Let the bodies pile high

TetleysTLDR: The Summary

Britain is already trying to launder Boris Johnson’s reputation, but the truth is stark: he presided over 23,000 preventable Covid deaths, skipped vital meetings, chose PR over science, and treated a national emergency like a dress-up Churchill fantasy. His government’s actions weren’t mistakes but ideology: protect capital, sacrifice the vulnerable, and laugh while doing it. Partygate exposed their contempt, Barnard Castle their gaslighting, and Johnson’s suspiciously convenient ‘Easter resurrection’ his addiction to performative martyrdom. The Covid Inquiry confirmed what everyone already knew: crony contracts, care-home carnage, PPE chaos and lethal delay. Yet Johnson now pockets £115,000 a year as if he were a statesman rather than a failed leader whose negligence cost lives. In any serious country he’d face investigation, not applause. Britain deserves accountability, justice for the bereaved, and an end to a system that lets charlatans fail upwards while the public buries the consequences.

TetleysTLDR: The long bit

Britain has always had a talent for forgetting the crimes of its ruling class.  It’s a national reflex: squint hard enough and even the most catastrophic leadership begins to look like quirky eccentricity.  We did it with Thatcher.  We did it with Blair and now the memory-holing machine is revving up for Boris Johnson: the Prime Minister who presided over 23,000 preventable deaths, partied while the nation grieved, lied until the wallpaper peeled, and still pockets £115,000 a year of public money as if he were some elder statesman rather than a proven charlatan who should be answering questions under caution.  Let’s call this what it was: the most lethal political failure of the modern era and the people responsible didn’t just walk away, they walked away wealthy.

A disaster engineered by entitlement

Covid didn’t expose anything new about Johnson.  It simply took the traits he’d always had: arrogance, indolence, lies-as-default-setting and magnified them in a crisis where consequences were counted in coffins.  He skipped early COBRA meetings because he simply didn’t care.  He dithered when decisions were urgent.  He clung to herd-immunity fantasies because they played well to billionaire-owned newspapers.  He instinctively chose PR over science, optics over public health, swagger over precaution.  Britain got hit with a once-in-a-century pandemic.  Johnson behaved like he was playing Churchill in a school assembly.  

‘Let the bodies pile high’:  A shithead shown up by pestilence

For all the faux outrage about it, the line uttered by Johnson, ‘Let the bodies pile high’  is the most honest expression of his politics you’ll ever hear.  Because that’s exactly what he allowed.

Not metaphorically. Literally.  Bodies in care homes that were flooded with untested discharges.

Bodies in hospitals stripped of PPE because friends of ministers got fast-track contracts.

Bodies in working-class communities whose residents didn’t have the luxury of working from converted garden offices.  Johnson’s Covid policy wasn’t a mistake. It was ideology in practice: capital first, people second, and if thousands die? That’s unfortunate, but not unfortunate enough to inconvenience the rich.

Partygate: The elite laughing in your face

The true obscenity of Partygate wasn’t just the rule-breaking. It was the contempt.  While the nation stood outside care homes waving through windows, Downing Street drank.

While families said goodbye via Zoom, advisers were wheeling in suitcases of wine.

While police fined teenagers for meeting in parks, the Prime Minister lifted a glass and smirked.  This wasn’t hypocrisy, it was hierarchy.  It was the rich taking the piss.

The message was simple: the rules are for you, not for us.

The Barnard Castle farce: A country gaslit in broad daylight

If Johnson’s Downing Street needed a monument to its surreal arrogance, Barnard Castle became it, and for those of us who actually live here, the whole episode felt like national theatre in the hands of third-rate actors.  Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s right-hand strategist, drove hundreds of miles during lockdown, broke the rules he helped write, and then stepped into the Downing Street garden to tell the country, with a straight face, that he made a thirty-mile round trip on winding country roads to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’.  

