GMB: Michael Rosen looks back on his battle with coronavirus
Michael Rosen is pondering his feelings towards health secretary turned Iâm A Celebrity insect-muncher Matt Hancock and our elected leaders over their handling of the covid pandemic that nearly cost him his life. âHow do I feel about the way Matt Hancock and the Government handled the Covid crisis?â he wonders aloud.
âPeople are entitled to feel bitter, but I try not to feel bitter. I donât feel angry, I just feel contemptuous. He was a fool for having got it wrong and a fool for having broken the Covid rules himself when he was having his cuddles with his girlfriend.â
While Rosen, now 76, spent six weeks on a hospital ventilator in an induced coma, in the spring of 2020 after contracting first Covid, then pneumonia, his family dutifully obeyed social distancing guidelines and the ban on hospital visits. As we all now know, the then-health secretary was engaged in a clandestine affair with his work colleague.
âI donât buy his whole, âWe fell madly in love, what else can you do?â thing,â continues Rosen, who was Childrenâs Laureate between 2007 and 2009, and has published more than 140 books. âWeâve all fallen madly in love. Sometimes, we just have to sit on opposite sides of the room. Hancock made a fool of himself then, and heâs still making a fool of himself.â
Rosen was treated in the same ward as broadcaster Kate Garrawayâs husband, Derek Draper, who still requires 24-hour care.
âShe was fighting back tears interviewing Matt Hancock on GMTV recently,â Rosen recalls. âAnd all he could do was talk in banalities, saying, âI know how you feelâ.â
He pauses, leaving unspoken the obvious next line, which is, âI donât think you doâ.
Rosen lives in leafy Muswell Hill, north London, with his third wife Emma and the eldest of their two children Emile, 18. He has just published his latest book, Getting Better, a deeply poignant memoir recounting his near-death experience and lessons learned.
Almost three years after his ordeal at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, north London, he is still learning to live with a range of post-Covid health issues.
Rosen has just published his latest book recounting his near-death experience and lessons learned
He now suffers blurred and double vision in his left eye and has 90 per cent hearing loss in his left ear. âIâm a bit lopsided,â he admits. He has intermittent balance problems, so his damning verdict on Hancock and his ministerial colleagues is perhaps no surprise.
âObviously Hancock was the health minister, but the mistakes must have been a Cabinet decision. There were some key moments they got wrong,â he continues.
âThey screwed up the PPE thing terribly by going with their mates and misspending billions, and they never thought through the test and trace thing.
âThe first thing to do, if youâve got a contagious infectious illness, is to think how you can isolate vulnerable people, and how you can trace people who are infected. They did exactly the opposite thing by taking people out of hospitals and banging them into care homes â which was an absolutely terrible thing to do.
âIn Boris Johnsonâs hands at the start of the pandemic was the greatest public health instrument the world has ever invented â the NHS. But his crucial, and lethal, first reaction, was to say, âWe donât have to bother with this. Iâm not segregating the marketâ.â
Rosen does not believe poor decision-making was entirely to blame. But there is clearly a seething anger, bubbling below the surface, as he talks.
âIâm not saying nobody would have died had different decisions been taken but it would have mitigated it. The UK had more than 200,000 deaths from Covid, and Iâm not saying that number would have been zero, but it could have been way fewer.â
Thanks to the heroics of the NHS, Rosen, who has had five children from his three marriages, is not among that horrifying number, but heâs aware how close he came to death, and the lasting effect the drama has had on his family.
Michael spent six weeks on a hospital ventilator in an induced coma, in the spring of 2020
âThe doctor told me I only had a 50-50 chance of making it and when I got that secondary infection â Klebsiella itâs called â they were very, very worried. It must have been horrendous for my family when I was put in a coma.
âEvery time they rang the hospital or any time the phone rang it might have been to say I was dead, so it was a nightmare for them.
âAnd then I came out of the coma and came home. I was in this weird hallucinating, delirious state and I couldnât stand up and they didnât know if I was going to be in a wheelchair forever. And who was going to wheel me around in the wheelchair?â
With his prominent eyes and gangly frame, Rosen might be said to resemble one of the more fantastical characters from one of his many childrenâs books â perhaps his most famous, his iconic and bestselling 1989 book, Weâre All Going On A Bear Hunt, was adapted for television in 2016, starring the voice talents of Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman â but he was unaware of the physical toll that Covid had taken on his body.
âI was just delighted to be home and I had no idea how terrible I looked until several people, six months, nine months, a year, even two years later, said to me: âMy God, you look so much better. And I said, âOh, did I look bad?â
âAnd they said, âYes. Your skin was all kind of papery. And you looked drawn. And you were grey under your eyes and you seemed sort of bewilderedâ.â
Rosen does not believe poor decision-making was entirely to blame
Three months before his 77th birthday, bewildered is the last adjective youâd use to describe Rosen, whose latest book, also explores with heartbreaking candour the sudden death in 1999 of his son Eddie, aged just 18, from meningococcal septicaemia.
âItâs been incredibly cathartic writing it all down,â says Rosen. âItâs been both a release and a relief.â It has also inadvertently turned Rosen into a willing but unqualified grief counsellor.
âPeople have stopped me on trains, and Iâve had emails from people sharing their experiences of grief and obviously Iâm not a guru and Iâm not trained, but people seem very glad to share their stories with somebody whoâs tried to put the words of their version of grief down in an order because, when a tumultuous thing like grief happens in your life, itâs like chaos in your head.â
Inevitably Eddieâs death and Rosenâs own brush with mortality has brought his future into sharper focus too.
âMy daughter told me that Iâm an optimistic nihilist. I donât believe thereâs an afterlife, or thereâs any kind of deity watching over me so that makes me a form of nihilist but Iâm not somebody that thinks thereâs no point to anything,â he smiles.
âI just think life is without a point; itâs pointless, but thatâs a good reason to be optimistic, and think, âWell, Iâd better make the most of it.â
âI have to accept the fact that I could pop off at any moment and that there may not be a lot of time left, so I have to work out what I feel about that but I donât feel an urgency to hurry up. Iâm just glad that Iâve got things to do. And if I donât finish them all, well⊠in fact I know that I wonât finish them all.
Rosen might be said to resemble one of the more fantastical characters from one of his many children
âI can imagine myself just fading out, going, âOooh, I could write that great big 500-page novel right now,â and then, Clunk. Dead. I can well imagine Iâd be in that state of mind.â
Time will tell if Rosenâs grand opus ever materialises, but one certainty is that his lifelong love affair with books â and with librariesâ pivotal role in increasing literacy for all walks of society â will prevail, whatever the current government policy.
âIt may not appear as a great disaster for all people, but in my world, cutting funding to libraries is one of the great disasters,â he says.
âItâs relatively easy for people who are very well off, well off, and quite well off to get all the reading matter they want, but for people who are poor, itâs actually difficult.
âYou either need a computer, which many people canât afford, and a library also provides that lovely free space, that access, that peace, where you can pull a book off the shelf, and not be asked, âSorry, have you bought a drink?â
âAnd when youâve got kids, you can take ten books away and you can give your children this fantasy pathway, this gateway into education.
âIt is an incredible platform and the idea that weâre closing them and preventing them, it seems to me like a form of class war and it fills me with fury and deep, deep anger.
âBut I still have hope for the future. I hope that weâll have a change of government in two years time, and if Labour are true to their historical ideals of access for all, they will do something to secure the future of libraries in this country.â