Rafael Behr
Boris Johnson’s dalliance with the science has ended, like most of his relationships, in acrimony. When he backed Dominic Cummings instead of the lockdown rules, Johnson abandoned any claim to rigour in his pandemic response. At the same time, he also squandered a precious moment of rapprochement between politics and facts.
A national emergency usually has a sobering effect on debate, but the threat from a microscopic virus achieved something more profound. It twisted the lens to focus on a level of empirical reality that had been invisible in the preceding years of hyper-partisan frenzy, when any notion of established truth seemed lost in a fog of culture war. A virus cannot be campaigned against or sidelined by intrigue. It resists all the techniques that brought Johnson to power and he seemed, for a while, genuinely chastened by it. Maybe the shock of a scientific challenge-the revenge of hard facts-will have some more durable corrective effect on wider politics, if not him.
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July 2020
 
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