With the Covid vaccine comes hope, relief, and weird patriotism from cabinet ministers
If you haven’t been paying attention to the pandemic – and, I’ll admit, I did start tuning out sometime around May – you would be forgiven for thinking it was all just a global ruse to launch Matt Hancock’s early morning TV career. Here he is, look, talking to Sky News about the doomed track-and-trace system, giggling in front of a faux-punk portrait of the Queen. Here he is, look, threatening Piers Morgan that he’ll take the vaccine on live television. And here he is – and yes, I’ve just watched it back again to make sure – here he is crying on Good Morning Britain, because someone called William Shakespeare took the vaccine, and that man was British. I grew up on a steady diet of Zig and Zag, so I’m fairly used to waking up to watch puppets being controlled by hands inserted into their darker regions, but I do think the 2020 reboot needs to work in the realism department.
Are we all right? Matt Hancock, who is pretending to cry on TV by holding a single finger to a dry eye and then laughing – I don’t want to “gatekeep crying” but that is simply not how it is done – clearly isn’t all right. With Tuesday morning’s rollout making household names of Coventry grandmother Margaret Keenan (the first person to take the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine outside of trials) and William Shakespeare (the first person named William Shakespeare to take the vaccine out of trials), it’s totally understandable that this news would bring with it a small, squirming feeling of hope. But then Hancock dabs his bone-dry eyes again and says something like, “There’s so much work that’s gone into this and it really, really … I’m just proud to be British”, and: ah. Are you? Really? Why?
