Britain has had more than 100,000 deaths from the Coronavirus, one of the highest rates in the world. Japan, another highly-developed country that is also an island, has had a little over 5,000 deaths due to Covid-19.
Under normal circumstances, you would expect the electorate to punish their government for such an appalling number of avoidable deaths. But in the UK, these are not normal circumstances, because Boris Johnson is charge and nothing is ever his fault.
How is it possible for the head of the government to not be held to account for 100,000 deaths? Does Boris Johnson possess some kind of magical superpower that allows him to avoid blame? Is it some kind of psychological "trick"?
On closer inspection, it seems that, indeed, it is some kind of psychological sleight of hand. Not only is Johnson able to avoid blame, but he is able to transfer that blame on to the victims of his own actions.
The government have been blaming the public for the number of deaths from Covid for a while now, but now that has gone into overdrive with the government's newest extremely graphic scare tactic.
Power without consequences
Let's remind ourselves how we got to this point.
The government, headed by Boris Johnson, has, from the very beginning of the pandemic, consistently refused to use effective border controls to limit the spread of the infection into the country. This approach is almost unique in the world.
Boris Johnson then was late in implementing a national lockdown, by which point the virus had spread widely across the country. This tendency to delay the decision-making process has been a consistent and entirely avoidable pattern in Johnson's behaviour during the pandemic.
He then allowed Covid patients to be sent from hospitals to care homes, adding to the deaths the elderly and vulnerable. The NHS was left to struggle without any clear or consistent direction from government.
He told people to go to work in unsafe conditions (this is still true now, as the government does not enforce health and safety regulations in workplaces, while the NHS, and retail and hospitality sectors in particular, have had to work in poorly ventilated workplaces while dealing with large numbers of the public).
It should also be made clear that many of the poorest in society are still going to work in unsafe conditions because they simply have no financial alternative; they are ineligible for any government support, so they have to simply choose between having enough money to feed themselves or the risk of becoming infected with the virus while at work. Many others are simply unable to get government financial help and no longer have any work at all, so are suffering in other ways.
When lockdown was eased in May, over the following months through till the winter, the government introduced a bewildering array of ever-changing rules that the public were somehow expected to follow.
At the same time the government encouraged people to socialise with others in the "Eat Out To Help Out" campaign, aimed at financially subsidizing the hospitality industry. This was later shown to have a significant effect on spreading the virus around the community.
Boris Johnson then encouraged people to meet others at Christmas time, being a significant factor in causing the dramatic second "spike" in deaths we are seeing now.
Boris Johnson claims to accept "responsibility" for the calamity that his decision-making (or lack of it) has created, while at the same time leading the public to believe it is their fault for the virus spreading.
With the undoubted success story that is the vaccine programme now taking precedence, it looks for all the world that Johnson will, as he has many times in the past, "get away with it". But the 100,000 deaths are a result of his decisions in government, and his government's decisions. Thus is the nature of power - that actions in government have consequences; in this case, 100,000 real consequences.
He will most likely escape blame, as he has before. This is the strange power he has on others - his magical ability to transfer blame to others, using his "lovable rogue" character to make people always want to give him the benefit of the doubt. He will lie again and again, and yet people still choose to believe him.
The blame game
Is there something uniquely-hypnotic about the effect Johnson's personality has on the electorate? His "superpower", if we can call it that, is to gaslight the nation; to lie, manipulate and disarm others with his persona - the "charismatic oaf" that the people will always forgive and excuse, allowing themselves to believe that it was really their own fault that 100,000 people died, for it couldn't possibly be the fault of Boris Johnson.
After all, he is just the head of government, and the government isn't responsible for anything, is it?
A last word about the media, who have been Boris Johnson's enablers for the past twenty years. Somehow, Johnson fits into their stereotype of being "one of us": as a former journalist (along with Michael Gove), Johnson has been charming his way in the right circles for years, his various mess-ups and controversies only adding to his fascination.
In the media, The Daily Telegraph is effectively his own personal propaganda machine, with the Express and Daily Mail almost just as fawning. The same can be said for The Sun and The Times, who can always be relied upon to provide a sympathetic telling of Johnson's agenda. This covers the vast majority of the media that the electorate consume; the left-wing media here are sadly barely worth mentioning in terms of their actual influence on the psychology of the electorate; the populist press have the advantage of patronage and government connections in the influence on the electorate.
So Johnson, for all his failings, is likely to be secure in his position as "national saviour" for quite a while longer. This blogger did at one point think his days at the political pinnacle were numbered, but he seems to have ridden in perennial luck and come out of it with barely a scratch to his reputation.
On current trends, he may well even win the next election, if the Brexit calamity can be blamed on the EU and an unprepared business sector as well as 100,000 deaths have been blamed on his own electorate.
