BORIS JOHNSON: I was being swept out to sea in a blow-up kayak. Time for a life or death decision…
How a Scottish holiday with Carrie – as the first wave of Covid abated – nearly ended in disaster and, says Boris, provided a chilling portent of the challenges that lay ahead
I squinted at the shoreline and heaved harder on the plastic paddle. It was getting on for 5pm. The wind was freshening, the swell starting to rise.
I was on the Kyle of Lochalsh, on the north-west coast of Scotland, in mid-August 2020, and there was no doubt – the land was getting more distant and things were going more wrong by the minute.
Carrie and I had taken a break from the No 10 flat (now also occupied by a captivating baby Wilfred) for a holiday in Scotland of which I had blissful childhood memories – of swimming and kayaking and gathering mussels.
I scoured the web and found what looked like a total dream: a tiny, lonely cottage on a grassy clifftop looking over the sea to Skye. I goggled at it on my laptop. Even the name seemed lovely – Applecross. Ah, I said to myself in the hard weeks leading up to our holiday: Applecross. We’ll get some peace there, put our feet up, look out at the sea. I could do some drawing.
Boris with Carrie, baby Wilfred and Dilyn the dog in Scotland in 2020 with the stunning seascape behind them
It’ll be great, I told Carrie; and then, almost as soon as we arrived in Applecross, a huge row blew up back in London about the system for grading kids at GCSE and A-level when they hadn’t been able to take exams in person.
Rather than trusting the assessment of the teachers – who we thought would be too generous to the pupils – we had used a rigid mathematical algorithm to distribute the marks, based on the school’s previous performance.
Many kids had clearly been unfairly treated, and for parents, exhausted by lockdown, it was all too much. They were all over the media, shaking with rage, demanding the head of Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary (who was, on this occasion, more or less innocent). People were starting to ask where I was, and why I was not returning to London.
There was no mobile signal in the cottage, so I would crouch by the landline under the stairs, trying to sort it out. As the exam crisis deepened, the media hunted us down and took photos of Applecross, and eventually we were forced to flee back to London. It was frustrating to have our principal annual holiday truncated to three and a half days – but there was at least one reason why I was not devastated.
Boris takes a stroll carrying baby Wilfred as he enjoys the wonderful views… and tries to avoid the clouds of midges
There is a detail about Scotland in August that we never seem to talk about, a phenomenon that nature seems to wipe from our memories – and that is the midges. What I could not see on those promotional computer images of Applecross is that somehow its marshy turf breeds huge grey clouds of insects.
They bang on the windows at dusk, some seemingly the size of daddy longlegs, and when you go outside you discover that there is no inch of flesh they cannot bite.
One night we tried moving to a tent we erected on the clifftop and lighting a fire. It was no better: they still descended in lungfuls, and the media later took great delight in pointing out that tent and fire were on the land of a farmer who, not unreasonably, objected to our presence.
So that is why I now came to be on the open water in an inflatable kayak from Argos: I was trying to get away from the goddamn midges – only to find a more serious problem. No matter how hard I gouged that paddle in the brine, I was going in the wrong direction.
I was being tugged by wind and wave into the fast-flowing channel between the mainland and the Isle of Skye, and thence to the Atlantic, where the rolling black gulfs of ocean were waiting to wash me down.
It looked as though our short summer holiday was about to climax in disaster, and though my sinews were now popping with effort there seemed to be nothing I could do. This blue plastic Argos inflatable kayak was in theory a two-seater; but after briefly subjecting herself to my nautical expertise, Carrie had decided to sit this one out on shore.
The result was that I was weighing down the stern, while the bow of this fatal barque had reared up and was taking the wind like a sail – and soon I was scooting in the wrong direction, away from safety, away from the shore, away from the detectives that I had last seen a few minutes ago, stick-like figures waving despondently at my departing form.
My breath came in rasps as I asked myself what would happen. Would I be able to wrestle the kayak back on course – or would nature prove too strong? The events of the next 20 or 30 minutes were to be an excellent lesson in human folly, and a warning – if only I had spotted it – about the struggle I was to wage that autumn with the ineluctable waves of disease.
As with the plastic kayak, there were moments when we believed that we were in command, that we had a way of beating the elements and steering things in the right direction. As with the kayak, we were almost right; but in the end we were wrong.
When we lifted the lockdown in July, we always knew that Covid would return in the autumn, as the weather turned cooler and people started to meet again indoors. So it did. On Saturday September 5, 2020, we had 2,576 new cases, the highest daily total since April.
But, though Covid was gaining ground in some places, it was very much in abeyance in others, and naturally people started to object to a one-size-fits-all solution. Why should they close pubs in Devon and Cornwall, they said, in the hope of stopping the spread of Covid in the terraced streets of Old Trafford?
On the face of it they had a point – and so was born a fatal but ostensibly reasonable notion: that the country could be divided up into zones of infection, or tiers, according to the state of the pandemic in each zone. In some areas you could socialise but not in others. There were yards of rules and restrictions.
