No.155 - Boris's 'Potemkin Nation' - Or Why Fewer and Fewer Trust your Government

Dear James,

Once upon a time there was a person called Grigory Potemkin, a minister and lover of the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great (1762-1796). Potemkin is alleged to have set up artificial "mobile villages" on the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress his Empress that ‘things were better than they were’. Potemkin's men, dressed as peasants, would populate the villages and, once the royal barge had passed by, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight. Today, a Potemkin village is any construction whose only purpose is to pretend to the viewer that a country in difficult circumstances is, in fact, doing much better. Myth or otherwise, the image has passed into international folklore.

Boris Johnson has done better than Potemkin. He has built a Potemkin Nation and the massive frauds being visited upon us have long pedigrees. Our own Dneiper River bank consists of ‘fraudulent constructions’ on both sides of the river of reality. On one bank we have the Brexit village. On the other, the Coronaviris village. Both have elements in common. Both are highly ‘mobile’ villages that change on a daily basis. The Brexit Village, threatened by hordes of Turks one day and European ghouls the next, displays queues of happy NHS staff spending an extra £350m per week in their hospitals against a backdrop of  ’bright lit uplands’ and glorious statues to ‘sovereignty regained’. On the other side of the river, the shore of the Coronavirus Village is lined with mountains of PPE, warehouses full of testing kits, Care Homes full of waving inhabitants and graphs that reach the sky or plumb the depths according to the needs of the day. And, of course, each village has its bright, sparkling advertising hoardings. In the Coronavirus village, Boris is shown enthusiastically shaking hands in Covid-19 wards while Hancock is promising 100,000 new test within days. Today, cherry trees laden with ‘positive’ data show how many lives Boris has saved, rather than how many of today’s awful death count he has lost. Yet the river of reality continues to flow. Covid-19 passed the 40,000 (60,000 excess deaths) mark on Friday marking us out as one of the top two or three worst performers in the world. And coming up fast behind, Brexit looms like a dark storm cloud on the horizon.

James, when the history of this decade of infamy comes to be written, your government’s trail of falsehoods will be laid bare. Last week the head of the UK Statistics Authority accused the government of continuing to mislead the public over the numbers of tests carried out for Covid-19. “The aim seems to be to show the largest possible number of tests, even at the expense of understanding,” said Sir David Norgrove in a letter to the benighted Matt Hancock. He criticized the government for mixing up tests carried out with testing kits sent out by post. In May, he had to ask the government to clarify whether the targets referred to “testing capacity, the tests that have been administered, the test results received or the number of people tested”. Is this why, on Friday, Matt Hancock appeared on stage without any medical or scientific ‘wingmen’? The poor man looked as if he had been socially and politically distanced by his own colleagues. It is hard to be Boris’s fall guy.

And so it goes on. Everyday, the government refuses to be honest with the population, dressing up figures in the best light, ignoring hard facts, in other words, confusing the nation with its Potemkin figures, its Potemkin initiatives, and its Potemkin strategies. No wonder your ministers look tired, dulled, deflated and depressed. It is hard work continuously building and rebuilding these bloody villages! 

Of course, we have our own modern day version of Potemkin, one named Dominic Cummings. Yes, he’s still there, pursuing the political love of his life, Boris Johnson. According to surveys conducted on behalf of the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute by YouGov, since Cummings’s ‘eyesight’ test in Castle Barnard, less than half of Britons now trust the Westminster government to provide correct information on the pandemic – down from more than two-thirds of the public in mid-April. Potemkin-Cummings has much to answer for James. As indeed do you as one of the tireless worker-drones striving endlessly to kid us all that your villages on either side of the river of reality are anything other than illusions! 

Kind regards, 

BH – Your Concerned Constituent