Virus inspires realism over Brexit #94

The response to Covid-19 is shaping up nicely as another symptom of the criminal inability to listen to Observer columnists, even if it might have lost some of its early appeal. N Cohen runs the old trope through yet another cycle:

Invocations of the wartime spirit, so characteristic of Brexiters who have never fought a war [unlike N Cohen] , led to the dallying with the possibility of “herd immunity” [not epidemiological modelling then]  Britain could take the Blitz, so it could take the virus. Meanwhile, the love of simplistic slogans and over-promising so characteristic of the Brexit movement has been displayed to the point of tedium.... a Brexit movement “impervious to reason and incapable of engaging with complexity” has reached its terminus. ..we have a dilettante PM, a cabinet of nobodies and a civil service policed by Vote Leave propagandists, who can fool the country in a referendum but have no idea how to manage it in a crisis....What’s over is the glib, deceitful spirit of 2016 with its false promise that bills need never be paid.

Johnson destroyed the careers of Alistair Burt, David Gauke, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond, Ed Vaizey and many another Conservatives with ministerial experience because they wouldn’t inflict a no-deal Brexit on Britain. He sent others to the backbenches...I am not asking you to like the Conservative politicians Johnson pushed aside, only to accept that the emergency demands the services of ministers who know how government works.

 Are we seriously being urged to cheer for Spreadsheet Phil and Dominic ('Endless') Griev(ance)? Even if they don't know or care how their own Parliamentary democracy works?

In his righteous outrage, and possibly showing his desire to express more sympathy than thou, Cohen even stoops to shroud-waving, just one more time, before the peak is passed:

There are many reasons why yesterday’s retailers of counterfeit optimism have become today’s frightened pessimists. To be precise, 27,510 reasons – and rising.