If those in power know what’s best for us, could they please lead by example?

Ihave never claimed to be the most consistent and logical person in the world but there are times when the seemingly endless process of our world turning upside down makes me long for a little straightforward order and discipline.

Let’s face it, we’re all having to deal with stuff we never even knew about less than a year ago. But it isn’t helped by the fact that those purporting to be leading us from darkness to light seem currently to be singularly failing to find the stash of emergency candles, let alone the dog-eared instruction book to provide the light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t attached to a runaway train.

Playwright Sean O’Casey once created a character who opined: “The whole world’s in a terrible state o’ chassis” and boy, did he have his prophesies in a row there.

Science at least appears to be dragging us in jig time towards a potential solution to the horrors of Covid-19 which is great news in anyone’s book. Instead of the historically loaded statement: “It’ll all be over by Christmas!” or whatever it was Boris Johnson blithely claimed back in the halcyon days of July, now: “Back to normal by Easter!” goes the glad cry. Normal? Answers on a postcard.

It also leaves politicos to cope with the intervening period between now and the aforementioned Christmas malarkey. Which seems to be coming down to how to convince the general population that they don’t actually need a festive season that lasts for months and costs a fortune that fewer of us can afford. But if they really want, they can go ahead and have it as long as it’s crammed into four days. And just so long as they accept they’re going to have a pigging awful start to 2021.

Frankly, in my admittedly somewhat tasteless opinion, anything that shrinks the bloated and overblown festive season of recent so-called “normality” might just be described as a blessing in disguise, except that this particular blessing tends to kill people in a somewhat indiscriminate and generally unacceptable fashion.

One thing is sure, however, whether it’s Nicola Sturgeon droning on about “staying at home being the default setting” or Matt Hancock fulminating re what on earth those who dare to drag themselves into work when they’re not well think they’re doing. Apart from trying to keep their jobs and their families in food and shelter, of course. Something not now guaranteed to be covered for much longer by those for whom they voted, it appears...

That thing, I put to you, is that the governing classes coming up with these regulations are going to expect the rest of

us to do what we’re told. Good luck with that, you might say. I couldn’t possibly comment. For, of course, there is the old saw that rules are made to be broken.

Now, it never does any harm for longheld practices and beliefs to be challenged, updated and refreshed as times, people and attitudes change. That is healthy if done well and for the right reasons.

It also seems to me, however, that we are living in an age where people in power, who allegedly don’t give a stuff about the integrity of tried and tested norms, traditions and modes of behaviour, have a strange tendency to expect others to behave properly. Or, at the very least, behave themselves in a way that they – the rule-breakers benders and makers – want them to. You only have to look at America under Donald Trump. (Not for very much longer, it is to be hoped, but I surely cannot be the only one who fears that The Donald

is going to be the gift that keeps on giving, even if nobody in their right mind actually wanted it much in the first place).

Here, of course, one man (and those who backed him) effectively beggared up the entire national approach to dealing with the spread of Covid-19 and simultaneously destroyed public confidence in any initiative or instruction since. Then we have the home secretary, who is allowed, in spite of a damning report of her shortcomings, to continue in her job which, by her lights, appears to be about shouting, swearing and generally intimidating her staff and colleagues in a fashion that would not be tolerated in any other workplace worth its properly-regulated salt.

And now, Lord love him, we have Uriah H – I mean Michael Gove, who, I imagine, is not one of the tetchy Tories planning to rebel against the freshly-imposed English tier system. He’s been getting hot under the

collar about the EU not being “flexible” enough to let Good Old Blighty do what it likes, while daring to point out that “rules are rules”. And thus being to blame when it all goes horribly wrong...

In the words of the old hymn (and if I’m quoting hymns, you know we’re all in big bother): “Change and decay in all around I see...” That’s from Abide with Me. But abide by the rules? Some hope.

The governing classes expect the rest of us to do what we’re told

BAUBLE SYSTEM: There is a perception that there is one rule for them (mostly the PM’s mates) and another, actually imposed, for us.