Beat The Devil (2021) Movie Script
1
I'm waking...
and I'm trying to wash...
the taste of sewage...
out of my mouth.
It isn't easy...
to do.
My doctor...
had warned me...
I might lose...
my sense of taste...
and smell.
They say...
it's a common symptom.
I don't have that symptom.
I have a different symptom.
Everything tastes of sewage.
When I go to the tap
at five in the morning
to drink the fresh water...
all I can taste is sewage.
Maybe I'm not keeping up
with developments,
but I haven't yet seen
this symptom listed as common.
When I ask questions
of medical professionals,
I'm getting used to the answer,
We don't yet know.
A couple of weeks before,
sometime in early March,
a piece of bad news arrived
wrapped in protein.
On Monday, I'd gone into the
editing room off Oxford Circus
to help deal with episode two
of Roadkill,
a new TV series I've written
about a Conservative politician
who is forward-looking,
intelligent,
charismatic and popular.
It's not based
on anyone in real life.
Television screenwriters
will tell you
that in any four-part structure,
episode two is always
the most difficult.
This one has severe bruising
from a producers' pile-on,
with a lot of people
from all over the place
giving contradictory notes.
The result is a bugger's muddle.
I've become convinced
the whole thing will benefit
from my mature
and steadying hand.
All cutting rooms are foetid.
Space is at a premium
in the West End,
and the complex machinery
thrums ominously warm,
not enough to fry an egg,
but maybe to coddle one.
The three of us -
director, editor and I -
squeeze into the attic space
and do an honourable day's work.
At some point, the director,
Michael Keillor,
a strong, rangy young man
from Dundee,
with Billy Connolly hair,
makes us all
a welcome cup of tea.
We share a plate of biscuits.
On Tuesday,
Michael rings to tell me
that the previous night,
without warning,
when he got home,
he collapsed.
And this morning
he can't move...
and he can't breathe.
This thing is kicking around
like I've swallowed
a Catherine Wheel.
I don't know from day to day
what to expect.
As soon as Michael told me
he had got it,
I knew I had to self-isolate.
But first,
I had to come to my studio
to take home my work.
I noticed,
as soon as I started walking,
that I was...
air hungry.
Uh-oh.
It's that quick.
Already I'm...
I'm not breathing so well.
From the little I've read,
I've understood
that this is a disease
which attacks the lungs.
Whatever happens, people say,
don't let it go to your lungs.
Even I, who know nothing,
know that we have
five vital signs.
At some point, probably
researching some play or film -
that's the only way
I learn anything -
I picked them up by heart.
Temperature, heart rate,
blood pressure, respiratory rate
and oxygen saturation -
that's the measure of how much
oxygen the blood is carrying.
In a normal person,
it's around 100%.
So, when it drops below 100,
when the blood isn't carrying
enough oxygen to the lung...
you start to worry.
Except, and this is
where things get weird,
doctors are already noticing
that with this virus
the rules don't apply.
Doctors normally feel compelled
to resort to ventilators
when patients have
oxygen saturation counts
in the eighties,
because by then
they are gasping for air.
Only with this disease,
they're not.
One doctor in New York
has taken a picture of a woman
lying on her belly
with oxygen saturation of 54,
and she's chattering away
on her mobile phone.
What the hell is going on?
People who should look ill
are looking fine,
and nobody understands why.
There's no correlation
between oxygen saturation
and how much oxygen
is reaching the vital organs.
What the fuck?
Another doctor
is quoted as saying,
The question is
whether this vital sign
we've been relying on
for decades
has been lying to us.
He adds, It's very humbling
in the 21st century
with all the scientific
advances we've made
and we just don't really know
the answer.
OK, so it may be humbling
for the medics,
but for me and people like me,
a better word is alarming.
It doesn't resemble
any other disease,
says another doctor.
You have to go back to HIV/AIDS
to find a virus
so little understood.
Mm.
I mooch around our house
for a couple of days,
pretending to work,
but by Friday
I'm feeling really terrible.
In the pageant
of random symptoms
which will soon follow,
there's only one symptom
that will remain permanent
throughout.
And that's exhaustion.
By nightfall,
I've crawled into bed
and forgotten what energy is.
At the beginning,
the illness isn't too bad -
some coughing and a weird
furriness around my lungs.
I've also lost the willpower
to do anything at all.
But then, I'm thinking,
well, that can be quite nice.
At this stage,
I'm looking forward
to what you might call
a Platonic illness -
lots of black-and-white
war films in the afternoon
with Noel Coward in white shorts
pretending to be
Lord Mountbatten,
rallying the men
and shooting at submarines,
while my wife Nicole brings me
hot lemon, honey and ginger.
My GP, Jonathan Sheldon,
has begun to Facetime me
twice a day,
though he says he can tell
much more from my voice
than from my appearance.
Because I'm confused
by the mildness of the onset,
I say to him,
Well, maybe I haven't got it.
He replies darkly,
Oh, you've got it.
But the question is,
what have I got?
A third of the patients admitted
to hospital with Covid-19 die.
And half of those admitted
to intensive care don't make it.
But what exactly
are they dying of?
This question isn't as simple
as it seems.
The rush to put people
on ventilators
is already slowing.
With this disease,
ventilators aren't doing
the job they're meant to do.
Blood is coming into the lungs
without much oxygen,
and then it's leaving
without much oxygen.
What's the point?
And people are having to stay
on ventilators
far longer than normal.
Doctors are becoming aware
that a lot of people
who go on ventilators
may never come off.
In fact, Covid-19 seems to be
a sort of dirty bomb,
thrown into the body
to cause havoc.
A lot of patients are actually
dying of kidney failure.
There's muscle inflammation
in nearly everybody.
In some cases,
patients are delirious
or suffering
inflammation of the brain.
But all this is less pervasive
than the blood clotting.
Beverley Hunt,
a Professor of Thrombosis -
I didn't know
there was such a thing -
at Kings College, London,
is telling us that she's noticed
an awful lot of sticky blood.
In fact, she's seeing
the stickiest blood
of her career.
And when you've got
sticky blood, she says,
you're much more prone
to having deep vein thrombosis
and pulmonary embolism,
which is when one
of the deep vein thromboses
travels around and blocks
the blood supply to the lungs,
which adds to the problem
of pneumonia.
Professor Hunt
uses an unexpected phrase.
It's almost medieval
in what we're seeing.
After five days in bed,
I get up and do something
phenomenally stupid.
I reach for the wok to make
Nicole and me Chinese lunch.
My whole family love
my chicken in black bean sauce
with bean sprouts.
It's my set piece.
So that's what I do,
in my dressing gown,
in the kitchen,
to prove that I'm putting Covid
behind me.
Nicole even takes a photo
for WhatsApp.
But I must have misremembered
the recipe,
because this is the first time
it's ever tasted of sewage.
From the first mouthful
I'm wondering
who made this godawful muck?
