We should have known the year was going to go badly wrong in February. Speaking at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Boris Johnson warned that the newly refitted UK, ready to descend the slipway and set sail for the high seas of post-Brexit free trade, might, if we weren’t careful, be scuppered by “new diseases such as coronavirus” triggering panic.
“At that moment,” Johnson said, “humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion.”
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