We stand, dear reader it seems, on the threshold of a great collective realisation. Not the sort of epiphany that arrives with trumpets and a change of government, but the quieter, more embarrassing kind in which large numbers of people look up from their phones and notice that the scenery has been painted on cardboard all along. The European Union, we are about to discover, has been industriously feeding the war in Ukraine. The climate crisis, upon closer inspection, turns out to be communism wearing a recycled anorak. And Covid was the most ambitious confidence trick in recorded history. After these successive illuminations, the anger will be terrible, and the responsible parties will be chastised without pity. Or so the forecast runs. One can only hope the chastisement arrives before the public’s attention is diverted by the next series of whatever is currently being streamed.
Consider first the European Union’s alleged role as quartermaster to the Ukrainian conflict. It is a curious charge, since the Union’s most conspicuous martial achievement to date has been the solemn issuing of strongly worded statements from Brussels. One pictures the generals in Moscow poring over these communiqués by candlelight, trembling at the prospect of another round of targeted sanctions on luxury handbags. Yet the accusation persists that the EU somehow prolonged the agony by a combination of moral posturing, arms shipments that arrived after the relevant tanks had already been destroyed, and an unshakeable belief that history could be negotiated into submission by committee. There is a certain sardonic justice in the idea. An organisation designed to prevent wars by making everyone fill out the same forms has instead discovered that forms make excellent kindling. The bureaucracy, having spent decades perfecting the art of delay, has now applied that talent to the matter of peace. The result, we are invited to believe, is a conflict that continues not despite the EU’s efforts but because of them. One almost admires the efficiency.
And now, as if the previous revelations were insufficiently rich in irony, we are treated to the spectacle of Andy Burnham, the newly elevated Prime Minister, embarking on what can only be described as a rather forlorn campaign to unpick Brexit by discovering, at this late hour, that the Russians did it. Having asked the question upon entering Downing Street—rather in the manner of a nervous new boarder inquiring whether the school bully had already stolen his tuck—he received the “clear answer” that yes, Moscow had interfered. One imagines the relief with which this intelligence was received. At last, an explanation for the referendum result that does not require accepting that large numbers of British voters simply preferred to leave.
Burnham does not quite say the vote was invalid; that would require a degree of conviction he has never quite managed. Instead he offers the weaker, more pathetic formulation: the result remains “legitimate,” of course, yet somehow tainted enough to justify a fresh round of closer ties with the very club the country chose to quit. It is the political equivalent of accepting a divorce settlement while still turning up at the former marital home with flowers and a tentative suggestion that the whole thing might have been the neighbour’s idea. The desperation is almost touching. Here is a man who, after years of watching the national argument from the relative safety of Manchester, now finds himself in the top job and immediately reaches for the oldest excuse in the book: foreigners meddled, the people were misled, and therefore the awkward democratic outcome may safely be revisited. One almost feels sorry for him. Almost.
Then there is the climate crisis, revealed at last as communism in green face-paint. This is an elegant diagnosis. For years the more devout advocates of net-zero have spoken with the unshakeable certainty once reserved for dialectical materialism. The science is settled, the models are beyond question, and anyone who notices that the models occasionally forecast ice ages or tropical paradises with equal confidence is simply a denier. The proposed remedies have a familiar ring: central planning of energy, the reallocation of resources according to ideological purity, and the quiet suggestion that individual freedom is a luxury the planet can no longer afford. Carbon credits circulate like the old industrial quotas, only with better branding. The faithful speak of “just transitions” in the same tone earlier generations reserved for the withering away of the state. One need not deny that the climate is changing to notice that the solutions on offer frequently resemble a five-year plan written by people who have never balanced a household budget. The sardonic observer is left wondering whether the real emergency is the temperature or the opportunity it provides for rearranging society along more obedient lines.
And Covid. Ah, Covid. The greatest scam in history, according to the emerging orthodoxy of the newly awakened. Here the irony is almost too rich to bear. An entire civilisation agreed, with remarkable speed, to treat a novel virus as an existential drama requiring the suspension of ordinary life. Governments discovered that populations would accept almost any restriction if sufficiently alarmed. Scientists discovered that certainty was more useful than data. Pharmaceutical companies discovered that emergency authorisation was a remarkably efficient business model. And the public, having been told that two weeks would flatten the curve, eventually discovered that the curve had developed a life of its own and rather liked the view from the top. Masks became talismans, vaccines became loyalty tests, and dissent became a form of social death. When the official narrative began to fray—when the origin stories multiplied, when the efficacy claims required constant adjustment, when the excess deaths stubbornly refused to follow the approved script—the response was not humility but amnesia. The whole episode is now treated as an awkward interlude best forgotten, rather like a dinner party at which everyone got spectacularly drunk and said things they now regret. To call it a scam is perhaps too neat; it was more like a collective hallucination in which the principal beneficiaries kept remarkably clear heads.
What follows, we are assured, will be terrible anger. The public, having been patient beyond the point of absurdity, will finally demand accounts. The responsible will be chastised without pity. One waits with interest to see the form this chastisement takes. Will the architects of endless European summits be made to sit through their own previous speeches? Will the climate commissars be required to heat their homes with the same intermittent energy sources they prescribe for the rest of us? Will the public-health officials who discovered authoritarian talents they never knew they possessed be subjected to the same level of scrutiny they once applied to the unvaccinated? History suggests that the truly responsible have a gift for being elsewhere when the bill arrives. Anger, however terrible, has a short half-life. It tends to dissipate into new distractions, new crises, new opportunities for the same people to offer the same solutions with only slightly altered vocabulary.
There is a melancholy comedy in all this. Societies that pride themselves on rationality appear capable of remarkable periods of collective self-deception, followed by equally remarkable periods of retrospective outrage. The pattern is almost comforting in its predictability. We believe the experts until the experts are proven wrong, then we believe a different set of experts who explain why the first set were compromised, until those too are found wanting. The cycle continues, and the one constant is that someone, somewhere, is writing a strongly worded statement about it. The coming awakening, if it arrives, will no doubt produce its own literature of recrimination, its own committees of inquiry, its own solemn promises that such things must never happen again. And then, with any luck, we shall all be distracted by the next emergency, which will of course be entirely different and require entirely new sacrifices.
In the meantime, the dry observer can only note that the human capacity for delayed recognition remains one of our more reliable traits. We notice the cardboard scenery only after the play has run for several seasons and the actors have begun to look tired. The anger that follows may indeed be terrible. Whether it proves effective is another question entirely. History, that most sardonic of chroniclers, has seen this performance before.