Making our nations laughable again

It’s always good to have a laugh, isn’t it? Laughter’s the great natural therapy for humans, in the state technically known to psychiatrists as ‘down in the dumps’. That’s a sad condition particularly common in our hard times.

Unfortunately, the laughs these days, precisely because times are so difficult, are sometimes a little bleak. We smile, but on occasion, more than a little wryly. The laughter, when it comes, is often hollow.

That’s true, for instance, of our amusement over the dark irony that those leaders, from the radical, populist right, whose proclaimed aim it is to make their countries world leaders, in fact make them into laughingstocks.

Cummings (l), the organ grinder, and Johnson
The mini-Trump combo currently running Britain

This week that has been particularly true of Great Britain. That benighted country has a government headed by Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s principal adviser, a man who led efforts to put in place the country’s lockdown regulations, but immediately broke them himself when he found that they inconvenienced him personally.

His decision to travel several hundred miles around the country while ill with Coronavirus, potentially infecting rather a lot of people on the way, was curious enough, but what was truly fascinating was his apparent inability to understand that anyone might find that behaviour reprehensible. He explained that he had problems organising childcare while he and his partner were in quarantine. It was as though no one else had ever faced similar difficulties, and his case should be treated as exceptional, because his circumstances were unique.

The Cummings government is fronted by Boris Johnson, a man often referred to as mini-Trump. He owes the nickname to his apparent desire to emulate the mega-Trump across the Atlantic. Why he should want to do that is hard to understand. It may be that he belongs to the shrinking band of people around the world who think Trump shows deftness of decision-making and sureness of vision, capable of inspiring people like Johnson with a desire to emulate him.

Anyway, this week the Cummings-Johnson duopoly went seemingly out of its way to provide us with material for laughs, if of the slightly grim kind. Johnson announced policy U-turns, on quarantining visitors returning from Spain and on tightening Coronavirus restrictions in the North of England, in the late evening and without anything like proper notice.

This gave the impression of a government without a strategy or any kind of ability to adopt measures in a rational or controlled manner. An impression which, if its track record is anything to go by, is entirely accurate.

One of Maggie Thatcher’s iconic sayings was in relation to U-turns. “You turn if you want to,” she told the 1980 Conservative Party conference. Then she paused for the inevitable applause and followed up with, “The Lady’s not for turning.” And the applause turned ecstatic.

Well, the Cummings-Johnson show clearly is for turning. Gyrating in the breeze, indeed.

So we laugh, grimly, at the irony of a government whose stated aim is to make Britain’s response to Coronavirus ‘world-beating’, while in fact it has succeeded only in making it laughable.

Trump:
braying can be quite funny but is no substitute for planning

Meanwhile, what’s the latest on mega-Trump? As he constantly assures us, researchers and drug companies in the US are working at speed (warp-speed, indeed, to adopt the administration’s own term, a reference to a form of travel in science fiction which corresponds to nothing real). Their efforts to develop a vaccine against Coronavirus are such that one may yet be available before the end of the year. But, it has now emerged, the administration has developed no plan to manage the distribution of the vaccine if one is developed, or to decide who should receive it first and who should wait as supplies ramp up.

As the received expression has it, fail to plan, plan to fail.

Another hollow laugh then, at yet another example of incompetence from Trump. Not, of course, that we expect anything else from him. Or indeed from Johnson.

I suppose it’s that complete fulfilment of expectations that makes Trump and Cummings-Johnson something to laugh at. Not a merry laugh. But a laugh all the same.

We should take some comfort from that much at least. See the funny side. Find a smile as an alternative to tears.

Though perhaps we might also pause a moment to learn an actual lesson. Which we might sum up quite neatly, as:

Plan to vote Populist, plan for disaster.