A Surprise Boris

 “There’s a surprise Boris at five,” my daughter announced before I was about the start an evening of teaching the flute via Zoom. 

No one wants a surprise Boris. Can you imagine? The scruffy straw-headed moon face popping up to shout, “surprise!” at you through those rubbery lips. 

I was confused about why the fact that the Prime Minister was going to host the daily five o clock briefing was being described as a ‘surprise Boris,’ in journalistic circles. You might not have noticed (because let’s face it, we’ve all stopped watching) but since we’ve been in Lockdown 3 there’s a briefing every day at 5pm. The cabinet take it in turns. Priti Patel talks absolute gibberish, Matt Hancock proves that he’s been on a steep learning curve but is actually trying, Gavin Williamson upsets teachers, pupils and parents and they are trying to stop Rishi Sunak from announcing free disco passes for anyone who has been vaccinated.  Surely it was just his turn.

It had to be Boris because of the number. Going over the next round number is a moment for an announcement. 

Over 100,000 deaths wasn’t a surprise for any of us who were watching the numbers.  My calculations estimate that even if no more mistakes are made there could still be another 30,000 deaths, as we come down the other side of the curve. However, tipping over this nice round number meant that we needed a serious briefing.

"Woo Hoo! Surprise!" Boris said, "When all this is over we're going to have a party.  A VCV celebration.  We will have defeated the enemy, won the war.  We will honour our brave soldiers of the NHS and commemorate the dead.  Every town will build a huge Johnson in memorial to those that have lost their lives.  We will hang out the rainbow bunting and sing, "We'll meet again," Can't tell you where, can't tell you when."

Then Chris Whitty showed his slides and explained that loads more people were still going to die and the man from the NHS broke down and said how tired they all were (not really, he was very professional) and the journalists asked questions that made the Prime Minister squirm.

"We did everything we could," he protested.

When they asked him how he felt about all those people dead on his watch he said that if he were to tell them then he would, "Exhaust the thesaurus of misery."  I checked Roget's and it's a good job he didn't, there are a lot of words there.

He also said that he had "worked with all the tools he had", which I thought was a rather rude way to refer to Dido Harding and his cabinet.

Weirdly, during the briefing we were treated to occasional glimpses and sounds from the room next door.  A man in a mask (who wasn't the comedian Michael Spicer) was trying to answer the questions for the Prime Minister and we got to see it.

Eventually, the Prime Minister told us why he was really there.

"The deaths we are forced to.....er I am forced to announce today are....."

He didn't want to do it.  He wanted to be Surprise Boris, Party Boris, Boris the bearing of good news but instead he was forced onto TV for everyone to notice that the predicted 20,000 deaths has been multiplied by 5 and there are more to come.  

Many have sadly died during this pandemic.  They use the word sadly to deflect blame but we know and we have sadly lost confidence in what they are doing.