What more is there to say about our sorry excuse for a prime minister? Or for all the hangers-on who broke the lockdown rules at a string of Downing Street parties and thought they’d got away with it?
And yet, what else is there to think about this week?
And what are we supposed to do with all this anger?
Like anyone with half a grasp of decency I’ve read the allegations about Number 10 parties (how many is it now – a dozen?) with a growing sense of fury.
But it’s the stories of the families who sacrificed final moments with their loved ones that make me livid to a degree I didn’t know was possible.
Alan Wightman, from Forfar, watched his mother Helen’s funeral online two days before Boris joined the throng at the “bring your own bottle” bash in the Downing Street garden on May 20 2020.
Liz Cullen’s mum Yvonne died in a Monifieth care home at the start of that month. Covid rules meant her family hadn’t been able to visit and only 10 mourners were permitted at her funeral.
My colleague Lindsay Bruce wrote about being diagnosed with, operated on and treated for cancer in lockdown. She did all of it alone because Covid rules prevented her from having someone with her.
Scorn extended to the Queen
And now we learn Downing Street held not one but two parties the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral on April 17 last year.
Staff drank and danced into the early hours, according to The Telegraph.
A special adviser acted as DJ in the basement. Someone was sent out with a suitcase to the Co-op to buy more booze.
🚨EXCLUSIVE
Number 10 held two boozy parties the night before the Queen mourned Prince Philip alone.
Staff drank and at points danced until the early hours of the night of April 16.
Hours later, the Queen went to a socially-distanced funeral for Philip. https://t.co/sWrFcOrplE
— Tony Diver (@Tony_Diver) January 13, 2022
Hours later the Queen sat alone in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle and grieved her husband of 73 years.
Social distancing rules meant 30 people attended the funeral of the man who had represented Britain on the world stage for all that time.
Boris Johnson was at Chequers but apparently the partygoers trashed his baby son’s swing. Maybe he has the same regard for personal possessions as he does the relatives of the 150,000-plus Britons who have now died from Covid.
Downing Street parties heap more pain on families
Most of us made smaller sacrifices than Alan Wightman and Liz Cullen. They all add up though.
I stopped visiting my lovely neighbour, who had only recently lost her husband and was missing him terribly, because of lockdown.
I thought I was protecting her.
But I wondered about that when I watched her funeral on Zoom a few months later.
Here’s another tiny, daft confession. I still feel guilty about the way my little dog died.
Handed over on the doorstep of the emergency vets at midnight. No contact, no pleasantries, no time for a last scratch on the head.
It sounds so feeble in the grand scheme of all the greater pain that people suffered. But for a while it broke my heart to imagine her thinking I’d abandoned her to her fate.
So I can’t even begin to grasp the million-times worse enormity of saying goodbye to a family member on Facetime.
Or knowing that they died without someone they loved to hold their hand.
I don’t know how you ever get over that.
And I don’t know how you’re supposed to contain your rage at a government that sent advisers out to stress the necessity of sticking to the rules, then rolled out the trestle tables and the Tesco plonk for a garden party a couple of hours later.
Government has shown contempt for us all
I don’t think The Courier has ever called for a sitting prime minister to resign in more than 200 years of publishing.
But the response to our editorial doing just that on Wednesday suggests we’re only saying what everyone else is thinking.
Instead we heard a variation on “Sorry we got caught” at PMQs, which is no apology at all.
It’s not enough. It doesn’t come close.
The Scottish Conservatives understand that.
And the contempt with which their calls for Boris Johnson to resign have been dismissed is entirely in keeping with the way his government has conducted itself.
You know it is bad when Kirsty Wark says ‘oooooooooft’. https://t.co/6cpUp9Ej3N
— kathryn samson (@STVKathryn) January 12, 2022
If that’s what they think of their colleagues, what does it say for the rest of us?
How many more insults from Boris Johnson and his government?
The Prime Minister’s non-apology on Wednesday was an insult to Alan Wightman, Liz Cullen and every decent person who did the right thing then and is trying to do the right thing now.
It’s why I’m ending this week even angrier than I was on Monday when ITV published the email that confirmed for the first time, and despite the PM’s earlier denials, that Downing Street broke the lockdown rules on May 20 2020.
And it’s why the only words I want to hear from him now are “I resign”.
With every fresh leak it becomes increasingly clear that during the greatest crisis to hit our country in all our lifetimes we have had the misfortune to be governed by the very worst people.
That is the Covid tragedy we all share.
And with every day they go unpunished it’s getting harder to imagine that this anger will ever subside.
