I suppose I have been interested in the practice of government for most of my adult life and I have long since realised that taken as a whole, politicians are not very bright – and sometimes they are dangerously gullible. They surround themselves with armies of respectful bureauprats and special advisers and make their decisions almost entirely on the advice of these desk jockeys.

If it is good advice and the politicians act on it, they emerge with glory. If the advice is pathetic, even disastrous and they take it, they emerge utterly discredited. One day this Coronabug crisis will be nothing but a fairly nasty memory and life will have moved on. Does anyone really remember swine flu, bird flu, MERS, SARS, BSE? We were told each marked the end of civilisation but we are still here and plodding on with our interrupted lives.

Does anyone remember the dire predictions of the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Confederation of British Industry that Brexit would virtually destroy the British economy?

Yet we voted against all their advice and were proved completely right.

Yet now we have another crisis in the Coronabug and the utterly useless advice that Bunter Johnson chose to follow has achieved what Adolf Hitler could not – it has trashed the fifth biggest economy in the world.

I am horribly afraid that the government and the media are still seeking to avoid telling us the level of the fiscal damage being done because they are scared of how the public will react. It is just too frightening.

Let’s face it, people and nations are resilient. We could have taken the extra casualties, buried the prematurely dead, shared our grief and got on with life. But from this advice and Bunter J’s decisions, the nation will be crippled for a generation.

Another thing about politicians, shared by bureaucrats, quangocrats and academics too is that when they screw, up their first priority is not to put it right. Oh no – the immediate aim is to cover it up or blame someone else.

We are told by political apologists that our leaders had no choice but to ‘follow the science.’

What arrant nonsense! The truth is that the boffins have their own agenda. They live off research grants, constantly renewed and hopefully increased. They need these regular dollops of public money to sit in their ivory towers shielded from most of the realities the rest of us have to face, and shuffle their graphs, slide rules and figures to produce their  ‘models’ in order to convince the rest of us that they can foretell the future.

I have more faith in fairground Gypsy ladies and their crystal balls.

Ninety percent of the scientific prophecies turn out to be wrong and the accurate ones are often a fluke. But they need those research grants and the moneybags will not pay for cosy reassurance. They need us to be scared. Predictions of disaster are lucrative.

Even more bizarrely perhaps, the boffins do not always say the same thing. Sometimes their models vary from one to another because they are human – even though they might feel they are superior beings.

A couple of months ago – it seems longer, Bunter J was offered a menu of possibilities, including a far more moderate and realistic forecast of what would probably happen from Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.

He turned that one down I’m afraid. Instead on advice, he picked the scariest one of the lot. It was from Imperial College, London, in the person of Professor Neil Ferguson, now departed because he couldn’t keep his flies buttoned. It is frightening to think that if it wasn’t for his need of an adulterous bonk or two, this man would still be advising the government! He has always been a disaster damnit!

It was overlooked or ignored that on swine flu his ‘model’ was completely wrong. Up to forty million dead worldwide, it said. The actual figure was eighteen thousand five hundred! He was wrong too on SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, BSE and the others yet still Bunter followed his advice. Why?

On COVID 19 Ferguson predicted half a million possible deaths but more likely only a quarter of a million.

We are still below thirty five thousand. It may yet climb to fifty thousand, which sounds pretty awful, but it is half the annual British life loss for illness and accident per annum.

According to available statistics, about ninety five percent of those will be the very elderly and frail or those deeply weakened by a pre-existing condition. There is an acronym that is apparently being very quietly mentioned in the corridors of power at the moment – WHDA.

It stands for ‘would have died anyway.

’Compared with our national population of sixty seven million, these figures are tiny. Yet all sixty seven million will be affected and their lives impoverished by the flattening of our economy.

Does Mr Johnson want that as his legacy I wonder? Somehow, I doubt it but unless he and his stooges wake up to reality pretty damned quickly, that is how this government will be remembered.

I used to think that Bunter Johnson was, at least, amusing, but I see nothing amusing in the landscape of ruin he is busy creating. Once people begin to realise what he has done, and how needless it was, I doubt that he will ever be forgiven.