1. The pandemic will end but there will be no reversion to political ‘normalcy’. The after effects of the pandemic, combined with Brexit, will shape U.K. politics in the 2020s and 2030s.

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2. Everyone wants the world to go back to normal. This is a profound and powerful desire. I think you see it in headlines about summer holidays and pubs reopening. I also think you see it in the stability of the government’s poling.

3. Just, please, make everything better. Just make it all go away. Can’t we just go back to how we were? Before all of this. Go back to the happier maskless past. These are entirely understandable sentiments.

4. I think there’s also a tendency to understate the impact of the pandemic. Not in terms of the terrible loss of life or the rigours of the confinement but how it has affected everyone.

5. My view, from the top of my column, is that the pandemic is a very rare instance (unknown to most people alive in the U.K.) of a profound collective trauma. To a greater or lesser extent, everyone has suffered (I think) some degree of trauma.

6. Here are three ideas for how I think the pandemic might have affected people. Firstly, mortality. Many people know someone who has died. More people know someone who has been hospitalised. Everyone knows someone who has been very unwell.

7. I think the pandemic has been a lesson in mortality. Of course, not to the same degree for all, but a lesson that everyone has been forced to attend. Mortality, I suggest, cannot be so easily consigned as a problem for very old people or an incidence of apparent randomness.

8. Secondly, perception of time. My contention is that the pandemic has altered our relationship with the past, future and present. The further we travel from normality the more distant the past becomes. The maskless past.

9. If course I can remember spending an evening (ok, several) in the pub with all my friends. I can remember not worrying about a sniffle or a scratchy throat. But those memories are fading. At what point does that old past seem lost or at least profoundly changed forever?

10. And what about future? For large parts of the last twelve months the future has to me at least seemed almost non existent. How can we think about what happens in twelve months if we don’t know what’s going to happen next week (NB mass vaccination will change This).

11. Which leaves us shipwrecked in the present, the dismal here and now where mortality is a cough away and every detail is heightened by fear and anxiety.

12. Thirdly, linearity. The pandemic is a lesson in non linearity, by which I mean the world being of such complexity that events appear to be more random than predictable. Not only do we not know what is going to happen next but we are continually surprised by what does happen.

13. The excellent news is that this dreadful pandemic is on the way out. There will be bumps in the road. And yes, the end will take longer than everyone wants. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Thank god.

14. But we won’t forget. How can we? My contention is that the experience has been so traumatic that it will impact behavior and thinking, of which politics is a large manifestation, for years to come. How can it not?

15. The financial crisis is analogous. An entirely different crisis but reasonably seen as a significant contributor to political volatility, of which Brexit is an obvious example. Also note that the 2nd and 3rd order impacts were difficult if not impossible to predict.

16. The pandemic has come at a very difficult political time for the U.K. Politics is always contentious but the division in the country caused by Brexit has caused a whole set of different fractures which remain unhealed and painful.

17. What does all this mean for the UK? Political turbulence is here to stay. If anything, I suspect we’ll see more rather than less ‘events’. Of course, this isn’t just true for the UK. But the situation in the UK is exacerbated by Brexit.

18. My instinct is that this is bad news for incumbents. And not just (perhaps) for Mr. Johnson. In this context, I’d define incumbency more broadly as the current cohort of leading politicians in the major parties (Nicola Sturgeon may be an interesting rule proving exception).

19. My instinct is that this is good news for radicals. I wonder if we’ll see a bifurcation between the newly risk averse and the newly risk seeking (carpe diem!). I also wonder if we’ll see a more marked divide between national protectionists and international cooperationists.

20. But whoever you are and however you think, change is coming. Of that ai am convinced. And I’m also convinced that for people who want to change things there will not be a better opportunity in our lifetime. /ends