LAUGH? We could have cried.
It’s been a funny old year, hasn’t it? A hellish 12 months of crisis and compromise that’s tested us all to our limits.
Sadly, not all of us have come out of 2020 with pass marks.
We’re talking of course about our elected politicians and their well-remunerated aides, who’ve somehow managed to find time for so many eyebrow-raising gaffes that not even a Kardashian-approved dose of botox injections could smooth our foreheads out again.
Dominic Cummings might not know much about eyebrows, but he’s certainly learned a thing or two about eyes after that lockdown-busting, driver’s-seat jaunt to Barnard Castle with the kids to test his vision.
For those who have managed to forget, big, bad Dom and his family pegged it from Downing Street to his parents’ pad in Durham because he thought his wife might have the virus. Never mind that it was 300 miles away or that travel of this kind was against the guidance laid down by the government he was advising.
A jolly to Barnard Castle followed to test his vision for the return leg. Of course. Like any of us would.
It’s one of the defining moments of our UK Government’s response to the pandemic and is still as inexplicable. Cummings kept the confidence of boss Boris Johnson and his job, after a carefully choreographed rose garden press conference that failed to diminish public outrage.
Johnson had initially been bullish about coronavirus, as if past members of the Bullingdon Club were simply immune to illness. Remember that trip to visit virus patients in hospital in March, the one in which he “shook hands with everybody” in a display that would have given even Icarus cause to pause?
He was confirmed to have the bug shortly afterwards in an utterly unpredictable development that no-one could possibly have anticipated.
Then there was Margaret Ferrier, who lost the SNP whip after she inexplicably went from Scotland to London and back again by train after taking the test and then getting a positive result.
The scandal took her from being a relatively unknown MP to the UK’s most famous. Well, infamous. And as if the shocking lapse of judgement wasn’t bad enough, Scots were then treated to England-based broadcasters pronouncing her last name like it was a posh brand of French mineral water. She represents Cambuslang, not Cannes.
Then chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood took in the waters of the Fife coast when she was snapped visiting her second home in the spring. Presumably she hadn’t seen the Scottish Government’s “stay home, save lives” campaign? Oh no, wait, she fronted the adverts.
Resignation followed, but only after it turned out she’d done it twice.
No tears were shed by the outraged public, just like when UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock “cried” over the vaccine live on Good Morning Britain, emoting hard in the way he’s seen real humans do. Viewers were sceptical about the display, suggesting the eye-rubbing minister might be in line for a Bafta nomination, but host Piers Morgan was touched so it must have been legit.
If Hancock did want to think about a career in the performing arts, he’d better think again – the government’s already told us that’s a waste of time. Remember the much-discussed “Fatima” ad from earlier this year, suggesting a black ballerina should retrain for a future “cyber”? The definition of adverse publicity at a time when the arts sector and its majority self-employed workforce was crying out for Treasury help.
It turned out that Fatima was in fact an American dancer, and the studio she was attached to was horrified by the use of the image, something it said it hadn’t cleared.
If you think that move was out of touch, what about the time Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, in the midst of international Black Lives Matter protest, claimed the movement’s symbolic gesture of taking the knee had been taken from Game of Thrones? But then, this is a man who, when Brexit Secretary, was surprised to find the UK relies on cross-Channel ferries for much of its trade.
So how to see out a year like this, with Brexit still opening up in front of us like a dropped box of antique crockery? Don’t worry, The Jouker has you covered. There’s a secret Santa on its way to all of you – it’s the “bang head here” sign seen hanging in the office of Marion Fellows MP during a parliamentary Zoom call.
We’ve asked Dominic Raab to handle the ordering and delivery. That’ll be fine, won’t it?
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