And the fact
that two hours later
I am rolling around in agony,
rushing to the lavatory,
spluttering,
coughing and groaning,
suggests that the disease
has just been waiting
for a beansprout cue
to get its notorious
second wind.
On the Friday
when I first went to bed,
the Prime Minister,
Boris Johnson,
has made the first
of two decisive interventions,
which will take the whole
United Kingdom towards lockdown.
Later, his allies in the press
will claim that
critics of his performance
are enjoying the benefit
of hindsight.
Not me.
From the moment the pandemic
was headed this way,
the Prime Minister scares me
because I keep thinking,
Johnson doesn't quite seem
on top of this.
He has spent the middle of
February on a twelve-day holiday
among the 530 acres
of mixed woodland at Chevening -
time, it later turns out,
divided between celebrating
his girlfriend's pregnancy,
negotiating the final details
of his most recent divorce,
and skipping National Security
emergency meetings.
He leaves it until 23rd March
reluctantly to announce
the full measures.
He seems to be struggling
with his own instincts.
I do accept that what
we're doing is extraordinary.
We are taking away
the ancient, inalienable right
of free-born people of the
United Kingdom to go to the pub,
and I can understand
how people feel about that.
Well, in fact, of course,
I hardly need point out,
no such right exists.
It's a piece of
journalistic invention.
Inns and public houses have been
regulated in the kingdom
since the 15th century.
A friend of mine, a journalist,
once said to me,
I'm a journalist.
I like journalists.
But, Christ,
I'd never put a journalist
in charge
of running the country.
It's on the evening
of Chinese lunch
that my regulator goes crazy.
Since neither Nicole and I
are confident
of successfully
using a thermometer,
we assume
that my bedtime reading
of 40 degrees and then some
is down to the thermometer
not having been used for years.
But then, when I wake
in the middle of the night,
not in a puddle,
but in a lake of sweat -
I have to change
both pyjamas and sheets -
we decide
maybe it was 40 after all.
It feels like it.
Nicole has thus far
defied medical advice.
We're meant to sleep
in separate rooms, but we don't.
We share a bathroom, too.
She's convinced
she's indestructible.
She always refers to her mother
dying too soon,
and she lived to 102.
Toward dawn,
my fever has headed dramatically
in the opposite direction,
and I start to shake
with Arctic cold.
Not even extra bedclothes,
two thick pullovers
and a hot water bottle
are doing anything to help.
But I can't help feeling
maybe Nicole is pushing her luck
with her own immunity
to this virus
when she climbs on top of me,
stretches her whole body
against mine and says,
Don't worry, I'll get you warm.
My wife doesn't seem
to have grasped
the notion of social distancing.
So...
unknowingly, we've slipped
into the mad phase,
and it will be with me
for the next eleven days.
Mad meaning any symptom
can appear at any time.
One day it's conjunctivitis,
next day it's diarrhea.
Then it's coughing.
Then it's friendly herpes.
But just as my illness
enters its mad phase,
so does
the Conservative government.
They're exquisitely timed
to happen together.
The problems in the UK start
when politicians fail
to use the space
granted by the westward spread
of the virus
to make preparation
for its arrival.
On 12th March,
even Jeremy Hunt, a former
Tory Health Minister himself,
calls the government's
lack of action
surprising and concerning.
The country remains
mysteriously open
to visitors from viral centres
like Italy and Spain,
who pour in at airports
unchecked and unquarantined.
At a National Security meeting,
also on 12th March,
the government
is still indulging
their more fanciful advisors.
They have been flirting
with a policy of herd immunity -
the happy-go-lucky notion that
if the most vulnerable among us
sheltered and hid indefinitely,
it might be possible
for everyone else
to carry on
and take their chances.
Not until the very day,
16th March,
that I contract the disease -
and now
this is a happy chance -
do our rulers realise
that although the theory
of herd immunity
is conveniently allowing them
to let mass gatherings
like the Cheltenham Races
go ahead,
it may unfortunately one day
lead to 250,000 deaths.
The government
immediately throws itself
into a desperate U-turn
by opting instead for
a conspicuously late lockdown.
No wonder I'm feeling I didn't
need to get this bloody thing.
It's somebody's fault.
And I can tell you
exactly whose.
I'm lying in bed sweating,
equally bewildered
by why our government has chosen
to ignore the World Health
Organization's urgent advice
that it's essential
to combine any lockdown
with widespread testing,
not just among
health professionals,
but among the population
at large.
The government is instead -
hello, have I got this right? -
suspending contact tracing -
are they crazy or what?
-
claiming it's not
scientifically necessary.
Yet how the hell are they ever
going to control the disease
unless they know who's got it?
It doesn't make sense.
In fact, I mean,
nothing makes sense.
At this point, I'm not sure
whether to put this down
to my delirium or theirs.
I keep waking in the night
firmly convinced
that right now -
usually around 2am -
is the perfect time
for me to fulfill my mission.
What is this mission?
Is it military?
Is it diplomatic?
Is it artistic?
I haven't the slightest idea.
That's why I'm up and out of bed
and standing in the middle
of the bedroom, ready to go.
Go where exactly?
Who knows?
One morning,
in the middle of this week,
Nicole has asked me
how I'm feeling.
I have replied,
One of my bodies is fine,
but the others aren't great.
I have gone on
painstakingly to explain
that the virus has divided me
into several separate identities
which all sleep in the bed
together side by side.
Clearly, I'm off my head,
though, as always
when you're off your head,
it doesn't feel that way to you.
But am I any more off my head
than a government
which can't admit
that they are dispatching
front-line staff
into work
with Covid-infected patients
without suitable protective
clothing or equipment,
in spite of
the impassioned testimony
of those same front line workers
that they are being sent
naked to work?
And why can nobody who speaks
for the government confess
that because they were so keen
to monitor
the dangers to the NHS,
they neglected the equal danger
to workers and residents
in the care home sector,
where deaths are set to rise
to alarming levels?
Why are we moving our most
vulnerable out of hospitals,
where they are protected,
into care homes
where they aren't?
Can anyone explain?
I can see this devilish virus
seems to be cleverly retrofitted
to find Johnson out.
It's smart.
It knows how to play
to all his worst weaknesses.
The virus is nothing
if not adaptable,
because it's meanwhile
outwitting the leader
of the United States
by targeting his quite different
shortcomings.
In his book The Art of the Deal,
Donald Trump has revealed
that the best way to do a deal
is by denigrating your opponent.
This is man
who speaks nostalgically
of punching
his high school music teacher
and giving him a black eye.
He has spent February
denigrating Covid-19:
You're not as bad as the flu.
Few Americans are at risk.
But the morale of the virus
seems strangely undaunted
by his tactics.
Perhaps it's read his book.
Trump is a man with a life-time
fear of contamination.
That's why he always has
wet wipes to hand.
He has a special horror
of women's bodily functions.
During the election campaign
in 2016,
he has referred to one of
his interviewers, Megyn Kelly,
having blood
coming out of her wherever.
