While listening to prime minister’s questions this week, I found myself thinking of George Michael’s song Freedom! ‘90. 

There are myriad current reasons why you might worry about my state of mind, but this is not one of them. Honest. 

You see, the prime minister was trying to make the leader of the opposition utter the words “Schools are safe”, and was showing mop-headed disappointment that he wouldn’t. This left me wondering: what power does Johnson think words have, and what power do they actually possess?

If you know anything about the man, you will know that words are important to him. They are his prime weapon, and he relishes wielding them. He once boasted that he could recite the first hundred lines of The Iliad in ancient Greek from memory, and throughout his life he has believed that his perceived power of language has given him an upper hand in any debate.

Coronavirus: Boris Johnson’s ‘mock-heroic turn of phrase’

Philip Seargeant, senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University, says of Johnson’s speeches that they are “often a mixture of unexpected metaphors or turns of phrase, hyperbole, and nostalgia…a mock-heroic turn of phrase with a sense of knowing bluster, which imbues a slight sense of comedy into things.”

As if we all needed reminding, Johnson held a press conference the day before yesterday when he marked the utterly devastating milestone of over 100,000 people having died with Covid in the UK. He was “deeply sorry”, and took “full responsibility”. Though his government had “truly done everything we could” to keep the number of deaths down, he would “deepen his resolve” - presumably to…do more than “everything”? 

During that speech, he had claimed that one would have to “exhaust the thesaurus of misery” to try to describe the horror of this number of deaths. This fits Seargeant’s analysis well: Johnson once again using linguistic bluster to throw up an air of impressive speech, which later settles into something rather less, as if his life were one prolonged filibuster. 

So, after he demanded that Sir Keir Starmer declare that “schools are safe”, we have to ask why hearing these words might have been important to him.

Words as agents of destruction

In the Old Testament, there is the idea that words can bring things into being: God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Or, to move to a different plane, Peter Pan demanding that everyone chants, “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do,” as means of reanimating Tinkerbell. 

So if he can get both sides of the House uttering “schools are safe”, perhaps he is hoping that this will - like a talismanic phrase - actually make it true?

Sadly, I think that there is something more cynical at work. Rather than believing that words perform acts of creation, Johnson knows full well that they can serve as agents of destruction. Having Sir Keir Starmer say the phrase then allows Johnson to quote him: “He said schools were safe!” And thus Starmer is bound to Johnson’s own errors of judgement. 

The truth of the matter was irrelevant; what he wanted was the soundbite, the tweetable snippet to fire out at will when all of this - and the truly terrible spectre of all those we have lost - comes back to haunt him at the next election.

So are schools safe? Clearly, Johnson himself does not believe that they are, because it was his instructions that closed them for all but key worker children and vulnerable pupils. And after he finally admitted the blindingly obvious that children, being of the same physiology as actual humans, are, surprise surprise, vectors of Covid transmission, he is keeping them closed until March at least.

Are schools safe? No, not yet, Boris.

Which leaves us with George Michael, and the freedom that we are all so desperate for. Because rather than petty point-scoring and yah-boo gotcha politics, “All we have to do now, is take these words, and make them true somehow.”

This is the deep work that we must all apply ourselves to together. And the longer Johnson uses his thesaurus to throw sand in the eyes of the nation, the longer it is going to take.

Kester Brewin has taught mathematics across a wide variety of schools for the past 20 years. He tweets as @kesterbrewin