While most people are at pains to do the right thing in tough times, the same cannot be said for Boris Johnson’s government
If there is one image from the past year that is certain to make the history books, it is that indelible picture from April of the Queen, Covid-masked and isolated, in a wooden pew of St George’s chapel, Windsor, for the funeral of her husband, Prince Philip. As yesterday’s heartfelt Christmas message confirmed, the monarch, frail though resolute, still consumed by duty, has, as she enters the 70th year of her long reign, never felt so alone.
You might argue that, at the end of a torrid year, her nation also finds itself as isolated as at any time during those seven decades. Twelve months on from the Brexit agreement that saw the not-very United Kingdom bid adieu to its nearest neighbours, many more of the fears of Remainers than the hopes of Leavers have begun to be realised. Though the economic evidence has been blurred by the pandemic, it’s already clear enough that departure from the single market has created dramatic and predictable labour shortages and severely disrupted supply chains. Far from the promised ease of “sovereignty”, Britain has in the past year become a country ever more hemmed in and obsessed by its borders, locked into intractable negotiation over the Irish Sea, mired in bureaucracy at the Channel ports, fixated on hostile responses to desperate refugees in rubber dinghies and currently shut out from any free movement to the continent because, as if we didn’t know before, borders have two sides.
