It was a bright warm day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith mounted the steps of the Ministry of Truth. Today would be busy; the media had been particularly active recently in spreading anti-Party propaganda. Now that deaths were galloping beyond the ‘good’ number of 20,000 – even without the care-home and community deaths which the Inner Party had had the foresight to exclude from official figures – the Party and by extension Big Bojo himself were in danger of appearing fallible to the thought-criminals and those with heretical tendencies.
When Winston reached his desk in the Records Department (motto: Rectify, Discredit, Divert) he found several slips of paper requiring attention. The first was in response to the new rumours that there had been no gowns, swabs or body-bags in the pandemic stockpile because the Party had ignored advice by NERVTAG to include them. Winston would need to rectify relevant government documents by erasing any record of such advice, so that the Inner Circle could deny that it had ever been given. Fortunately the Higher Authorities had decreed that no minutes be kept of the NERVTAG meetings themselves, and its membership and precise role were clothed in secrecy. Winston would also need to record the Party spokesman’s official response that they had taken the right steps at the right time to combat the virus, following the science, and had been working day and night delivering a strategy designed at all times to protect our NHS and save lives. Winston had lost count of the times he had officially recorded these crucial truths.
The next slip referred to the damage done by Comrade Hancock’s promise that 100,000 tests per day would be carried out by the end of the month. Winston had already dealt with this once, by changing the official record to show that Hancock had been referring to capacity rather than delivery. But his efforts had been sabotaged by Hancock’s own reiteration of his impossible pledge. Hancock would surely end up being vaporised, once he had served his purpose as the coronavirus fall guy. Meanwhile records would have to be created in readiness for the 30th April to show that this target was met. Winston spent some time inventing plausible names for non-existent testing stations.
Winston finally turned his attention to the continuing fallout over Big Bojo’s non-appearance at five COBRA meetings coupled with Comrade Cummings’s participation in SAGE. Winston was working on the Discredit and Divert strategy, supporting the message being pumped out by the Inner Party that the media had been infiltrated by a mysterious Brotherhood with an anti-patriotic agenda. This had already gained traction and was being widely shared among Big Bojo’s devotees. Following the success of the NHS Clap, the Ministry of Truth had revived the Two Minutes Hate in order to channel the same enthusiasm into a national weekly booing of the treacherous media. Winston’s job was to record the vast crowds participating in this show of solidarity. To do this he thought of a number, added a couple of zeros, and made it history.
Before he left his office Winston dropped all evidence of the pre-adjusted records down the memory hole. He would sleep well that night. He loved Big Bojo.
© C P Jenkinson 28/04/2020. With grateful acknowledgement to the extraordinary brilliance of George Orwell.
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