It’s all very awkward for Cressida. Of course she’s delighted that the UK’s vaccine roll-out is going so well, but did the EU have to make such an utter mess of it?
At first it was easy to attribute the UK’s head start to sheer good luck: both sides had been chucking money at vaccine research and Britain simply happened to back the right horse. Then stories began to emerge of the delays imposed on the EU’s vaccine decisions by the need for all twenty-seven nations to endorse every tiny step, and Cressida was faced with the inconvenient truth that it was precisely the UK’s independence from such a cumbersome bureaucracy which had enabled it to react with such speed and agility. Damn. She’s tried arguing that the extraordinary circumstances of a pandemic are hardly a test of the long-term viability of Brexit, but everyone just says she’s a sore loser.
This makes Cressida even crosser: she didn’t think anyone had noticed what a sore loser she was. The truth is that Cressida hasn’t stopped sulking since June 2016, but when she’s with Brexity friends she’s always very restrained and if the subject comes up she contents herself with just pursing her lips and knowing she’s on the side of the angels, the side of peace and cosmopolitanism, the side of The Ode to Joy.
But Cressida’s angels are falling fast. The once urbane President Macron is behaving like a truculent two-year-old about the Oxford-AZ vaccine and making a silly noise about going to play with his new friend Vladimir because Vladimir’s vaccine is much nicer than Britain’s vaccine so there yar boo sucks. Cressida can never forgive Macron for achieving the impossible by making Boris Johnson seem almost grown-up. Meanwhile Ursula von der Leyen, who always cut such a reassuringly sensible figure with her clipped voice and immaculate hair, now reminds Cressida rather alarmingly of the icy Nurse Ratched from Cuckoo’s Nest. Cressida is appalled by the EU’s spiteful vendetta against AstraZenica and their assumption that they can just barge their way to the front of the queue like the playground bully. Damn. It is but scant consolation that the UK is no nearer the moral high ground, what with all the crowing and the gleeful tabloid headlines – ‘No EU can’t have our jabs!’ When her ninety-fourth Brexity friend says, ‘I bet now you wish you’d voted Leave,’ Cressida gives up trying to explain and decides to emigrate to New Zealand instead.
© C P Jenkinson 30/04/2021
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