Why I am staying in Hawaii for the UK's newest lockdown adventure
SAGE, much more than Brexit, continues to violate the country I love.
Happy New Year. Yesterday Boris Johnson plunged the UK into lockdown again, prompted again by the left-wing activist scientists of SAGE, Michael Gove and a number of bedwetting MPs. Johnny Mercer, last seen embarrassing himself during the Roger Scruton affair of 2019, is the latest clown to have enlisted himself into the first circus of 2021. There will be more.
In Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 masterpiece, Sexy Beast, Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) is a former London gangster retired to Spain’s Agua Amarga. There he receives an unwelcome visit from psychopathic criminal Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), who arrives under false pretences and attempts to pressure him into one last heist organised by the terrifying crimelord Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). It doesn’t end well for Logan.
I regard the certain profiles occupying SAGE - namely Neil Ferguson, Susan Michie, John Edmunds and Andrew Hayward - as Kingsley’s Logan. Before I left London in December I was venturing nearby the Timothy McVeigh style of political analysis when it came to SAGE, so staying in Maui, is the most responsible, least domestic terrorist-ey option. Larry Ellison, upon whose island I overlook and whose hotel I have stayed in, made the same decision.
I humbly request that the over-confident SAGE dare not try and lure me back.