Our mop-haired Goebbels

Most of us know the dictum that if you tell a lie often enough, no matter how big it is, it becomes the truth. Boris Johnson is well-known by now for distorting the facts when it suits him. From his time sending fictitious reports from Brussels, which eventually saw him fired by the newspaper which employed him, to claiming Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as one of our agents and thus sealing her fate as an Iranian hostage, his lies have been very damaging. Rather less damaging to our national interests, more to the public's trust in government, has been his prevarication over the social meetings at the heart of Whitehall when the rest of the country was mandated to avoid contact with others.

All of the foregoing have been exposed, though rather too late in most cases. That is not true of another one of his favourites which he spouted twice at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, that membership of the EU would prevent us from mounting our own independent vaccination programme. This is not true. There is nothing in the Lisbon Treaty, no directive, no rule nor any convention, which forbids a member state of the Union from acquiring vaccine and delivering it to her citizens as she sees fit. Leaving the European Medicines Agency conferred no advantages, only the disadvantages of not being able to influence medicines policy across the continent and the loss of the EMA's England HQ with its roster of high-quality jobs. To be generous to the prime minister, he may be confusing the EMA with a separate initiative. Member states were invited to join the cumbersome EU Vaccines Strategy, but there was no compulsion to do so. 

There were many occasions on which the Leader of the Opposition could have put the prime minister right. But Keir Starmer is playing the populist card, not willing to say anything which might hint at disapproval of Brexit. It is left to Labour back-benchers not yet forced into the Starmer mould to call for a Brexit impact assessment, as Fleur Anderson did this afternoon.

It could be argued that this particular lie is now irrelevant, as we have well and truly left the EU. But Johnson is still using it as part of his personal propaganda, implying that it was down to his leadership that we had a vaccine programme. A few seconds' thought must show this to be fallacious. The vaccines did not come from nowhere. The two early leaders in the field came out through preliminary research and the early (December 2019) recognition of the danger of SARS-CoV-2 on the part respectively of a high-tech company set up by two immigrants in Germany and a university research laboratory in England, a lab. which, it should be pointed out, often had to scratch around for public funds. If it had been down to Johnson alone, the history of PPE procurement leads one to think that we would still be waiting for product. It is the government contention that they did not realise they had an emergency on their hands until the second week in March 2020 when they hurriedly threw money at favoured companies without thoroughly checking their ability to come up with the goods.