The fall | TheArticle

My adult life has been punctuated by crisis and catastrophe, but it didn’t start that way. I left university in 1999, and stepped into the happy world of Francis Fukuyama’s imagination.

Ideology was over. History was at an end. What a happy time it seems in retrospect: Blair and New Labour, Clinton and the Third Way. And then, 9/11. I still remember where I was when I got

the call. “Turn on the TV, turn it on!” I spent the rest of the day gawping at the screen. It was sickening. A friend texted, “Fancy a drink later, if we’re not all dead by dinnertime?” The

wars that followed were just as sickening. A boy I grew up with — he lived two doors down from us — was killed in Afghanistan. I went to his funeral, feeling both sad and furious: sad for

his death, and furious at the people who’d visited all this pointless agony on his family, on his mother, on all of us. They played Nimrod as the coffin was taken out. I’ve never been able

to listen to it since. The 7/7 bombings of 2005 seemed part of the same war. I remember the frenzy of messages from friends and family, and how we all walked home from the City, stopping in

every other pub for a sharpener before carrying on. It took about an hour and half to walk back to Brixton. There was something unreal about it all, about the long lines of people walking

home. But then I’d grown up with bombs. We had one down our road when I was a kid. Sir Steuart Pringle, a former Royal Marine commander, got into his car one day on South Croxted Road,

turned the ignition and triggered a device that had been put there by the IRA. He survived, but with horrible injuries. My father and I had driven past that bomb about five minutes before it

had gone off. And so I had grown up in a world where people had planted bombs and for some inexplicable reason were trying to kill you. Perhaps that’s why the 7/7 experience didn’t disturb

me quite so much on the day itself. But it took a friend to awaken me to the real horror of it. A few weeks after the attacks, she’d had a visit from Special Branch. It turned out that on

the day of the bombing, she’d got off the bus at the same stop where the bomber had got on. When normal life resumed, I went back to working in the City, in a job that involved interviewing

lawyers about structured finance. It was routine, quite nerdy and often very dull. Many of the people I spoke to were involved in preparing prospectuses for the sale of obscure credit

products called CDOs. When all those CDOs finally melted down in 2007/8, I had the advantage of at least knowing what the initials stood for, even though my grasp of how iffy B-assets were

suddenly re-engineered to become snow-white, AAA gold was pretty sketchy. But even so, I could see the effect they had. Everyone could. On Monday September 15, 2008, I still remember my wife

coming into our room — she always gets up before me — and saying, “the radio says that bank’s collapsed.” That got me out of bed. Lehman Brothers. I could scarcely believe it. I was from a

generation, many of whom had fought to get into the City, where the banks and brokerage houses were the pinnacle of professional ambition. And now Lehman’s had gone under? It was like

learning that Mount Everest had collapsed. How the hell could that happen? The bankers had destroyed the global economy. In Allan Greenspan’s deathless euphemism, the Federal Reserve had

identified a “flaw” in its thinking on asset price bubbles. They’d allowed a huge bubble to inflate in the housing market and had failed to do anything about it. And then the US housing

market had collapsed, taking all those clever-clever, lawyer-built CDOs with it. The weight of that economic failure was so great that it took the global economy down with it. Unemployment

in Europe soared — as high as 50 per cent in Greece — and for a while it looked as if the euro itself might collapse. These appalling economic ructions certainly helped Britain’s

eurosceptics in their bid to pin Europe as a failed experiment. At home, austerity in the UK made many feel that something was wrong with the system. This was compounded by the fact that the

Government was able to bail out the banks, but not the people. This sense of extreme disillusionment was only enhanced by the appalling embarrassment of the MPs expenses scandal, which

broke in 2009. What a shameful time it was. Whatever you think of the Brexit vote, it would be hard to deny that it made the country an angrier, more divided place. But that division and the

poisoning of our national life is as nothing when compared to the nightmare we now face. Covid-19 is an order of magnitude more significant than any of the events described above. It will

kill on the scale of a war, it will ravage economies more than any financial crisis, and it will re-shape our countries, our health systems, our international relations — everything. “I’m

just sorry you have to go through all this,” said my mother when I spoke to her last week. “We never had anything like it.” You had the war, I said. “I’m not that old,” she reminded me, a

little sharply. “My father had the war. He came home from India and never wanted to go anywhere ever again. We grew up settled. Comfortable. Happy where we were.”  Those were the days when

it was possible to buy a flat in what is now Zone 2 London for £7,000, and get a job working for Mark Bolan in the West End. My mother did both of those things. Dad set up a film company and

won a Bafta. Their generation was one of careers, of pensions, of houses and security. But that generation also experienced a profound psychological shift. In 1972, when the Apollo 17

spacecraft was on its way to the moon, the astronauts turned the camera back round and took one of the most consequential images in human history. No one had ever photographed the earth from

space like that before. The resulting image was beautiful, but also terrifying. It showed the earth floating in an infinite void, alone. For the first time, humanity was able to look back

on itself and sense the precariousness of its situation. It was the image that showed human kind its true position in the greater scheme of things. The effect of Covid-19 will bear

comparison with the psychological impact of that image. Through this wave of sickness and death, humanity will be forced to re-evaluate itself, just as it did when it saw Nasa’s image of the

“blue marble”. This pandemic reveals to us the thinness of the membrane on which everything rests, our politics, our economics, our society. That membrane can be ruptured in an instant. And

so here we now are, despite all the strongmen, the nationalism, the witty speeches, the guns, the bombs, the financiers, the ideology — we have slipped through. And we are falling. Covid-19

teaches us that, despite everything, such a fall is possible. And once we understand that, nothing can ever be the same again.