2020 – Nation Ordered to Stay Home, Immediately Rediscovers Baking and Rage

Covid Arrives, Government Improvises, Public Complies Then Discovers It Has Strong Opinions About Everything

Nation Ordered to Stay Home, Immediately Rediscovers Baking and Rage

Covid Arrives, Government Improvises, Public Complies Then Discovers It Has Strong Opinions About Everything

On 23 March 2020, Boris Johnson appeared on television and told the country to stay at home. The instruction was, in the specific legal and practical terms of what was being asked, without precedent in peacetime British history — the suspension of normal social, commercial, and civic life across the entirety of the country, enforced by regulations that carried legal penalties, justified by a pandemic whose scale and character were still being assessed but whose trajectory was sufficiently alarming that the health system’s capacity to absorb it without overwhelming was not guaranteed.

The public complied. This was, by the standards of a country whose relationship with authority has historically been mediated by the specific British tendency to reserve the right to grumble while doing what is asked, a remarkable demonstration of social solidarity. The streets emptied. The offices closed. The schools closed. The pubs and restaurants and theatres and gyms and hairdressers closed. The airports went quiet. The roads went quiet. The cities went quiet in the specific way that cities go quiet when something has happened to empty them — not the quiet of night, which is normal, but the quiet of day, which is not, and which carries within it the specific disquiet of absence where presence is expected.

Into this quiet, the country baked. The sourdough starter became the pandemic’s domestic symbol — the fermented flour mixture that required feeding and attention and produced, if managed correctly, bread of a quality that the pre-pandemic lifestyle had not afforded the time to bake. The sales of flour, yeast, and bread tins reached levels that suggested that an unexpected secondary consequence of a global health emergency was the rediscovery of domestic food production by a population that had outsourced it entirely to supermarkets and was now discovering, with the surprise appropriate to the rediscovery of a forgotten skill, that making one’s own bread was both possible and satisfying.

The Government’s Response: Speed, Improvisation, and Consequence

The government’s initial response to Covid — herd immunity, then lockdown — described an arc from the theoretical to the practical that the evidence of what was happening in Italian hospitals compressed into a matter of weeks. The initial position, briefed but never formally announced, that allowing the virus to spread through the population while protecting the vulnerable would achieve natural immunity faster and with less economic disruption than suppression, was abandoned when the modelling produced the number of deaths that would result, which was a number that no government could accept as policy and survive.

The PPE shortage — the lack of personal protective equipment for NHS and care workers in the early weeks — was the operational failure that the inquiry and the journalism documented most thoroughly and that the families of care workers who had died without adequate protection experienced most directly. The contracts for PPE that were awarded through the VIP lane — a fast-track procurement process that gave preferential treatment to suppliers referred by ministers and officials — produced one of the pandemic period’s most sustained accountability arguments: a process that the government defended as necessary in the conditions of emergency procurement and that independent analysis identified as producing contracts to companies without established track records in PPE supply at prices that the scale and urgency of the procurement did not adequately justify.

The vaccine programme, when it arrived, was the story that the supply failures and the excess deaths had not been. Britain became the first country in the world to administer an approved Covid vaccine on 8 December 2020 — Margaret Keenan, ninety years old, receiving the Pfizer vaccine at University Hospital Coventry — and the subsequent rollout, managed by Kate Bingham’s vaccine taskforce through the NHS infrastructure, produced vaccination rates that were, in the early months of 2021, the fastest of any major country in the world. The vaccine programme was a genuine achievement of public sector procurement and NHS delivery, and it was received with the specific satisfaction of an institution demonstrating, in a crisis, that the investment in it had been worthwhile.

Thursday Nights: The Ritual That Held

The weekly applause for the NHS — hands clapped on doorsteps across the country, every Thursday at eight o’clock, through the spring of 2020 — was one of the pandemic’s most distinctive cultural productions: a collective ritual, spontaneously begun and spontaneously sustained, that expressed the specific public emotion of a country grateful for the people risking their lives in hospitals and care homes and GP surgeries while everyone else was being asked to stay home.

The applause began on 26 March 2020 and continued weekly until 28 May, when its organiser, Annemarie Plas, ended it on the grounds that it had served its purpose and that continuing it risked the ritual becoming performative rather than genuine. The applause was, in its duration, an exact measure of the first lockdown’s social solidarity — present while the emergency was acute, concluded when the emergency was being managed rather than experienced. Its ending coincided, roughly, with the public’s discovery that the government’s lockdown management was more complicated than the instruction to stay home had suggested, and that the instruction’s application was not being applied uniformly by those who had issued it.

Captain Tom Moore: The Figure That the Moment Required

Captain Tom Moore was ninety-nine years old in April 2020, a veteran of the Second World War, and he walked laps of his garden in Bedfordshire with the aid of a walking frame, raising money for NHS Charities Together in a challenge whose initial target — £1,000 — was exceeded by a factor that defeated the arithmetic of original expectation. He raised £32.79 million. He was knighted by the Queen at a ceremony at Windsor Castle, became a number one recording artist, and died in February 2021 at the age of one hundred, of Covid, having contracted the disease that his fundraising had been directed at fighting.

Captain Tom was the figure that the pandemic required — the specific human story that concentrated the collective emotion of the lockdown period and gave it a focus that the abstractions of R numbers and death tolls could not provide. His garden laps were, in their simplicity, the opposite of the pandemic’s complexity — a single man walking in a garden, raising money by walking, watched by a country that needed exactly this: uncomplicated goodness, plainly performed, for an unambiguous purpose.

The Rage: What People Were Angry About

The compliance of the lockdown coexisted with a sustained and growing rage about the management of it — the confusion about the rules, the changing guidance, the mixed messages about masks, the specific rage about the briefings from Downing Street at which the Prime Minister and his scientific advisers delivered information that was sometimes inconsistent with each other and sometimes inconsistent with itself over successive press conferences.

Dominic Cummings’s trip to Durham during lockdown — the discovery that the Prime Minister’s chief adviser had driven from London to County Durham during the period when the government was specifically instructing the public not to make non-essential journeys, followed by a press conference in the Downing Street rose garden in which Cummings explained his reasoning in terms that the public found insufficient — was the pandemic’s defining political moment of 2020. It was the moment at which the gap between the instruction and the behaviour of those giving the instruction became visible, and at which the public’s compliance, which had been based partly on the assumption that the rules applied to everyone, discovered that the rules were being interpreted with a flexibility that the government’s own communications had not advertised.

The rage that followed was real and sustained. It did not end the government or change its direction in any significant respect. It did begin the process of credibility erosion that the subsequent parties in Downing Street would accelerate and that the 2024 election would eventually settle.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown on 23 March 2020. Britain administered the world’s first approved Covid vaccine on 8 December 2020 — Margaret Keenan at University Hospital Coventry. Captain Tom Moore raised £32.79 million for NHS Charities Together by walking laps of his garden; he was knighted and died of Covid in February 2021 aged 100. Dominic Cummings’s trip to Durham during lockdown was revealed in May 2020; his rose garden explanation press conference became a defining moment of the pandemic’s political management. PPE procurement through the VIP lane produced contracts worth billions to suppliers referred by ministers and officials. Britain’s vaccine rollout was the fastest of any major country in the world in early 2021. Total Covid deaths in the UK exceeded 200,000 by the end of 2022.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 23 March 2020 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]