With 100,000 Covid dead in the UK and counting, we simply must not allow the Tories to escape a reckoning with reality
Charlie Williams lost his father to Covid-19 early in the pandemic, when he succumbed to the virus in a care home during the first wave. According to Charlie, his father’s death was manslaughter perpetrated by a government that bears “criminal” responsibility for the level of deaths over the past year. Charlie’s main focus now, as a member of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, is to force those in power to take responsibility for what they have done.
Speaking to him is like flicking on a light switch and illuminating all that has been lost in our rolling, fractious national discussion about lockdown and the economy. Here it is: the grief, the rage, the shock that the nightmare is still continuing despite our belief during the first wave that things couldn’t possibly get worse. Alongside Williams’s determination is a sense of bewilderment at how little the government seems to be suffering in terms of public opinion. He has all the detail of the past few months at his fingertips; all the moments when the government minimised the threat, dithered or made disastrous decisions, such as the one to discharge patients straight back into care homes. When I ask him why, despite the British death toll passing the 100,000 mark, the Tories still have a plurality of the public on their side, he says: “That’s the million-dollar question. It’s absolutely mind-boggling.”