He has also repeatedly
characterised
Hillary Clinton's bathroom break
during a Democratic debate
as disgusting.
You may predict
that this president
is not ideally equipped
to cope with something
which breaks into your body
and violently disrupts it.
Trump can't conquer
his natural disdain
for anyone who gets ill.
Sick people are
what he calls losers.
When he later
contracts the disease himself,
he is flown by helicopter
to the Walter Reed Center
where his treatment costs
$100,000.
But I've noticed
among some of my friends
that a similar attitude,
though not articulated,
is not far from the surface.
A famous film director
remarks to me
that I'm the only person
he knows who's got it.
Do I detect
an undercurrent of rebuke,
as though
it's not the sort of thing
the middle classes
are meant to get?
Apparently,
I've crossed class lines
by carelessly catching a disease
which generally attacks
manual workers
and ethnic minorities.
After all,
it's already becoming clear
that you are twice as likely
to die if you're poor.
Diseases follow
the social gradient.
And skin colour.
In England and Wales,
you are four times
as likely to die...
if you're black.
But, again, am I dying?
This is another
very good question.
I've entered the vomiting phase,
and I'd say
it's the worst so far.
Six times daily, I'm beating
a track to the bathroom.
I can't keep anything down,
and the result is
I'm losing strength.
Nicole is horrified
because I'm the colour
of Dracula,
but also frustrated
because I won't eat anything.
But what's the point, I ask,
if it just comes up again
in an hour?
And for the first time,
my doctor is seriously worried.
I don't like the sound of you.
You need to go into hospital
for them to take care of you.
I say, I won't go.
It's too dangerous.
Hospitals are full of people
with Covid-19.
You've already got Covid-19,
he replies.
How can it be worse in hospital?
I don't know, I say.
I just feel it is.
All right, he says,
but I'm not letting this go on
much longer.
The doctor is bombarding me
with horse pills,
antibiotics
of industrial strength,
which he says may explain
the permanent taste in my mouth.
Next morning,
I wake after a torrid night,
convinced that Polos
will solve the problem.
Nicole is so relieved
that there's something
I actually want to eat
that she buys me ten packets.
Unfortunately, it's some time
since I had a Polo,
and in the interval it's obvious
from the first one I pop in
that the manufacturers
have changed the formula.
They are now
flavoured with sewage.
On the tenth day,
my sole diary entry reads...
Total despair.
'But we have
to get through this together,
'and we are getting
through it together.'
My mood is aggravated
by the dense blizzard of clich
which is fogging up
my television.
You would think, given
that soon, the UK death rate
will be higher than
in any other country in Europe,
and the UK
testing and tracing system
the least successful in Europe,
you would think
a note of contrition
might begin to be heard
in the public realm.
But no, the preferred route
through the crisis is bullshit.
Government ministers must now,
every man and woman,
toil their way doggedly
down the centre
of the bullshit highway.
Words like failure
or mistake are forbidden
and replaced
by the anodyne challenge.
Yes, we faced challenges
is government-speak
for Yes, we failed.
Ramping up is government-speak
for finally doing something
that we forgot to do.
We followed the science
is government-speak
for Don't blame us.
The word that's getting
beaten up worst is mediocrity.
The only qualification
for being in Johnson's cabinet
is that you must possess
a mind vacant of all doubt
about Johnson's scorched-earth
approach to Brexit.
If you have any reservations,
you're excluded.
And this has left
the Prime Minister
with as good
a statistical chance
of forming
a strong administration
as if he were to insist
that all ministers
must have ginger hair,
or stand in their socks
at over six foot ten.
Everywhere, as one
unknown minister after another
stutters and stumbles
on the airwaves,
people complain that this is
a cabinet of mediocrities.
But this does violence
to the word.
Mediocrity suggests
middling ability.
You and I are mediocrities.
These people are incompetents.
Ministers like
Robert Jendrick...
Dominic Raab...
and Helen Whately,
the hapless Minister of State
for Social Care,
who comes across
like a quiz contestant
who's forgotten
the name of the fourth Beatle -
and who is, by the way,
in charge of care homes -
such people don't begin to meet
my definition of mediocrity.
The nadir of the government's
performance comes from...
the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
Patel has been recklessly
reinstated by Johnson
after being driven out of
government for trying, in 2017,
to pioneer a one-woman guerrilla
British foreign policy
in the Middle East.
She has taken
twelve secret meetings
with Israeli politicians,
including the Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu,
while being careful not
to inform the Foreign Office -
an omission which she later
denies to a newspaper.
Plucked from disgrace,
she is today asked
by a journalist
at the regular press briefing
if she will apologize
for the failings
of resources and equipment
which NHS staff
and their families
blame on the government.
Patel replies that she's sorry -
if people feel
there have been failings.
The journalist,
a little taken aback -
everyone except Patel
knows the facts -
gives Patel a second chance,
and asks,
But are you apologising
for the lack of
Personal Protective Equipment
which has led to mass infections
and the deaths
of several nurses and doctors?
Patel replies,
I'm sorry
that people feel that way.
All right, maybe watching
television in my condition
is a mistake.
My mind is racing back
to Suez and to Iraq
to recall instances of any
public figure trying to get away
with a formula of words
as despicable as this.
But at least, as I sweat,
shiver and vomit,
it gives me an insight
into what the medical profession
have to put up with,
answering to their masters.
Come virus time,
the Conservative Party
has discovered
a hitherto undisclosed
admiration for nurses.
But in June 2017,
Johnson, Patel and Matt Hancock
had been among the 313
Conservative MPs
who were seen cheering
when a motion suggesting
the lifting of a pay cap
which kept nurses' rises
down to 1%
was, with the help
of their votes,
defeated
in the House of Commons.
If I wasn't gagging anyway...
I'd gag.
At least, now that Johnson
himself has come down with it,
Conservatives have stopped
downplaying Covid-19
and recognised that it is
ten times as deadly as flu.
For the first time
in the right-wing press,
the disease has acquired
a heroic dimension.
Can't think why,
but for some reason it's
no longer a disease for losers.
Suddenly Covid is for men,
in particular, blond white men
who have extraordinary
resources of character
with which to fight.
Our Prime Minister
turns out to be one of these.
Although he will later pay
due tribute to the very nurses
whose pay rise he opposed
three years previously,
Johnson will also remember
to tip his hat
to his own natural buoyancy
and refusal to give in.
Gosh, how I wish I had
Johnson's character.
I've been foolishly assuming
that my own survival
would be down
to a mixture of good luck,
the care of my wife,
and the expertise
of my wonderful GP.
My character, thank God,
doesn't come into it.
On the fifteenth day,
much to Nicole's alarm,
I've lost six kilos in ten days.
I've got the voice of an old man
and the body of
a Bosnian prisoner of war.
But then, for no obvious reason,
Day 16 is different.
I'll never know why.
6th April 2020
was always going to be a date
of special significance.
