World leaders now face a fact that they cannot deny | thearticle

Ours is an era that, in future, will come to be defined by the language of rebuttal. Just think of all those future academic studies into the concept of “fake news”. Think also of its

British equivalent, “Project Fear”. But now, something has come along that is not _fake_. It cannot be denied, brushed off or labeled as a hoax. Covid-19 has put a stop to all that. We have

stepped out of a strange political period where consequences seemed to have been suspended. Trump and Brexit — so far, they have been all cause and no effect. Both phenomena have appeared

huge on the political horizon, blocking out everything else, sucking out all of the political oxygen. But really, neither has had much of an outcome. The Trump administration has denied

everything and not yet imploded, while at the same time Johnson’s Brexit administration has blustered and not yet agreed any EU deal. A politician can avoid all the awkward questions, can

shout them down as being “a hoax”. He can dodge the Today programme all he likes — but he cannot dodge a pandemic. Even the global leader in truth suppression, the Chinese government, has

found this out. The virus doesn’t care a damn about party sensibilities. The Chinese Communist Party went into a frenzy of denial as the virus began to spread. It only managed to contain the

disease by putting huge numbers of its citizens in a state of brutal enforced lockdown. The period of denial was a direct consequence of President Xi Jinping’s rigidity and his inability to

accept a politically difficult truth. This led to the government’s decision to allow Chinese citizens to travel home and abroad during the holiday season — a catastrophic decision. Trump’s

reaction has been similarly destructive. In the early stages of the outbreak, the President took to Twitter effectively to denounce the disease, after which he claimed that the US government

had pretty much eradicated it anyway. He then appeared on Fox News to tell viewers that no one knew more about the disease than he did. The chutzpah of this performance was rivaled only by

the Iranian Health Minister’s now-notorious press conference in which he announced that the disease had not taken hold in Iran, while his deputy stood behind him, visibly suffering from the

symptoms of a severe fever. He was isolated with Covid-19 the next day. The politicians have been made to look like fools. But even so, the most visceral reaction to the spread of Covid-19

has not then been political — the reaction has been economic and financial. Stock-markets have plunged. They were already falling due to worries about a global recession, brought on by the

sharp fall in China’s economic output caused by Covid-19. But this morning, European markets have tumbled again — at the time of writing, the FTSE is already down 8 per cent. BP and Shell

are both down around 20 per cent. A huge amount of people’s pension money is invested in these oil firms. It is expected that, when US markets open later this morning, there will be similar

falls on Wall Street. This new collapse has been accelerated by a new oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Both countries have opened their taps with the result that the oil price

has collapsed by around 30 per cent. The oil collapse is not a direct consequence of Covid-19, but it comes at a moment when markets were already in a state of panic over the disease. It

will reinforce a financial and economic downturn that was already under way. When markets drop by these enormous amounts, it’s not fake news. It’s very real, very scary news. Huge amounts of

Chinese workers are still locked down. Lombardy, which accounts for one fifth of Italy’s economy, is in a state of quarantine. Large international events are being called off across Europe

and the US. Britain and the US both have charismatic leaders with a highly flexible relationship with the truth. But now they both face a reckoning with the twin facts of death and economic

collapse. These two factors will form the basis of the new Chancellor’s Budget, which will be given on Wednesday. An era of denial, one that in retrospect may come to look like a happy,

rather foolish time, has come to a shuddering halt. We have entered a period of crisis. World leaders now face this fact — and it is one they cannot deny.