Mortality, blame avoidance and the state: constructing Boris Johnson’s exit strategy

Andrews, Leighton ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9166-0116 2021. Mortality, blame avoidance and the state: constructing Boris Johnson’s exit strategy. Price, Stuart and Harbisher, Ben, eds. Media, and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Framing Public Discourse, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 220-234. (10.4324/9781003147299-16)

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Abstract

This chapter offers a qualitative and interpretive analysis of United Kingdom (UK) Government communications and imaginaries since the emergence of the Covid-19 virus as a public issue in the UK in January 2020 as the state seeks an exit strategy and heads towards a likely public inquiry. The UK Government did not want to go into lockdown, delayed the lockdown at the cost of thousands of unnecessary deaths and, once in lockdown, found it hard to exit while retaining the trust and confidence of the people following the lockdown breach by the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Dominic Cummings. Johnson's heroic leadership model, and its associated imagery, has been actively constructed through management of the Government's narrative, assisted by Conservative-supporting newspapers. The published evidence so far suggests that even when there was a commitment to a lockdown, it was intended that it would last for a maximum of three months.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9780367706302
Last Modified:	26 Jul 2024 15:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/134603

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