All right, I'll tell you:
it's the 50th anniversary
of my first full-length play
premiering at Hampstead Theatre.
In other words, today I've been
a playwright for fifty years.
Because this is an anniversary
which only I had noticed,
celebrations were always
going to be muted.
I hadn't heard
of street parties -
and in the circumstances
they're non-existent.
And yet 6th April
is also the day -
inexplicable and unexplained -
when I stop being ill.
I wake up and say to Nicole
that I quite fancy a croissant.
I might as well
have come out of a coma
to judge by her reaction.
Are you having
one of your delusions?
No, I really
do want a croissant.
But you haven't wanted
anything for a week.
No, but I would
quite like a croissant.
I look around.
I smell the air.
It doesn't smell of sewage.
When later I speak
to my friend Howard Brenton,
who has also had it,
he says that the disease departs
like a demon leaving your body.
You see?
Medieval, again.
It's going to take a long time
to get better.
I know that,
and I know not to rush it.
I'm very weak.
I know to take it easy.
Not, for instance, to go back
to running the country.
But I'm overwhelmed
by a sense of the arbitrary.
I admit
that later that afternoon,
when it is clear
than I am indeed clear...
I begin to cry -
not altogether selfishly,
not just at my own good fortune,
but at how unfair it all is.
So many people,
many younger than me,
fitter than me,
better than me,
poorer than me,
are going to die
when they don't need to.
Liam Donaldson,
the one-time Chief Medical
Officer in England, said,
To err is human,
to cover up is unforgivable,
and to fail to learn
is inexcusable.
I don't have survivor's guilt.
I have survivor's rage.
Not long
after I started writing,
in the late 1970s...
I made a television film
called Licking Hitler,
which was about
a black propaganda unit
run from an English
country house
during the Second World War.
Because very few people had
heard about the unit's existence
and the filthy work it did,
and because the fight
against the Nazis had, in myth,
always been portrayed as
an exclusively noble endeavour,
fought with impeccable
high principle,
the film caused quite a stink.
People were shocked.
Who would have thought
the British, of all people,
would need to sink
to lying and libelling
in order to the fight
a just war?
Why was it necessary?
In 1978, that question
still meant something.
Since then,
I've kept up my interest
in the relationship
between public life and untruth.
When the website PolitiFact
established by careful research
that only 4% of claims
made by Donald Trump were true,
I was taken aback.
Really?
Was it as much as that?
But after years of thinking
about these things,
I am still bewildered
by the British handling
of this latest chapter
in our island's story.
Surely, looking abroad
to the examples
of Angela Merkel in Germany
or Jacinda Ardern
in New Zealand,
something must have stirred
inside the head
of at least one thinker
in Downing Street.
Given how well
those two leaders were doing,
and how badly we were doing,
did it really never occur
to anyone in power
that possibly
following their example
and levelling with the public
might be a more fruitful
political tactic?
Not necessarily
for the virtue of it -
let's be realistic -
but - hey! -
just for the efficiency.
Explain, please.
What is stopping the government
from admitting...
Since 2010,
we underfunded the NHS.
Our attempts to introduce
competition between hospitals
have been a catastrophe.
Our denigration of junior
doctors and nurses
was a public relations disaster.
When the virus came,
we were slow to react
because we took a wrong road,
and the Prime Minister's mind
was elsewhere.
We were wrong when we pretended
contract tracing
was suspended in March
for scientific reasons,
when in fact it was because of
a testing capacity shortage.
We have been short of PPE
throughout,
we've neglected care homes,
we should've closed
the airports?
What...
What would it actually cost
to confess that we were
talking through our hats
when we claimed,
at a press conference,
to be an international exemplar
in preparedness?
Apart from anything,
wouldn't it be so much easier?
Is the labour of lying
really worth the effort?
Isn't it draining
on everyone's ingenuity,
conscience and resources?
Wouldn't Johnson himself
look and feel far less exhausted
if he were liberated
from a narrative
scarcely anyone believes?
With one bound,
wouldn't he be free?
Does it never occur to the
great minds of British politics
that there is
a direct connection
between honesty and popularity?
Why is that idea
so hard to grasp?
Has no one
in the current government
ever met the bereaved?
Do they not remember
Hillsborough?
Or Bloody Sunday?
Or the residents
of Grenfell Tower?
Have they really not yet learned
that the most soothing
possible bandage
for the wounds
inflicted by grief...
is the truth?
Do the families and friends
of the dead not deserve it?
I'm tired of reading
that people want to be spoken to
like adults.
In my experience,
it's adults who lie.
I want to be spoken to
like a child.
It's to children
all decent people
tell the truth.
Perhaps this desire is in line
with my new personality.
I'm so glad to be alive
that I wake every morning
wanting to thank the universe
for continuing to host me.
In recovery,
I am suffused with joy.
Unexpectedly,
my character now allows me
to say things like,
This is a beautiful
glass of water.
I'm startled to come
out of this experience a hippy.
I call my exercise teacher,
Matt Bamford,
and ask him what exercise
I should take to recover.
He says, None.
You can't exercise
your way out of this.
And sure enough, he's right.
One of the most moving
experiences of my life
is to sit and feel my body
mend itself.
It regains strength,
independent of anything
I bring to the process.
I do nothing.
It knows what to do.
My wife, by contrast,
has also developed
a new personality.
Her saintliness has apparently
vanished with her fears.
When she sees me walking
unsteadily along the corridor,
greeting her with a croak,
she exclaims, Oh, my God,
it's like you are ninety.
I'm not staying married
to a ninety-year-old man.
I've been very ill, I say,
I'm convalescing.
Well, convalesce quicker.
Nicole notices that in recovery
I've developed a newfound
over-sensitivity to movies.
When, in a film we're watching,
John C. Reilly whacks Gwyneth
Paltrow hard across the face,
Nicole asks me if I am aware
that I've just shouted,
Don't do that.
When Edward Kennedy
drives Mary Joe Kopechne
off a bridge in Chappaquiddick,
then swims to safety
without rescuing her,
do I realise that
I've just shouted Bastard?
Yes.
I guess the virus is in me...
and always will be.
The day will come
when Covid-19 will be forgotten,
just as Spanish flu
is forgotten.
Already, after a period
of fierce forbearance
and self-censorship,
the culture warriors
are rearming.
Sir Graham Brady,
a Conservative backbencher,
has been lecturing the workers,
telling them to improve their
attitude to the end of lockdown.
He tells the public
they're a little too willing
to stay at home.
Conservative MPs are settling
back into their comfort zone,
making their timeless complaint
that the public are once more
letting the politicians down.
I'm walking round the garden,
wondering whether Sir Graham
ever asks himself
why anyone should trust
a government
which refuses to trust them.
I think of...
the great James Baldwin:
Allegiance, after all,
has to work two ways,
and one can grow weary
of an allegiance
which is not reciprocal.
I go back into the house.
I make tea.
Right now I can only do
the simple things.
But by doing
simple things right,
my plan...
is to beat the devil.
