Oliver Dowden unplugged: entering and exiting largely unnoticed
Robbed. This should have been one of the greatest press conferences of all time. Just imagine. The lights go dim in Number 10 and the sound system belts out Eye of the Tiger. Moments later the strobes start flashing and Boris Johnson shadow boxes his way to the podium in a silk dressing gown.
As the Survivor front man sings “Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet / Just a man and his will to survive”, Boris strips off the dressing gown to reveal his perfectly honed physique in a mankini. He then performs three star jumps and squeezes out one and a half press ups before performing his trade mark ‘Splash Down’ on Chris Whitty. There’s no coming back from that for the chief medical officer. Boris has still got it; “Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past / You must fight just to keep them alive.”
Disappointingly, the hastily arranged Downing Street press conference didn’t quite pan out that way. What we got was something rather more pared down.
No slide shows to let us know how many more people had died of the coronavirus or to cement the UK’s ranking near the top of the world mortality league table. Not even the chief medical officer or the chief scientific adviser to provide the sponges in the corner. Then again, maybe they weren’t totally on board with the health risks of what was about to be announced.
What we got was a solo acoustic set from the culture secretary. Oliver Dowden unplugged. Which was something of a drawback as he has the air of a trainee sales assistant on the luxury goods floor of a department store. Posh, well-meaning, but not particularly bright. Somehow he managed to make what should have been a good news story, that all sorts of live events, sports, gyms, beauty parlours and tattooists, would be reopening sound rather underwhelming.
Dowden began by saying that outdoor theatres and music venues would be reopening with new social distancing guidelines, so people could be flocking back to Glyndebourne in their ones and twos. Which might have been rather more enticing had the Glyndebourne website not already posted the news that all its live events for the rest of the summer were sold out. The 50 tickets that had been available had long since gone.
It was less of a surprise to find that recreational cricket would be back in business from the coming weekend as Downing Street had spent hours watching videos of the Hemingford Hermits, officially one of the country’s worst teams, for which I had the honour of batting number nine and being fifth change bowler for the best part of 30 years.
It had always been a point of honour for the Hermits never to stand within two metres of anyone or to field the ball cleanly.
Having rattled through a list of activities – other than a visit to the National Gallery – that he would never have dreamed of doing himself, Oliver nervously took some questions and immediately came unstuck. How come the government was doing so much to help the entertainment industry when the redundancies in the retail sector were piling up by the day?
“Um … er,” Dowden answered indecisively. Well the chancellor had made this splendid gesture in yesterday’s summer statement. “Eat out to …” Oliver’s eyes glazed over in panic. He had already forgotten the second half of the slogan. “Um … Eat out to … restart the economy.” Here’s what he imagined happening. People would get so excited by the prospect of a £10 voucher that on their way home they would get a bit carried away and treat themselves to a leather sofa. Some might even go completely wild and splash out on a new house that had gone up in price to offset the cut in stamp duty.
It was all downhill from there. Inevitably, most journalists wanted more details on the science behind all this. After all, it seemed a bit odd that most schools couldn’t go back to normal until September yet the government was busy reopening gyms.
By now Oliver was a beaten man. All he could offer was that he was sure the prime minister would never have sanctioned anything that put the public at risk. Er, hello? Have you met Boris. The whole point of Boris is that he thinks nothing of putting anyone, including himself, at risk. No one in government has a clue if the new measures will lead to a second spike, they just want a good news story to get them and the country through the next few months of the summer.
“We are ramping up testing and tracing,” Dowden said helplessly, apparently unaware that the ‘world-beating system’ was still largely ineffective and was picking up only half of new infections at best. And no, there was no plan to move to mass asymptomatic testing because the current regime was already fully effective. Oliver fidgeted uneasily, moving his weight from one leg to the other as he said this. There is clearly something going on in his subconscious even if there is nothing much going on in his conscious.
In an ideal world, the press conference would have ended with Boris being carried aloft on the shoulders of Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance while a tattooist inked ‘Champ’ on his pasty, chubby arm. Instead, Dowden sloped off largely unnoticed. Much the same way as he had arrived.
