Strictly scientifically – to use the term as she’d understand it – I have always held Gillian McKeith personally responsible for the 59-hour labour that preceded the birth of my first child. Gillian now seems to ply her trade as a Covidiot, but back in 2010, she was riding low in the 10th series of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. Rightly ridiculed by the phoneline-voting public, Gillian was chosen to face trials night after night, from the minute she was relieved of her position in a light aircraft and forced to skydive into camp on the Sunday.
On the Tuesday evening, Gillian returned to her campmates with a mere one star, having failed to bosh the bushtucker trial menu with the same alacrity as Happy Mondays lead nutritionist Shaun Ryder. Faced with their increasingly surly hunger, Gillian retired to the quarters of the show doctor, where she was promptly discovered to have a tick. Or, if you prefer – and as comedy cliche demands – a tick was discovered to have Gillian McKeith. Either way, I laughed so much that my water broke.
To cut a long story short, I would go on to watch the two succeeding nights’ episodes of I’m a Celebrity in the hospital during that labour, making it something of a focal point during a period that was increasingly agonising. For me, physically; for Gillian, televisually. Availability for the much-promised epidural finally opened up 48 hours in, half an hour before the 9pm kick-off of the Thursday episode, in which Gillian admitted stealing fruit from the men’s camp food store. Friday would see Gillian once again voted to face trial, this time in the form of a water-based challenge by the name of Aquatic Strife, while my day’s other events included a large blood transfusion and an even larger gin and tonic. Hang on – and the birth of my son.
Anyway, the point is: we had a lot of time on our hands in that hospital, allowing my husband and me to discuss at remorseless length whether things might not have started so early – scientifically speaking, you understand – had Gillian not been quite so babyish, wet, idiotic and desperate for fame that she couldn’t wait to go on I’m a Celeb, despite proudly nursing a self-confessed phobia of “everything that moves”, to say nothing of being a vegan whose dietary requirements were always going to prevent her from eating the required range of delicacies, from witchetty grubs to the various penises. The Great British Public voted by unprecedented margins for her to face various humiliations, clearly enjoying the tables being turned on a woman who’d made her name brutally haranguing unfortunate people about the contents of their excrement.
So yes, back in 2010, it was generally accepted that McKeith didn’t know shit. Quite literally – as genuine experts kept explaining, her insistence on what you could extrapolate from a mailed-in stool sample was about as convincing as most ancient forms of divination. The brilliant Ben Goldacre obtained, in the name of his dead cat, the same postal degree on which McKeith traded as a “doctor” – a title she eventually “opted” to stop using in adverts after “discussions” with the Advertising Standards Authority.
Fast-forward to the present day, and Gillian seems somehow to have re-emerged, but this time as a rallying voice against pretty much any of the scientific consensus on a global pandemic. Here she is on an anti-lockdown march, and here she is this very week sharing the video of the BBC Newsnight journalist Nick Watt being hounded through the streets by aggressive and menacing anti-lockdown protesters on Monday. Gillian’s brothers and sisters in arms in this include the likes of Right Said Fred, distracted actor Laurence Fox, rapidly unspooling quackademic Naomi Wolf, GB News baby blimp Dan Wootton and the photographer Laura Dodsworth, whose pandemic book A State of Fear is 1. a bestseller and 2. a load of old conspiracist cobblers.
Sure, some of them are more bad-faith than others, and you can see the appeal of the message that there is nothing to worry about but worry itself. Most of us have gone mad one way or another over the past 15 months, and I deeply sympathise with those who feel that the restrictions and the misery and the government failure and deceit have felt, and continue to feel, never-ending.
Yet the reality, as so often, is monstrous cock-up rather than conspiracy. The reason we are, as of last night, having to delay “Freedom Day” on 21 June is because of specific choices made by the government earlier this year, which were vocally flagged up at the time by many. The Delta variant, which originated in India, has proved to be a pretty worthy foe, massively aided and abetted by Johnson’s inexplicable – and yet entirely explicable – decision to keep India off the red list for weeks after the alarm bells had rung. The border policy was, according to his own former closest adviser, a “joke”. If you need a handy example of a false economy, do consider the fact that the government has preferred to pay hotels to stay shut and leave their staff on furlough, as opposed to getting them to administer a proper quarantine system during a short but crucial period earlier this year when it would have been sensible to let our great vaccine programme get a headstart on any foreign variants, instead of the other way round. We are where we are because of decisions like that – and being told “one last heave” by the PM, whose mistakes have necessitated the heave, really makes me heave.
But take a look at those names again – Gillian McKeith, Right Said Fred, the Wolf and the Fox, the Archbishop of Wootton – and ask yourself: are these honestly going to be the Guys? The ragtag band of misfits whose maverick clear-sightedness and courage takes them on a vast journey to save everyone else, all the way from the web browser to the GB News studio? Hand on heart: no. No, they aren’t. There is no outlandish movie plot, never mind any reasonable real-life scenario, in which this particular band of people could know more about science and virology than the scientists and the virologists. No matter how beaten you might think we are as a society, the only way we could be more completely spannered is if we started letting ourselves think that maybe the poo lady had a point. However completely over it all everyone now completely is … if that’s the passenger manifest of the Common Sense Ark, then we do still have to caution each other against boarding.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