I'm waking...
and I'm trying to wash...
the taste of sewage...
out of my mouth.
It isn't easy...
to do.
My doctor...
had warned me...
I might lose...
my sense of taste...
and smell.
They say...
it's a common symptom.
I don't have that symptom.
I have a different symptom.
Everything tastes of sewage.
When I go to the tap
at five in the morning
to drink the fresh water...
all I can taste is sewage.
Maybe I'm not keeping up
with developments,
but I haven't yet seen
this symptom listed as common.
When I ask questions
of medical professionals,
I'm getting used to the answer,
We don't yet know.
A couple of weeks before,
sometime in early March,
a piece of bad news arrived
wrapped in protein.
On Monday, I'd gone into the
editing room off Oxford Circus
to help deal with episode two
of Roadkill,
a new TV series I've written
about a Conservative politician
who is forward-looking,
intelligent,
charismatic and popular.
It's not based
on anyone in real life.
Television screenwriters
will tell you
that in any four-part structure,
episode two is always
the most difficult.
This one has severe bruising
from a producers' pile-on,
with a lot of people
from all over the place
giving contradictory notes.
The result is a bugger's muddle.
I've become convinced
the whole thing will benefit
from my mature
and steadying hand.
All cutting rooms are foetid.
Space is at a premium
in the West End,
and the complex machinery
thrums ominously warm,
not enough to fry an egg,
but maybe to coddle one.
The three of us -
director, editor and I -
squeeze into the attic space
and do an honourable day's work.
At some point, the director,
Michael Keillor,
a strong, rangy young man
from Dundee,
with Billy Connolly hair,
makes us all
a welcome cup of tea.
We share a plate of biscuits.
On Tuesday,
Michael rings to tell me
that the previous night,
without warning,
when he got home,
he collapsed.
And this morning
he can't move...
and he can't breathe.
This thing is kicking around
like I've swallowed
a Catherine Wheel.
I don't know from day to day
what to expect.
As soon as Michael told me
he had got it,
I knew I had to self-isolate.
But first,
I had to come to my studio
to take home my work.
I noticed,
as soon as I started walking,
that I was...
air hungry.
Uh-oh.
It's that quick.
Already I'm...
I'm not breathing so well.
From the little I've read,
I've understood
that this is a disease
which attacks the lungs.
Whatever happens, people say,
don't let it go to your lungs.
Even I, who know nothing,
know that we have
five vital signs.
At some point, probably
researching some play or film -
that's the only way
I learn anything -
I picked them up by heart.
Temperature, heart rate,
blood pressure, respiratory rate
and oxygen saturation -
that's the measure of how much
oxygen the blood is carrying.
In a normal person,
it's around 100%.
So, when it drops below 100,
when the blood isn't carrying
enough oxygen to the lung...
you start to worry.
Except, and this is
where things get weird,
doctors are already noticing
that with this virus
the rules don't apply.
Doctors normally feel compelled
to resort to ventilators
when patients have
oxygen saturation counts
in the eighties,
because by then
they are gasping for air.
Only with this disease,
they're not.
One doctor in New York
has taken a picture of a woman
lying on her belly
with oxygen saturation of 54,
and she's chattering away
on her mobile phone.
What the hell is going on?
People who should look ill
are looking fine,
and nobody understands why.
There's no correlation
between oxygen saturation
and how much oxygen
is reaching the vital organs.
What the fuck?
Another doctor
is quoted as saying,
The question is
whether this vital sign
we've been relying on
for decades
has been lying to us.
He adds, It's very humbling
in the 21st century
with all the scientific
advances we've made
and we just don't really know
the answer.
OK, so it may be humbling
for the medics,
but for me and people like me,
a better word is alarming.
It doesn't resemble
any other disease,
says another doctor.
You have to go back to HIV/AIDS
to find a virus
so little understood.
Mm.
I mooch around our house
for a couple of days,
pretending to work,
but by Friday
I'm feeling really terrible.
In the pageant
of random symptoms
which will soon follow,
there's only one symptom
that will remain permanent
throughout.
And that's exhaustion.
By nightfall,
I've crawled into bed
and forgotten what energy is.
At the beginning,
the illness isn't too bad -
some coughing and a weird
furriness around my lungs.
I've also lost the willpower
to do anything at all.
But then, I'm thinking,
well, that can be quite nice.
At this stage,
I'm looking forward
to what you might call
a Platonic illness -
lots of black-and-white
war films in the afternoon
with Noel Coward in white shorts
pretending to be
Lord Mountbatten,
rallying the men
and shooting at submarines,
while my wife Nicole brings me
hot lemon, honey and ginger.
My GP, Jonathan Sheldon,
has begun to Facetime me
twice a day,
though he says he can tell
much more from my voice
than from my appearance.
Because I'm confused
by the mildness of the onset,
I say to him,
Well, maybe I haven't got it.
He replies darkly,
Oh, you've got it.
But the question is,
what have I got?
A third of the patients admitted
to hospital with Covid-19 die.
And half of those admitted
to intensive care don't make it.
But what exactly
are they dying of?
This question isn't as simple
as it seems.
The rush to put people
on ventilators
is already slowing.
With this disease,
ventilators aren't doing
the job they're meant to do.
Blood is coming into the lungs
without much oxygen,
and then it's leaving
without much oxygen.
What's the point?
And people are having to stay
on ventilators
far longer than normal.
Doctors are becoming aware
that a lot of people
who go on ventilators
may never come off.
In fact, Covid-19 seems to be
a sort of dirty bomb,
thrown into the body
to cause havoc.
A lot of patients are actually
dying of kidney failure.
There's muscle inflammation
in nearly everybody.
In some cases,
patients are delirious
or suffering
inflammation of the brain.
But all this is less pervasive
than the blood clotting.
Beverley Hunt,
a Professor of Thrombosis -
I didn't know
there was such a thing -
at Kings College, London,
is telling us that she's noticed
an awful lot of sticky blood.
In fact, she's seeing
the stickiest blood
of her career.
And when you've got
sticky blood, she says,
you're much more prone
to having deep vein thrombosis
and pulmonary embolism,
which is when one
of the deep vein thromboses
travels around and blocks
the blood supply to the lungs,
which adds to the problem
of pneumonia.
Professor Hunt
uses an unexpected phrase.
It's almost medieval
in what we're seeing.
After five days in bed,
I get up and do something
phenomenally stupid.
I reach for the wok to make
Nicole and me Chinese lunch.
My whole family love
my chicken in black bean sauce
with bean sprouts.
It's my set piece.
So that's what I do,
in my dressing gown,
in the kitchen,
to prove that I'm putting Covid
behind me.
Nicole even takes a photo
for WhatsApp.
But I must have misremembered
the recipe,
because this is the first time
it's ever tasted of sewage.
From the first mouthful
I'm wondering
who made this godawful muck?