A kayak like the one Boris got into difficulties in during the disrupted holiday to Scotland
I can hardly believe the gall, the audacity of the Government in trying to micromanage humanity. People could meet in the grounds of a National Trust castle (up to six) but not in a fairground or funfair. They could have childcare indoors in Tier 1, but not in Tier 2. They could drink in a pub in Tier 2, but not in Tier 3, where alcohol was only allowed with a main meal.
I think of those long discussions around the green baize of the Cabinet table, well into the night, as brilliant young officials came up with ever more elaborate schemes for modulating human behaviour – and I want to scream. It’s bonkers, really.
It’s like those weird bans in Leviticus on the types of four-legged animal you can eat, or the ban on trimming your sideburns.
Actually, it was more bonkers than Leviticus, the third book in the Old Testament – because unlike Yahweh or Moses, we kept changing the rules; indeed, the whole point of the tiering system was that we would keep changing the rules.
The Covid-19 Taskforce would sit in their room in the Cabinet Office night after night, somehow believing that they could magically orchestrate the nation – Slough into Tier 2, Windsor into Tier 1 – without any regard for the reality of people’s lives, let alone for the virus.
How could I, Boris Johnson, have conceivably authorised these super-complicated codes of behaviour? How could we ever have thought the tiering system was realistic?
The answer is partly that we hoped it would work. We just hoped we could play whack-a-mole, symphonically opening and closing the zones of the UK, like cuckoo clocks or sea anemones, until we had got through the second wave without the horror of a full national lockdown, closing the schools and sending the economy again into freefall.
But why on earth were the public so willing to have their lives circumscribed in such rabbinical detail? The answer is that they were frightened; they wanted something to believe in, something officially sanctioned that they could do to stop the spread of the disease; rules they could collectively obey.
Like the children of Israel in the desert, we turned to highly regimented systems of behaviour, as part of our response to the horror and mystery of invisibly transmitted infection.
And we in officialdom were, of course, appalled by our own scientific impotence, and we also wanted to believe in the rules. They were the best we could provide because as yet we had no cure.
As October wore on, I could tell that we were heading for another full national lockdown: the only question was when. The disease was now rising across the whole country, and once again I was faced with two appalling choices.
I could baseball-bat the UK economy in the chops just as it was getting back on its feet, with untold damage to life chances; or else I could trust to the tiers (and there are some who still believe they could have worked, with a bit more time), and risk the lives of many, many thousands of people. It was utterly agonising – and lonely.
Many of my natural political allies were by now actively hostile to locking down; the Cabinet was becoming more and more divided and agnostic.
But it was clear to me then – and it still is – that my fundamental duty was to protect the lives of British citizens.
So on November 5 we went back into lockdown, though we kept schools and universities open.
It was miserable, but by the end of the month it seemed to be working, and on December 2, we opened up again, in time, I hoped, for Christmas. Then disaster – a new variant, Delta, which was to go on to kill millions of people around the world.
By December 18, it was obvious that we were beaten, and that my dreams were dashed.
Here I was, this supposed libertarian and lover of freedom – the first prime minister in history to cancel Christmas.
Some people told me, sardonically, that they were actually perfectly happy about the decision – since it meant they didn’t have to see their in-laws or other relatives.
I didn’t feel that way at all. I felt deeply and unexpectedly emotional. I think I knew subconsciously that this was my mother’s last Christmas, and we had a plan to spend it with her in the No 10 flat.
She had suffered a nasty scare at the very outset of the pandemic – though not from Covid – and I had hardly seen her in the past year; and like every other family in the country, I felt the separation.
I can see now that it was probably always unrealistic to think we could get things open for Christmas. Almost everywhere else sustained a big second wave – and, as with the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the second wave was bigger and more deadly than the first.
I should have learned the lesson of the kayak, back in August – that nature is sometimes irresistible.
As the wind got stronger and pulled me further from shore, I had to choose between two bad options. I could either get swept out to sea and drown, or at least trigger a ludicrous coastguard helicopter rescue; or else I could ship the oar, abandon the kayak and swim for it, while the coast was still just about within swimming distance.
So that, I am afraid, is what I did. I had a lifejacket. The water wasn’t too cold.
It was only about 600 yards from shore, and when I was quite close one of the detectives – a rugged, kite-surfing man called Mick – heroically stripped off and struck out in my general direction, though I wish to stress that at no stage did I need his assistance.
As for the kayak, it was instantly and completely lost to view, and I suppose it drifted on like the Mary Celeste, and who knows where it went, beyond the stormy Hebrides, perhaps, to wash up enigmatically in some Norwegian fjord.
It actually belonged to Ollie, one of the No 10 front-of-house staff, and though it took some time to find him a replacement, he never complained.
It is a testament to the amazing discretion of the detectives that the story of my aquatic humiliation never got out. Perhaps I should have stuck it out. Perhaps I could have paddled on for five hours, in the dark, until I made landfall on Skye.
Perhaps – by the same token – we could have trusted to tiering and avoided a second lockdown.
Well, perhaps. But sometimes you have to respect the power of the natural world, and cut your losses.
Adapted from Unleashed by Boris Johnson (William Collins, £30), to be published on October 10. © Boris Johnson 2024. To order a copy for £25.50 (offer valid until October 12, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
Boris Johnson will be in conversation with Gyles Brandreth at The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on October 12.
