June 23: "Every nation gets the government it deserves"

The above saying comes from the French writer Joseph de Maistre who died in 1821.

Put very bluntly, the saying means that if you are stupid enough to vote for a bad leader, then you can't really complain when that leader does bad things. That's if your country allows you to vote, of course.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died from Covid-19 as a result of the bad leadership of Donald Trump (US), Boris Johnson (UK) and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).

Covid-19 has brought home the message that a nation is like a car: where the car goes and how it travels depends almost totally on .... the driver.