It was an insult delivered with such brazen confidence it bordered on performance art.  Johnson stood behind him, nodding like a dashboard bobblehead, effectively endorsing a story so ridiculous it became a punchline in record time. Meanwhile, the public, people fined for sitting alone on park benches, people denied access to dying family members were expected to swallow this lumpy arse gravy down whole.  Here in Barnard Castle, the incident lingers like a bizarre civic stain:  the day the British government tried to gaslight the entire country and used our town as their set piece.  It was the clearest early red flag of what the Johnson administration truly believed: not that rules mattered, but that the public would accept any insult if it came from someone posh enough.

The Easter miracle that wasn’t

And then came the great hospital melodrama. Downing Street briefed that Johnson was minutes away from ventilation, the press treated it as a national vigil, and broadcasters whispered gravely about the Prime Minister fighting for his life.  Then, astonishingly, three days later he bounded back out, bright-eyed and perky, bouncing around like Tigger with love eggs up his arse - a man who’d had a long weekend rather than a near-death encounter. No ventilator trauma. No ICU recovery curve. No lingering respiratory issues, just Boris harrumphing back in miraculous time for the cameras.  Doctors and nurses forced to sign the Official Secrets Act.  Real Covid survivors know the truth: nobody comes back from ventilation like that.

But the narrative served its purpose.  The PM reinvented as national martyr.

A PR resurrection for a man who specialised in rebirths whenever the heat rose too high.It wasn’t an Easter miracle.

It was a script.  A self-serving redemption arc performed while real families faced real funerals.

Twenty-three thousand preventable deaths

The Covid Inquiry didn’t uncover anything new: it merely confirmed what frontline staff, bereaved families and anyone with a grip on reality already knew: Tens of thousands died who did not have to. Because Johnson delayed lockdown.  Because testing collapsed.  Because the PPE stockpile was a joke.  Because care homes were turned into viral blast furnaces.  Because contracts went to cronies.  Because governance was replaced by improvisation, ego and lies.  

This wasn’t a tragedy: it was political violence carried out through negligence.

£115,000 a year: a reward for catastrophic failure

And so we arrive at the sickest joke of all: the state handing Boris Johnson £115,000 a year for life to ‘support his public duties’.  What duties?  The only duties Boris owned were the ones her derilicted.  So now he fhwa fhwas around the after-dinner circuit, The GB News pity appearances.  The ghost-written Telegraph witterings.  The endless grift and self-promotion. Britain is a country where nurses who watched patients and their colleagues die now rely on foodbanks, but Johnson, whose decisions helped those people die, gets rewarded like a retired king.

This isn’t accountability.  It’s class solidarity, among the class that never pays for anything.

And the pearly clutching that 'Boris was doing is best' and the risible 'Clap for Boris' now looks as hollow as it was.  

A serious country would treat this as a crime

In any functional nation, a leader who misled the public, broke his own laws, and presided over preventable mass death would face investigation. Possibly prosecution.  Here?

He gets a column, a cheque and a standing ovation from the same cunts in the press that helped sell his myth in the first place.When leaders fail upwards, democracy collapses downwards.

Britain Deserves Better Than This Serial Charlatan

Johnson is not loveable.  He is not eccentric.  He is not a rascal gone wrong: he is a man whose decisions killed thousands.  A man who mocked the rules the public followed.  A man who lied as a reflex.  A man who turned governance into theatre.  A man who walked away untouched while the country he governed buried its dead.  The fact we still pay him £115k a year is not an error, it is a confession.  This is what Britain rewards.

This is who Britain protects.

And until that changes, the bodies will keep piling high, metaphorically, economically, politically: because the system that produced Boris Johnson is still in place, still rotting, still ruling. The country deserves justice.  The bereaved deserve answers.  

And Boris Johnson?

He deserves nothing more than the accountability he has avoided his entire life.  If we had a serious democracy, he wouldn’t be on a pension, he’d be in a courtroom.

Tetley is a left of centre writer and retired musician based in the UK.  A former member of the Labour Party, he writes political analysis exposing Britain’s authoritarian drift, the criminalisation of protest, and the erosion of civil liberties.

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