And the fact
that two hours later
I am rolling around in agony,
rushing to the lavatory,
spluttering,
coughing and groaning,
suggests that the disease
has just been waiting
for a beansprout cue
to get its notorious
second wind.
On the Friday
when I first went to bed,
the Prime Minister,
Boris Johnson,
has made the first
of two decisive interventions,
which will take the whole
United Kingdom towards lockdown.
Later, his allies in the press
will claim that
critics of his performance
are enjoying the benefit
of hindsight.
Not me.
From the moment the pandemic
was headed this way,
the Prime Minister scares me
because I keep thinking,
Johnson doesn't quite seem
on top of this.
He has spent the middle of
February on a twelve-day holiday
among the 530 acres
of mixed woodland at Chevening -
time, it later turns out,
divided between celebrating
his girlfriend's pregnancy,
negotiating the final details
of his most recent divorce,
and skipping National Security
emergency meetings.
He leaves it until 23rd March
reluctantly to announce
the full measures.
He seems to be struggling
with his own instincts.
I do accept that what
we're doing is extraordinary.
We are taking away
the ancient, inalienable right
of free-born people of the
United Kingdom to go to the pub,
and I can understand
how people feel about that.
Well, in fact, of course,
I hardly need point out,
no such right exists.
It's a piece of
journalistic invention.
Inns and public houses have been
regulated in the kingdom
since the 15th century.
A friend of mine, a journalist,
once said to me,
I'm a journalist.
I like journalists.
But, Christ,
I'd never put a journalist
in charge
of running the country.
It's on the evening
of Chinese lunch
that my regulator goes crazy.
Since neither Nicole and I
are confident
of successfully
using a thermometer,
we assume
that my bedtime reading
of 40 degrees and then some
is down to the thermometer
not having been used for years.
But then, when I wake
in the middle of the night,
not in a puddle,
but in a lake of sweat -
I have to change
both pyjamas and sheets -
we decide
maybe it was 40 after all.
It feels like it.
Nicole has thus far
defied medical advice.
We're meant to sleep
in separate rooms, but we don't.
We share a bathroom, too.
She's convinced
she's indestructible.
She always refers to her mother
dying too soon,
and she lived to 102.
Toward dawn,
my fever has headed dramatically
in the opposite direction,
and I start to shake
with Arctic cold.
Not even extra bedclothes,
two thick pullovers
and a hot water bottle
are doing anything to help.
But I can't help feeling
maybe Nicole is pushing her luck
with her own immunity
to this virus
when she climbs on top of me,
stretches her whole body
against mine and says,
Don't worry, I'll get you warm.
My wife doesn't seem
to have grasped
the notion of social distancing.
So...
unknowingly, we've slipped
into the mad phase,
and it will be with me
for the next eleven days.
Mad meaning any symptom
can appear at any time.
One day it's conjunctivitis,
next day it's diarrhea.
Then it's coughing.
Then it's friendly herpes.
But just as my illness
enters its mad phase,
so does
the Conservative government.
They're exquisitely timed
to happen together.
The problems in the UK start
when politicians fail
to use the space
granted by the westward spread
of the virus
to make preparation
for its arrival.
On 12th March,
even Jeremy Hunt, a former
Tory Health Minister himself,
calls the government's
lack of action
surprising and concerning.
The country remains
mysteriously open
to visitors from viral centres
like Italy and Spain,
who pour in at airports
unchecked and unquarantined.
At a National Security meeting,
also on 12th March,
the government
is still indulging
their more fanciful advisors.
They have been flirting
with a policy of herd immunity -
the happy-go-lucky notion that
if the most vulnerable among us
sheltered and hid indefinitely,
it might be possible
for everyone else
to carry on
and take their chances.
Not until the very day,
16th March,
that I contract the disease -
and now
this is a happy chance -
do our rulers realise
that although the theory
of herd immunity
is conveniently allowing them
to let mass gatherings
like the Cheltenham Races
go ahead,
it may unfortunately one day
lead to 250,000 deaths.
The government
immediately throws itself
into a desperate U-turn
by opting instead for
a conspicuously late lockdown.
No wonder I'm feeling I didn't
need to get this bloody thing.
It's somebody's fault.
And I can tell you
exactly whose.
I'm lying in bed sweating,
equally bewildered
by why our government has chosen
to ignore the World Health
Organization's urgent advice
that it's essential
to combine any lockdown
with widespread testing,
not just among
health professionals,
but among the population
at large.
The government is instead -
hello, have I got this right? -
suspending contact tracing -
are they crazy or what?
-
claiming it's not
scientifically necessary.
Yet how the hell are they ever
going to control the disease
unless they know who's got it?
It doesn't make sense.
In fact, I mean,
nothing makes sense.
At this point, I'm not sure
whether to put this down
to my delirium or theirs.
I keep waking in the night
firmly convinced
that right now -
usually around 2am -
is the perfect time
for me to fulfill my mission.
What is this mission?
Is it military?
Is it diplomatic?
Is it artistic?
I haven't the slightest idea.
That's why I'm up and out of bed
and standing in the middle
of the bedroom, ready to go.
Go where exactly?
Who knows?
One morning,
in the middle of this week,
Nicole has asked me
how I'm feeling.
I have replied,
One of my bodies is fine,
but the others aren't great.
I have gone on
painstakingly to explain
that the virus has divided me
into several separate identities
which all sleep in the bed
together side by side.
Clearly, I'm off my head,
though, as always
when you're off your head,
it doesn't feel that way to you.
But am I any more off my head
than a government
which can't admit
that they are dispatching
front-line staff
into work
with Covid-infected patients
without suitable protective
clothing or equipment,
in spite of
the impassioned testimony
of those same front line workers
that they are being sent
naked to work?
And why can nobody who speaks
for the government confess
that because they were so keen
to monitor
the dangers to the NHS,
they neglected the equal danger
to workers and residents
in the care home sector,
where deaths are set to rise
to alarming levels?
Why are we moving our most
vulnerable out of hospitals,
where they are protected,
into care homes
where they aren't?
Can anyone explain?
I can see this devilish virus
seems to be cleverly retrofitted
to find Johnson out.
It's smart.
It knows how to play
to all his worst weaknesses.
The virus is nothing
if not adaptable,
because it's meanwhile
outwitting the leader
of the United States
by targeting his quite different
shortcomings.
In his book The Art of the Deal,
Donald Trump has revealed
that the best way to do a deal
is by denigrating your opponent.
This is man
who speaks nostalgically
of punching
his high school music teacher
and giving him a black eye.
He has spent February
denigrating Covid-19:
You're not as bad as the flu.
Few Americans are at risk.
But the morale of the virus
seems strangely undaunted
by his tactics.
Perhaps it's read his book.
Trump is a man with a life-time
fear of contamination.
That's why he always has
wet wipes to hand.
He has a special horror
of women's bodily functions.
During the election campaign
in 2016,
he has referred to one of
his interviewers, Megyn Kelly,
having blood
coming out of her wherever.
