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Catherine Deveney: We’re trapped in Borisaurus Rex’s time machine

Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds up a portrait he painted of the Queen during a drawing session with children (Photo: Daniel Leal/AP/Shutterstock)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds up a portrait he painted of the Queen during a drawing session with children (Photo: Daniel Leal/AP/Shutterstock)

Do you know, I almost forgot about the Sue Gray report as I whooped with excitement at Boris Johnson’s idea to reintroduce imperial measurements to mark the Royal Jubilee.

Tra, la, la, and out with the scales and weights for this weekend’s celebratory baking session; the red, white and blue royal cake ribbon lovingly measured in inches instead of those euro-centimetre things.

I am not sure how Borisaurus Rex located his time machine, but I am right there with him. To hell with the young whippersnappers raised on grams and metres and litres! Who needs ‘em?

Back to the past we go, whizzing by any EU nonsense – didn’t they hold us back with their billion-pound investments in our country and infrastructure? – straight back to the golden land of hope and glory.

Shall we have shillings and pence while we are at it? Wipe out the cost of living crisis with a currency confusion that means nobody knows how many sherbet dib dabs to a shilling anymore. Or how many units of electricity to our £400 energy allowance from her majesty’s millionaire chancellor.

Oh, Boris, you old rogue! How we love your diversionary tactics.

A quick whoosh through history

Let’s accompany the journey to pre-metric heaven with a nostalgic soundtrack from Abba which, according to the Gray report, is de rigueur for parties at Number 10. (Can we miss out the fights and the throwing up, though? I’m a bit squeamish.)

The tricky thing is to know exactly where to stop in history. Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. The loadsamoney eighties? Dancing Queen. The swinging sixties and seventies? Or, are we going the whole hog, back to Tory nirvana: the days of the Empire? Money, Money, Money.

Wherever we stop, I vote Super Trouper number one in the Tardis jukebox. “I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night from Glasgow…”

Many communities struggled under the rule of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Photo: Suzanne Vlamis/AP/Shutterstock)

A whoosh through history certainly reminds us of the people who created change that took generations to claw back from. The Thatcher years, for example, which tore up ideas of community in ways that never did get properly restored. Trade unionism, notions of solidarity, ideas of collective bargaining, all resigned to a scrapheap that said the individual was all there was.

A health service reorganisation that brought in rafts of suits promulgating the notion that a transplant, if you closed your eyes and squinted against the light, could be seen as, why, almost like a purchase from a cash and carry. Two for a fiver, Mrs MacIver!

Their baby died in Laura’s womb but she was told there wasn’t a hospital bed for her. No ambulance could attend to her

We see the results of this approach, still. A health service that has buckled and bowed. One in which person-centred care is in name only.

Earlier this week, we heard the tragic story of Laura Brody and her partner. Their baby died in Laura’s womb but she was told there wasn’t a hospital bed for her. No ambulance could attend to her.

She miscarried in her bathroom, put her baby’s remains in a wet cloth inside a plastic box, and went to join a queue at her local hospital waiting room. I think the Tardis just lurched into mediaeval times.

Accountability matters

“Move on! Move on! Nothing to see here!” Shouts Boris, as he stands in the cold, dark, shadow of Sue Gray, like a policeman waving rubbernecking drivers past a traumatic crash.

We were told we must wait for the Gray report before the idea of lawbreakers breaking the law could be properly addressed, but Boris had a time trick to beat all others: that time was already past before it existed. Ta-da!

A photograph obtained by ITV News of the prime minister raising a glass at a leaving party on November 13 2020, during lockdown, with bottles of alcohol and party food on the table in front of him (Photo: ITV/PA Wire)

There may have been a nanosecond last week when it flashed by, but we’re in the Tardis now. Tally-ho, super troupers!

Like Thatcher, Boris Johnson has created societal changes that could take generations to recover from: notions of integrity in public life; of equality under the law. Put simply, the idea that truth matters. Accountability matters.

“He absolutely thinks none of the rules apply to him,” someone who knows him well was quoted as saying this week.

We’re being short-changed

Of course, none of us is naïve enough to think that politics was ever a clean business. But, at least there was a semblance of expectation that it should be. When your dirty linen was exposed, you resigned.

This weekend, Boris will wave his little Union Jack, and sing God Save the Queen, and it will all feel a bit like listening to Nero’s violin music while Rome burns.

Boris Johnson and the Queen in Buckingham Palace (Photo: Dominic Lipinski/AP/Shutterstock)

Johnson’s latest wheeze on imperial measurements is just another discordant note in the whole cacophonous mess, an out-of-tune appeal to anti-Brexiters who think we can stop the Tardis in some old utopia in which Britain matters to the rest of the world.

You can measure this all up in metric or in imperial, but one thing is clear: we’re being short-changed and dished up half measures all round.


Catherine Deveney is an award-winning investigative journalist, novelist and television presenter

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