The first duty of a government is to protect its people.

As the death toll from Covid-19 in Great Britain climbs towards being the second highest in the world, it is clear that the present British government has failed catastrophically in their duty of care. They are killing us through their incompetence.

The reason is simple and straightforward. Never before has a British government been elected on a single issue platform. Whether you are pro- or anti-Brexit, this government was elected on a mandate to deliver Brexit. The Prime Minister therefore chose a cabinet of ministers whose primary aim was to achieve separation from the European Union.

Unfortunately any other abilities they could have possessed, such as competence, imagination or foresight were ignored. The NHS was seen as a campaign opportunity, a political football, not as a living entity requiring actual funding.

We are in the situation where we are being led by people who simply do not know what they are doing. They are out of their depth, promoted beyond their capabilities because they subscribed to a shared but irrelevant ideology.

The only trait our leaders share with the Chinese and Japanese is a fear of losing face. They are not brave enough to admit they need help, and will refuse to seek it. I am not hopeful for our future under this regime.

“Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic: what they are short of is imagination.” — Albert Camus, The Plague

P24:    ‘My money is on Purser to catch her.’
‘Mine is on the cat.’ He imagines the world below her: through the prism of her great eye, the limbs of agitated men unfurl like ribbons, yearning through the darkness. Perhaps she thinks they are praying to her. Perhaps she thinks she has climbed up to the stars. Perhaps the darkness falls away from her in flecks and sparks of light, the roofs and gables like shadows in water; and when she studies the net there is no net, only the spaces in between.

P34: ‘But my difficulty is, he wants me to do some very strange things. Things I never imagined a wife had to do.’

P46: … if God had wanted us us to wear coloured clothes He would have made coloured sheep.

P63: He thinks of Wyatt in his prison, as dusk slips through the runnels and estuaries of the Thames, where the last light slides like silk, floating, sinking; it is the light that moves, when the stream is still.

P101: ‘ — it must strike your Majesty that a rising, such as he advocates, cannot only be against somebody. It must also be for somebody.’

P102: — if you were thin air, suppose you were a spirit who could slide between blades of grass — then you would hear the aspirations of the dying, you would hear them cry to God for mercy.

P111: ‘He talks to a woman as if she were a town wall and he has to breach her.’

P176: The scuffling and haste, the sudden vanishing of papers, the shushing, the whisk of skirts and the slammed doors; the indrawn breath, the glance, the sigh, the sideways look, and the pit-pat of slippered feet; the rapid scribble with the ink still wet; a trail of sealing wax, of scent.

P220: There is always a current of disturbance, till a house settles about you: till your dog finds its way to the hearth and the sheets to the beds, the beef to the table.

P241: ‘You speak of new times and new engines. These engines may rust before you have wheeled them to the fight. Do not join battle with the noble families of England. You have lost before you ride out. Who are you? You are one man. Who follows you? Only carrion crows, bone-pickers. Do not stop moving, or they will eat you alive.’

P244: He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; till they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey’s dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.

P248: At times he sent Him special requests, which the less well-connected call prayers; and always, until the last months of his life, God fell over Himself to make sure Tom Wolsey had what he wanted.

P257:    ‘My lord cardinal — ’
The cardinal turns his face, mild: ‘What? Drink up, Dr Barnes. And take the chance. You only get one.’

P280: Ambassador Chapuys, you notice, has not exactly said he is dead; he has only let him fall, as it were naturally, into the past tense.

P411: What’s left of that boy? Only his glance around a room to note the exits, his dislike of having people moving behind him.

P422: The day not his day, when they told him his wife was dead, and the day not his day, when his daughters were sewn into their shrouds and carried to burial: two lost little girls, weighing nothing, owning nothing, leaving barely a memory behind.

P503: In the song school the notes are painted on the wall so the whole group can learn at once. When they are well learned, the notes are whitewashed over. But none of the songs vanish. They sink deep, receding through the plaster, abiding in the wall.

P548:    ‘You Irish,’ the eel boy would say, ‘you flying smut from Satan’s forge; I’ll pillock you, I’ll fillet you, I’ll set your hair on fire.’
And in reply he said naught. He never said ‘I’ll spit you, I’ll stab you, I’ll carve out your bloody beating heart.’
Till, of course, he did.

P568: Friendship swears it will stand and never alter, but when the weather changes men change their coat.

P597: ‘The Venetians, you know, they draw a line on their ships to see that they don’t overload them. I have no load line. Or none that the king can see.’

P607/609: [I spotted a typo! Twice! Vicegerent instead of Viceregent! But then I checked: Vicegerent is the official administrative deputy of a ruler or head of state: vice (Latin for “in place of”) and gerere (Latin for “to carry on, conduct”). So there. Who knew?]

P661: It’s the sudden heat that shocks you, the contaminating swill across the stone. You bend and pull out the knife. Something comes with it: a loop of his tripes. Your first thought is for the blade. You wipe it on your own jerkin, an efficient action, one-two. You don’t look down: but you feel him at your feet, a lumpen mess. At once you offer a prayer.

P679: When he was weak from fever the past broke in, and now he has no defence against his memories, they recapitulate themselves any time they like: when he sits in the council chamber, words fall about him in a drizzling haze, and he finds himself wrapped in the climate of his childhood.

P681: Now his houses have plums ripening from July to late October, fruits the size of a walnut or a baby’s heart, plums mottled and streaked, stippled and flecked, marbled and rayed, their skins lemon to mustard, russet to scarlet, azure to black, some smooth and some furred like little animals with lilac or white or ash; round amber fruits dotted with the grey of his livery, thin-skinned fruits like crimson eggs in a silver net, their flesh firm or melting, honeyed or vinous; his favourite kind the perdrigon, the palest having a yellow skin dotted white, sprinkled red where the sun touches it, its perfumed flesh ripe in late August; then the perdrigon violet and its black sister, favouring east-facing walls, yielding September fruits solid in the hand, their flesh yellow-green and rich, separating easily from the stone.

P715: He goes to the window. In the park the trees are marrying the shadows. You can’t see where the rain ends and the shadows begin.

P717: The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.

P794:    ‘We are playing chess in the dark.’
‘On a board made of jelly,’ he says.
‘With chessmen of butter.’

P817:    A clerk comes in. He greets him in Welsh. ‘Give you good morning, Gwyn. Nice sunny weather.’
‘None of that,’ Norfolk growls. ‘Get this fellow out and send another scribe.’

P827: [An actual typo: Byran for Bryan]

P849:    ‘You shouldn’t believe in ghosts,’ he says uncertainly.
‘I don’t,’ Martin says. ‘But who are they to care, if I believe in them or not?’

P850: The chroniclers tell us that in the reign of the third Henry, the king punished his servant Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, starving him out of sanctuary and throwing him into a deep dungeon. [Hubert de Burgh built the first recorded folly, Stultitiam Hubertum.]

P854: you should never play chess with a prelate, they always have a pawn in their sleeves.

P861: So I won’t see August, he thinks. The hares that flee the harvester, the cold morning dews after St Bartholomew’s Day. Or the leaf fall, the dark blue nights.

P870: It occurs to him that when he is dead, other people will be getting on with their day; it will be dinner time or nearly, there will be a bubbling of pottages, the clatter of ladles, the swift scoop of meats from spit to platter; a thousand dogs will stir from sleep and wag their tails; napkins will be unfurled and twitched over the shoulder, fingers dipped in rosewater, bread broken.