Mediaboss Marketing

It's tempting to wonder if history is made by stupid people as much as by clever people. The reputation of former adviser to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, was enhanced by a television drama which presented him as a deep thinker and a deft communicator, two gifts that don't always go together.

ot that there weren't other voices ready to explain how bumping yourself out of the single market was effectively imposing sanctions on yourself, the sort of treatment we usually reserve for rogue states.

One of the qualities of a truly great leader must surely be the ability to hold fast against all derision when you are sure you are right. It is also the mark of a fanatic.

We only get to find out which term applies when the story is over and history has passed its judgment.

Fortunately, there are tests we can apply to political figures while they are still alive. Arlene Foster agitated for Brexit without foreseeing the danger of a weakening of the Union. It's hard to see how posterity will vindicate that.

Maybe foreign capital will now pour into Northern Ireland and we'll all be so rich in 10 years' time that we'll be called the Orange Tiger.

We got a nice insight into the workings of the mind of one of our conviction politicians on Any Questions on Radio 4 last week. Sammy Wilson came out as seriously sceptical of the efforts to curtail the Covid-19 virus.

He said the Government and advisers had succumbed to "Project Fear". This is a phrase that was coined to dismiss the warnings about how bad Brexit could be. Sammy applied it to the reaction to the virus. Now it's the handy phrase for mocking any doubts about any policy.

Sammy scoffed at the "deplorable way" in which old people have been left "cowering in their homes", because of measures to control a pandemic which has affected very few of us.

He didn't exactly say, "Give me liberty or give me death", but he did say that we are being kept in a state of perpetual fear to prepare us to accept curtailments on our liberty, as if he thinks the curtailment of liberty is the core objective.

His solution would have been to "protect the vulnerable and let others get on with their lives". He didn't say how that could be done without curtailing the liberties of older people. (It can't.)

Sammy is 67 years old. He is one of the vulnerable himself. I'm a bit worried about how red his cheeks are. He is a portly man.

The implications of what he says are that he himself should be removed from society, out of reach of a virus that could kill him, and that people who are less likely to die should be free to blithely infect themselves and each other.

So, on the one hand, he is saying that old people are cowering in their homes and, on the other, that that's where they would be anyway if he was in charge.

He is demanding freedom from curtailments and then endorsing curtailments.

Sammy rants a lot and yet one of his repeat themes is that we are all getting over-exercised about something or other. Like the chances of a united Ireland.

That question was a prompt for further self-contradiction. He said that the Government handling of the virus has demonstrated the merits of being part of the United Kingdom, a bigger and richer country.

I should have been on that programme. Somebody should have been there to point out that the Irish Republic's infection levels are proportionately about a quarter of those in Northern Ireland.

And how come these measures, which he dismissed minutes earlier as "deplorable", are now evidence of the merits of the Union?

Sammy builds up arguments on different issues and doesn't check whether they contradict each other. Then he did it again.

There was a question about whether electric cars will ever be affordable. Sammy said the Government's Green plan was "Stalinist".

This from the man who wanted the vulnerable to be sectioned off from the rest of society. He said he drives a diesel van and that people should have the option of driving whatever car they think they need.

So, one minute he is the social engineer who will lock up the vulnerable and the next he is a free market libertarian who would let anyone drive whatever they liked, regardless of the impact on the environment. He's a libertarian when it suits him.

If the threat is a virus, then the response should be targeted and thorough.

And if it is climate change, then everyone should do as they please.

We should have more of our local politicians on Any Questions in the hope that they will unpack their thinking, or lack of it, as candidly as Sammy did.

In the style of the programme, there is often a light question at the end. This was the week in which Barbara Windsor died. One of the clips played over and over again in the news reports showed her as the landlady in EastEnders, ordering someone out of her pub.

So, who would Sammy order out of his pub? The Chief Medical Officer. Sammy didn't remember his name. That's how much attention he has been paying to him.

The case against Professor Chris Whitty (write it on your cuff, Sammy) is that he ordered the pubs closed without having gathered sufficient evidence of the extent to which Covid-19 might be spread in them.

Some things have to be taken on faith and it seems to me that one of the easier ones to accept is that drunk people mingling in a bar and bumping against each other and shouting and blathering and squaring up to each other are more likely to spread infection than people sitting down to a meal, well spaced from each other.

You get the feeling that Sammy, when we were hit with a pandemic, would have spent a year gathering data on how it spread before taking measures against it.

I hope Sammy has a happy and restful retirement and that it starts soon. In fact, I hope the same for a lot of our politicians.

But one thing we have learnt in this strange year is that daft as some of our politicians are, they are not exceptional. There are others as daft everywhere.

Read the original here:
Malachi O'Doherty: Sammy Wilson is a libertarian... but only when it suits him - Belfast Telegraph