Kevin McKenna: The secret briefing for the UK's lockdown exit strategy

Thanks to this pair’s tireless efforts, The National has been handed a copy of the UK Government’s planned strategy for dealing with coronavirus and its roadmap to getting the country back on its feet when the pandemic has been tamed. This is top-secret material which has been held back from the regular Cobra meetings and circulated around the much more exclusive subgroup: Grab Everything in Sight and Head for the Hills or GRATIS for short. This is set up when the chips are down, the balloon goes up and the lights go out.

“My dear chaps and lady chaps, all of us here face a peril wholly unprecedented in its gravity. To a lesser extent, the rest of the country does too. Look, there’s no point in shilly-shallying and beating about the bush: this coronavirus is really quite nasty.

“It’s imperative now that we triage our response. This will ensure that resources are allocated strictly according to name, current Debrett’s ranking and Coutts credit rating.

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“Despite what you might read elsewhere, the UK has been well prepared for this challenge. The austerity measures which we have selectively introduced over the past 10 years have toughened up the vulnerable and increased their tolerance quotient. Early mortality rates have thrived in our sprawling housing estates and survivors have come to rely on food banks and Just Giving.

“It’s in these places, of course, where most Covid-19 casualties will reside. They are overcrowded and the streets and houses are narrow and close together. But having become accustomed to the vicissitudes of austerity, I feel they will be able to cope with much of what coronavirus will throw at them.

“I really think that Dom’s herd immunity thingy will be a blessing here. The immune systems of northerners and Scots have toughened up in the face of heart disease, alcohol abuse, drug violence and early death. They’re already living with these every day so I feel they won’t be unduly put out by coronavirus. I can be their good shepherd, leading (some of) them to the Promised Land with the crook of righteousness. Those of us who have been spared these ups and downs are less able to cope and thus must be protected a bit more.

“Look, I don’t think there’s much to be gained from putting off the horse-racing and the football just yet. The people who attend these sorts of events will be due to die early anyway of all the usual working-class diseases. I think it would be quite callous of us to deprive them of their sweaty pleasures when they know that a trip to the mortuary is just around the corner anyway. Dominic’s a bit of a northerner and he told me they would much rather die proudly on their feet in busy pubs or flying kestrels together than fade away miserably in their homes.

“I was speaking to President Trump about this today and he’s adamant he won’t be railroaded into doing anything that smacks of panic either. He said, ‘The way I see it, Boris is this: the more people get it; the more people get to survive it. It’s so beautiful. It’ll make them proud to be American and boost national morale. I’m already ordering millions of hats with the message: ‘I whupped Covid-19, Bring on Covid-20.’

“This is simply nature’s pruning fork and we don’t want to make a difficult situation worse by spending money on PPE that can only be used once in a lifetime. We need to be much more fiscally responsible than that. With all this in mind I’m proposing a rapid coronavirus exit strategy as follows:

“A year-long public holiday: Many people will be unemployed so I think it makes sense to turn their first year of worklessness into a public holiday so that they don’t feel so bad about it.

“The fecund royals: The royal family is to be given a set of achievable goals – six more royal babies by the end of 2021; three royal weddings and a couple of big, dressy-up funerals. By the way, has anyone seen Philip lately? Just saying …

“Hunger games: Bring Harry and Meghan back for a million a year and get them to have an Invictus Games-style event for the long-term unemployed in places like Burnley and Sunderland.

“The Great British Clap: We’re already coming under pressure to increase the pay of all those NHS front-line staff. This, though, will be open to abuse. All sorts of rum types are claiming to be ‘front-line’ workers when they’re really only keeping the wards clean and washing the beds down. So, in lieu of decent wage rises, we’ll institute a weekly clap for the NHS for the next two years, enforceable by local vigilante groups. Postcode Lottery prizes will be handed out to streets that achieve the loudest claps and they’ll win bunting for all their neighbours.

“Honours, honours, honours: We’ll also give the NHS workers an appropriate gong on the usual sliding scale: knighthoods for the top brass; CBEs for the consultants, OBEs for long-servers and MBEs for the lollipop ladies and everyone else. There’ll be a special order of merit for the deceased and we’ll send up Priti to hand out the medals. She’s got a light touch with grieving families.

“War: If the waters threaten to get a little choppy at home and there’s a bit of civil unrest, we’ll take back Hong Kong in retaliation for the Chinese starting the bloody thing anyway. We’ll send in a couple of gunboats and create a Don Pacifico incident; they’ll retaliate and we’ll get Trump to send in a couple of subs in exchange for taking his chlorinated chicken after Brexit. Wars heal us and bring us all together.

“Piers Morgan: MI5 and Sir Harry Pearce have been notified.”

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