For the BBC, the virus truce has already ended

At first, the BBC tried to be responsible under the shadow of Covid-19. After its long-running Brexit disgrace, it briefly returned to the straight and narrow, giving useful information calmly, as it always should, particularly in a crisis. As a result, the Government was forced to let ministers appear once more on the Today programme. Anything else would have looked petty. The BBC sensed the licence fee might be saved if it behaved.

Now, however, the corporation is reverting to type. Its default position is a narrative in which the Government is failing to provide whatever it is that organised groups of public-sector individuals – especially the NHS – demand. That is fair enough, but leaves out so much: the needs of other workers, the vital interconnection between public and private sectors, the urgent need to investigate conflicting scientific models.

The BBC won’t touch wider questions, such as China’s responsibility for the catastrophe, although it attacks Donald Trump without scruple. Quickly it becomes coercively moralistic, just as it does about climate change.

Yesterday morning on the Today programme, Nick Robinson was back doing what he loves best: trying to beat up a government minister. He succeeded, of course, against the decent but inexperienced Helen Whately. It was so sterile. Why didn’t the BBC look into how best to get tests to people faster, instead of scalping Ms Whately?

A few minutes earlier, the news bulletin had announced that Boris Johnson, in a message to the nation, had said that “Margaret Thatcher was wrong that there is no such thing as society”. Yet all he actually said – just as David Cameron did a few years back – was: “There is such a thing as society”. Clearly Boris was making a deliberate reference to her famous sentence in order to present himself as a caring Prime Minister, a point that Chris Mason analysed fairly. But the news, as a matter of simple fact, was wrong, and wrong in the way the BBC usually is.

In her famous interview, by the way, Mrs Thatcher was making almost exactly the opposite point to what we are told to think. She was trying to show that “society” is not an abstract, but made up by the obligations of each to all. She spoke of “a living tapestry of men and women” – not a bad description of our interconnectedness, which matters so much just now.

There are certain virus phrases of which one can have too much. One is “People are dying…”, as in “People are dying, so how dare you visit your mother/drive to go on a country walk/sell an Easter egg”, and so on.

Yes, people are dying, but you will not do much to stop them dying by self-righteous policing (by citizens or by the authorities) of the most marginal infringements of the rules. People are living, too. The more they are trusted to behave sensibly without snooping and lecturing, the likelier they are to maintain psychological balance and public-spiritedness when panic is a much more prevalent risk than death.

Besides, people are not, so far, dying in unusual numbers. Roughly 50,000 people die in Britain each month. Roughly 1,500 have died with Covid-19 (not necessarily of it) this month. Since many of these deaths are of people who were already very ill for other reasons, the normal monthly statistical total has hardly altered. It is probable that the situation will get much worse, but the prevailing view is that the bad trend will not last very long.

I spoke to a respected local undertaker yesterday. He told me that there has as yet been no rise in the number of funerals, but there is a shortage of coffins. In other words, there is what, in other contexts, people call “panic-buying”. Without coffins, body bags may have to be permitted. Unless properly informed, the public will assume the coffin shortage is because “people are dying” in unprecedented quantities. So far, it is not.

It has been cheering, in the time of plague, to see pictures of the

Queen granting Boris Johnson an audience down the telephone, and of the Duchess of Cambridge launching an initiative to assist mental health during the crisis, also on the phone.

Both calls were made from home, of course, so one could see the pleasant backgrounds. The Queen had beside her or on the mantelpiece two statuettes of horses, two of corgis and one of a serviceman. The Duchess was seated at a desk furnished with an elegant uniform edition of hardback books (I couldn’t see the titles) and that nostalgic object, a blotter.

Both women spoke into telephones attached to wires, a rarity in the age of the mobile and the portable: no chance of either of them pacing up and down as they spoke. The Duchess’s instrument, admittedly, looked as if it might have been born in the 21st century. The Queen, however, was wielding one of those off-white numbers from the Seventies where the mouthpiece looks like a small vase for violets or forget-me-nots and the wire is always getting twisted up. The face of the phone was not visible in the picture, but I like to think it had a circular dial which you revolve, rather than buttons which you stab.

Both scenes felt stable and cosy – effects which, in people’s idea of a successful monarchy, are even more important than pomp and circumstance.