He has also repeatedly
characterised
Hillary Clinton's bathroom break
during a Democratic debate
as disgusting.
You may predict
that this president
is not ideally equipped
to cope with something
which breaks into your body
and violently disrupts it.
Trump can't conquer
his natural disdain
for anyone who gets ill.
Sick people are
what he calls losers.
When he later
contracts the disease himself,
he is flown by helicopter
to the Walter Reed Center
where his treatment costs
$100,000.
But I've noticed
among some of my friends
that a similar attitude,
though not articulated,
is not far from the surface.
A famous film director
remarks to me
that I'm the only person
he knows who's got it.
Do I detect
an undercurrent of rebuke,
as though
it's not the sort of thing
the middle classes
are meant to get?
Apparently,
I've crossed class lines
by carelessly catching a disease
which generally attacks
manual workers
and ethnic minorities.
After all,
it's already becoming clear
that you are twice as likely
to die if you're poor.
Diseases follow
the social gradient.
And skin colour.
In England and Wales,
you are four times
as likely to die...
if you're black.
But, again, am I dying?
This is another
very good question.
I've entered the vomiting phase,
and I'd say
it's the worst so far.
Six times daily, I'm beating
a track to the bathroom.
I can't keep anything down,
and the result is
I'm losing strength.
Nicole is horrified
because I'm the colour
of Dracula,
but also frustrated
because I won't eat anything.
But what's the point, I ask,
if it just comes up again
in an hour?
And for the first time,
my doctor is seriously worried.
I don't like the sound of you.
You need to go into hospital
for them to take care of you.
I say, I won't go.
It's too dangerous.
Hospitals are full of people
with Covid-19.
You've already got Covid-19,
he replies.
How can it be worse in hospital?
I don't know, I say.
I just feel it is.
All right, he says,
but I'm not letting this go on
much longer.
The doctor is bombarding me
with horse pills,
antibiotics
of industrial strength,
which he says may explain
the permanent taste in my mouth.
Next morning,
I wake after a torrid night,
convinced that Polos
will solve the problem.
Nicole is so relieved
that there's something
I actually want to eat
that she buys me ten packets.
Unfortunately, it's some time
since I had a Polo,
and in the interval it's obvious
from the first one I pop in
that the manufacturers
have changed the formula.
They are now
flavoured with sewage.
On the tenth day,
my sole diary entry reads...
Total despair.
'But we have
to get through this together,
'and we are getting
through it together.'
My mood is aggravated
by the dense blizzard of clich
which is fogging up
my television.
You would think, given
that soon, the UK death rate
will be higher than
in any other country in Europe,
and the UK
testing and tracing system
the least successful in Europe,
you would think
a note of contrition
might begin to be heard
in the public realm.
But no, the preferred route
through the crisis is bullshit.
Government ministers must now,
every man and woman,
toil their way doggedly
down the centre
of the bullshit highway.
Words like failure
or mistake are forbidden
and replaced
by the anodyne challenge.
Yes, we faced challenges
is government-speak
for Yes, we failed.
Ramping up is government-speak
for finally doing something
that we forgot to do.
We followed the science
is government-speak
for Don't blame us.
The word that's getting
beaten up worst is mediocrity.
The only qualification
for being in Johnson's cabinet
is that you must possess
a mind vacant of all doubt
about Johnson's scorched-earth
approach to Brexit.
If you have any reservations,
you're excluded.
And this has left
the Prime Minister
with as good
a statistical chance
of forming
a strong administration
as if he were to insist
that all ministers
must have ginger hair,
or stand in their socks
at over six foot ten.
Everywhere, as one
unknown minister after another
stutters and stumbles
on the airwaves,
people complain that this is
a cabinet of mediocrities.
But this does violence
to the word.
Mediocrity suggests
middling ability.
You and I are mediocrities.
These people are incompetents.
Ministers like
Robert Jendrick...
Dominic Raab...
and Helen Whately,
the hapless Minister of State
for Social Care,
who comes across
like a quiz contestant
who's forgotten
the name of the fourth Beatle -
and who is, by the way,
in charge of care homes -
such people don't begin to meet
my definition of mediocrity.
The nadir of the government's
performance comes from...
the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
Patel has been recklessly
reinstated by Johnson
after being driven out of
government for trying, in 2017,
to pioneer a one-woman guerrilla
British foreign policy
in the Middle East.
She has taken
twelve secret meetings
with Israeli politicians,
including the Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu,
while being careful not
to inform the Foreign Office -
an omission which she later
denies to a newspaper.
Plucked from disgrace,
she is today asked
by a journalist
at the regular press briefing
if she will apologize
for the failings
of resources and equipment
which NHS staff
and their families
blame on the government.
Patel replies that she's sorry -
if people feel
there have been failings.
The journalist,
a little taken aback -
everyone except Patel
knows the facts -
gives Patel a second chance,
and asks,
But are you apologising
for the lack of
Personal Protective Equipment
which has led to mass infections
and the deaths
of several nurses and doctors?
Patel replies,
I'm sorry
that people feel that way.
All right, maybe watching
television in my condition
is a mistake.
My mind is racing back
to Suez and to Iraq
to recall instances of any
public figure trying to get away
with a formula of words
as despicable as this.
But at least, as I sweat,
shiver and vomit,
it gives me an insight
into what the medical profession
have to put up with,
answering to their masters.
Come virus time,
the Conservative Party
has discovered
a hitherto undisclosed
admiration for nurses.
But in June 2017,
Johnson, Patel and Matt Hancock
had been among the 313
Conservative MPs
who were seen cheering
when a motion suggesting
the lifting of a pay cap
which kept nurses' rises
down to 1%
was, with the help
of their votes,
defeated
in the House of Commons.
If I wasn't gagging anyway...
I'd gag.
At least, now that Johnson
himself has come down with it,
Conservatives have stopped
downplaying Covid-19
and recognised that it is
ten times as deadly as flu.
For the first time
in the right-wing press,
the disease has acquired
a heroic dimension.
Can't think why,
but for some reason it's
no longer a disease for losers.
Suddenly Covid is for men,
in particular, blond white men
who have extraordinary
resources of character
with which to fight.
Our Prime Minister
turns out to be one of these.
Although he will later pay
due tribute to the very nurses
whose pay rise he opposed
three years previously,
Johnson will also remember
to tip his hat
to his own natural buoyancy
and refusal to give in.
Gosh, how I wish I had
Johnson's character.
I've been foolishly assuming
that my own survival
would be down
to a mixture of good luck,
the care of my wife,
and the expertise
of my wonderful GP.
My character, thank God,
doesn't come into it.
On the fifteenth day,
much to Nicole's alarm,
I've lost six kilos in ten days.
I've got the voice of an old man
and the body of
a Bosnian prisoner of war.
But then, for no obvious reason,
Day 16 is different.
I'll never know why.
6th April 2020
was always going to be a date
of special significance.
All right, I'll tell you:
it's the 50th anniversary
of my first full-length play
premiering at Hampstead Theatre.
