English exceptionalism: Brexit and excess Corona deaths

Good old F O'Toole never rmisses a chance  to rebuke we racist and anti-Celt Little Englanders for our temerity in 'leaving Europe'. Using his great grasp of underlying forces, available only to Irish literateurs,he draws lessons from coronavirus (lots of these of course):

Coronavirus has exposed the myth of British exceptionalism

O'Toole would never embrace Celtic exceptionalism, of course

On 20 March [22 days before this was written], Boris Johnson announced the closure of pubs, clubs and restaurants. Even as he did so, however, he made it clear that this decision was an assault on the national character.“We’re taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go the pub,” he said.

Even more offensive to O'Toole's Celtic and cosmo sensibilities was the copy in the Sun :

In this version, the freedom to go to the pub was conferred by genetics and history, not on the “people of the United Kingdom” or “the British people”, but on “people born in England”. It does not apply to Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish people and certainly not to the 9.4 million people living in the UK who were born abroad. It is a particular Anglo-Saxon privilege.

It wasn't cheerful hyperbole for Boris,nor an unfortunate but common mistake for the Sun to slip between references to Britain and to England (it is not known if O'Toole was quoting the English version). The GUardina headline writer seems to have done the same thing, of course, and not noticed that the article pans just the English. 

Something much deeper emerges:

the Sun’s version actually made more sense...what Johnson was really evoking was a very specific English sense of exceptionalism, a fantasy of personal freedom as a marker of ethnic and national identity....Johnson’s Churchill impersonation has always been a way of claiming that his own waywardness is not mere self-indulgence but the mark of a special (and idiosyncratically English) destiny. 

The myth of a unique and defining love of personal freedom as a badge of nationhood underpinned a profound reluctance to impose life-saving restrictions on movement and social gatherings....On the altar of this exceptionalism, lives have been sacrificed.

O'Toole the epidemiologist! In his witty way, he spots some contradictions and resolves them in a literary flourish:

the persistence of an equal and opposite cliche of Englishness: the queue....Orderliness is just as prominent as waywardness in the English self-image – which suggests that neither of these truisms [odd word - he didn't want to say 'cliche' again?] is ancient, inalienable or worth a damn when you are making policy in a time of plague [no hyperbole there, thank goodness].

Finally, the author's message:

The exceptionalist “freedom-loving instinct” has little to do with history [not apparent in the World Wars?] and much more to do with current politics, specifically the politics of Brexit. Johnson described as “magnificent” a 2014 book by the arch-Brexiter Daniel Hannan called How We Invented Freedom – “we” being the Anglo-Saxons. Hannan expressly reclaimed the idea of exceptionalism, the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons being the exception especially to European slavishness. Brexit, as he argued, was one imperative of this dichotomy. Tragically, a notion that the UK could ignore the World Health Organization [another infallible transnational body] and do its own thing [at first, when no-one knew what to do and no smart arse had hindsight?] with the virus was another.