In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1935 film adaptation of ‘The 39 Steps’, Richard Hannay (played by Robert Donat) tells seemingly ‘respectable citizen’ Professor Jordan (Godfrey Tearle) that the dastardly criminal mastermind he is after has the top joint of the little finger of his left hand missing. “Sure it’s not this one?” says Prof Jordan, raising his right hand.
I thought of that famous scene on Monday when Boris Johnson made his latest ‘address to the nation’. That we were going into a new national lockdown, so soon in the New Year, was absolutely unsurprising. In fact, in a tweet on December 18, I predicted the exact date (January 4) when Johnson would make his announcement.
We were told that it was because of a “new variant strain” of the virus that the government was having to take action, but of course it was all pre-planned. The big giveaway was on November 5, when Chancellor Rishi Sunak extended the furlough scheme to the end of March.
Why on earth would he do that if the intention was to get things back to normal? A lockdown in early January was always going to happen, and the cynics among us expected it to be introduced as soon as millionaire pro-lockdown inside-the-tenters like Piers Morgan returned from their luxury Christmas/New Year Caribbean holidays. And so it proved.
But this time, unlike in March 2020, there’s no pretence that the latest ‘Stay at Home’ order for the peasants is ‘just’ for three weeks. Not even ‘just’ for three months. “Oh, we very much hope restrictions will be eased by the end of March, the date when the current legislation runs up to, if this or that happens with the vaccines, but we have to be very, very cautious,” is the official line. And you know what that means.
Boris Johnson has done a Professor Jordan. Like Richard Hannay, the members of the public who believed the propaganda that anyone who said coronavirus restrictions were ‘The New Normal’ was a ‘crackpot conspiracy theorist’ have received a rather rude awakening. Like Prof Jordan, Johnson has shown them his little finger....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...