Johnson and his cabinet didn’t prepare for the inevitable second wave. But we need to move beyond a sense of impotent dread
I’m not often amazed by Any Answers?, since it’s a Radio 4 phone-in, and I can generate the opinions of the whole swathe of that listenership with some keyboard shortcuts in my head. But this weekend’s episode was the most brutal, moving and surprising I’ve ever heard. Half of the callers started crying, overwhelmed, as astonished as anyone to hear their own voice suddenly crack.
It was only sometimes about a death in the family; the other calls demonstrated something more like a steadily building desperation, and it all came back to the same point: we’ve known this would happen for months. We’ve known there would be a second wave; that schools would probably close and deprived children would need laptops and broadband; that the pressure on hospitals would be unbearable; that the economic hardship caused by a frozen economy was not just going to evaporate with the passing of time; that viruses don’t stop for Christmas. We knew all these things as surely as we knew that winter would be cold. Why did nobody plan for any of it?