In other words, today I've been
a playwright for fifty years.
Because this is an anniversary
which only I had noticed,
celebrations were always
going to be muted.
I hadn't heard
of street parties -
and in the circumstances
they're non-existent.
And yet 6th April
is also the day -
inexplicable and unexplained -
when I stop being ill.
I wake up and say to Nicole
that I quite fancy a croissant.
I might as well
have come out of a coma
to judge by her reaction.
Are you having
one of your delusions?
No, I really
do want a croissant.
But you haven't wanted
anything for a week.
No, but I would
quite like a croissant.
I look around.
I smell the air.
It doesn't smell of sewage.
When later I speak
to my friend Howard Brenton,
who has also had it,
he says that the disease departs
like a demon leaving your body.
You see?
Medieval, again.
It's going to take a long time
to get better.
I know that,
and I know not to rush it.
I'm very weak.
I know to take it easy.
Not, for instance, to go back
to running the country.
But I'm overwhelmed
by a sense of the arbitrary.
I admit
that later that afternoon,
when it is clear
than I am indeed clear...
I begin to cry -
not altogether selfishly,
not just at my own good fortune,
but at how unfair it all is.
So many people,
many younger than me,
fitter than me,
better than me,
poorer than me,
are going to die
when they don't need to.
Liam Donaldson,
the one-time Chief Medical
Officer in England, said,
To err is human,
to cover up is unforgivable,
and to fail to learn
is inexcusable.
I don't have survivor's guilt.
I have survivor's rage.
Not long
after I started writing,
in the late 1970s...
I made a television film
called Licking Hitler,
which was about
a black propaganda unit
run from an English
country house
during the Second World War.
Because very few people had
heard about the unit's existence
and the filthy work it did,
and because the fight
against the Nazis had, in myth,
always been portrayed as
an exclusively noble endeavour,
fought with impeccable
high principle,
the film caused quite a stink.
People were shocked.
Who would have thought
the British, of all people,
would need to sink
to lying and libelling
in order to the fight
a just war?
Why was it necessary?
In 1978, that question
still meant something.
Since then,
I've kept up my interest
in the relationship
between public life and untruth.
When the website PolitiFact
established by careful research
that only 4% of claims
made by Donald Trump were true,
I was taken aback.
Really?
Was it as much as that?
But after years of thinking
about these things,
I am still bewildered
by the British handling
of this latest chapter
in our island's story.
Surely, looking abroad
to the examples
of Angela Merkel in Germany
or Jacinda Ardern
in New Zealand,
something must have stirred
inside the head
of at least one thinker
in Downing Street.
Given how well
those two leaders were doing,
and how badly we were doing,
did it really never occur
to anyone in power
that possibly
following their example
and levelling with the public
might be a more fruitful
political tactic?
Not necessarily
for the virtue of it -
let's be realistic -
but - hey! -
just for the efficiency.
Explain, please.
What is stopping the government
from admitting...
Since 2010,
we underfunded the NHS.
Our attempts to introduce
competition between hospitals
have been a catastrophe.
Our denigration of junior
doctors and nurses
was a public relations disaster.
When the virus came,
we were slow to react
because we took a wrong road,
and the Prime Minister's mind
was elsewhere.
We were wrong when we pretended
contract tracing
was suspended in March
for scientific reasons,
when in fact it was because of
a testing capacity shortage.
We have been short of PPE
throughout,
we've neglected care homes,
we should've closed
the airports?
What...
What would it actually cost
to confess that we were
talking through our hats
when we claimed,
at a press conference,
to be an international exemplar
in preparedness?
Apart from anything,
wouldn't it be so much easier?
Is the labour of lying
really worth the effort?
Isn't it draining
on everyone's ingenuity,
conscience and resources?
Wouldn't Johnson himself
look and feel far less exhausted
if he were liberated
from a narrative
scarcely anyone believes?
With one bound,
wouldn't he be free?
Does it never occur to the
great minds of British politics
that there is
a direct connection
between honesty and popularity?
Why is that idea
so hard to grasp?
Has no one
in the current government
ever met the bereaved?
Do they not remember
Hillsborough?
Or Bloody Sunday?
Or the residents
of Grenfell Tower?
Have they really not yet learned
that the most soothing
possible bandage
for the wounds
inflicted by grief...
is the truth?
Do the families and friends
of the dead not deserve it?
I'm tired of reading
that people want to be spoken to
like adults.
In my experience,
it's adults who lie.
I want to be spoken to
like a child.
It's to children
all decent people
tell the truth.
Perhaps this desire is in line
with my new personality.
I'm so glad to be alive
that I wake every morning
wanting to thank the universe
for continuing to host me.
In recovery,
I am suffused with joy.
Unexpectedly,
my character now allows me
to say things like,
This is a beautiful
glass of water.
I'm startled to come
out of this experience a hippy.
I call my exercise teacher,
Matt Bamford,
and ask him what exercise
I should take to recover.
He says, None.
You can't exercise
your way out of this.
And sure enough, he's right.
One of the most moving
experiences of my life
is to sit and feel my body
mend itself.
It regains strength,
independent of anything
I bring to the process.
I do nothing.
It knows what to do.
My wife, by contrast,
has also developed
a new personality.
Her saintliness has apparently
vanished with her fears.
When she sees me walking
unsteadily along the corridor,
greeting her with a croak,
she exclaims, Oh, my God,
it's like you are ninety.
I'm not staying married
to a ninety-year-old man.
I've been very ill, I say,
I'm convalescing.
Well, convalesce quicker.
Nicole notices that in recovery
I've developed a newfound
over-sensitivity to movies.
When, in a film we're watching,
John C. Reilly whacks Gwyneth
Paltrow hard across the face,
Nicole asks me if I am aware
that I've just shouted,
Don't do that.
When Edward Kennedy
drives Mary Joe Kopechne
off a bridge in Chappaquiddick,
then swims to safety
without rescuing her,
do I realise that
I've just shouted Bastard?
Yes.
I guess the virus is in me...
and always will be.
The day will come
when Covid-19 will be forgotten,
just as Spanish flu
is forgotten.
Already, after a period
of fierce forbearance
and self-censorship,
the culture warriors
are rearming.
Sir Graham Brady,
a Conservative backbencher,
has been lecturing the workers,
telling them to improve their
attitude to the end of lockdown.
He tells the public
they're a little too willing
to stay at home.
Conservative MPs are settling
back into their comfort zone,
making their timeless complaint
that the public are once more
letting the politicians down.
I'm walking round the garden,
wondering whether Sir Graham
ever asks himself
why anyone should trust
a government
which refuses to trust them.
I think of...
the great James Baldwin:
Allegiance, after all,
has to work two ways,
and one can grow weary
of an allegiance
which is not reciprocal.
I go back into the house.
I make tea.
Right now I can only do
the simple things.
But by doing
simple things right,
my plan...
is to beat the devil.