TWO WORLD WARS, ONE WORLD CUP AND ONE CV-NINETEEN : Exciting news today from 10 Downing Street with the announcement that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is to undertake a victory tour of England.
Many quarters of an impressively uncritical press have been calling for an open top bus “Victory tour” for some time. This is standard for any impressive national victory by a great team.
Huge parliamentary support is also there with many MPs looking to take any spare seat up top on the bandwagon and shout “Vaccines! Vaccines! Forget the PPE scandals! Forget your dead NHS staff! Vaccines!”
Revelations yesterday that the PM has produced an entire propaganda film, paid for by the taxpayer, to gloss over the absolutely catastrophic (and avoidable) death toll in the U.K. only heightened anticipation that a victory tour was looming.
Dido Harding will of course have a pride of place, assuming someone can find her on the day.
We went out into the queues for tiny post office kiosks (that snake down most high streets during the plague in once crowded urban areas), thanks to the pre-virus austerity closure of the old boring big and spacious branches, to see what the public think.
“I can’t wait,” I Hope To Be The Last Person Left Alive In My Village told LCD Views. “We’re very patriotic around these parts. Well, we were. But I still am. I’m going to make sure the bunting is up early and on the day the bus comes by I won’t mention the dead at all. I expect to get my second vaccine dose sometime in 2039. It’s great.”
Have your British Exceptionalism polished and ready for the day the victory bus crawls by and be ready to shout “We haven’t done elimination as a strategy because death is too lucrative!”