson’s address to the nation was easy to understand at the level of individual sentences, and only hard to understand as a whole because no one has ever done anything like this before outside the pages of fiction

John Rentoul
Monday 23 March 2020 22:38 GMT
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Boris Johnson announces nationwide lockdown to tackle coronavirus

It was like the script of a science fiction film, except that here was a real prime minister reading it out in real life and everything in it described what our lives will be like for the next three weeks, except that everyone knows it will be a lot longer than that.

“We will stop all gatherings of more than two people in public.” A novelist of exceptional imagination could have written a sentence like that. Now Boris Johnson’s speechwriter is required to write it because that is the advice from the medical and scientific specialists.

The prime minister has put the entire nation under house arrest. It seems like a genteel form of detention. We are allowed out to buy necessities – “as infrequently as possible” – and to do our state-approved exercise – once a day. But these are not mere requests. “If you don’t follow the rules the police will have the powers to enforce them.”

This being Boris Johnson, you half expected him to start joking about the absurdity of the situation. But this is so serious there were no references to Roman senators or Greek myths. When Boris Johnson says, with a straight face, “We’ll stop all social events,” you know the time for bluff and bluster has gone.

He said it well. It was plain, blunt and concise. It was easy to understand at the level of individual sentences, and only hard to understand as a whole because no one has ever done anything like this before outside the pages of fiction.

Even harder to understand because this was the prime minister who was elected for a single purpose which everyone has forgotten about, and for a subsidiary purpose of cheering the nation up. He was popular – to the extent that he was – because he was optimistic and cheerful. And here he was, optimistically and even slightly cheerfully telling the nation to stay in their homes while the plague passes their front doors.

He has been preparing, in his deceptively disorganised way, for this moment all his life. Unlike his hero Winston Churchill, who at school predicted he would one day defend London and England from military onslaught, Johnson didn’t know what his challenge would be. He must have supposed it would be Brexit, while always suspecting that something else would come along to test him.

Well, here it is. He hasn’t passed all the elements of the test. The Times thundered its disapproval of him yesterday. He has fumbled the messages he tried to deliver to the British people; he has seemed sometimes to be lagging behind events; occasionally he has seemed uncertain and has looked hunted.

But tonight he pulled himself back up to the level of events. It was an address that will be remembered. Either as the moment when the lockdown started to press down on the rising curve of deaths; or as the moment when the prime minister started to lose control of the situation. We have to hope that he has got the policy right.

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