New rules reveal how the wacky world ahead of us will look
Until the discovery of a vaccine, attempts to return to normal life will remain deeply challenging. Businesses, sporting authorities and organisers of cultural events will continue to face profound difficulties and restrictions.
Thankfully, the latest guidance from the Government – announced exclusively in today’s column – should help the country take its first steps on the road to economic recovery.
Football
At corners and free kicks, each defender must maintain a distance of at least two metres from the nearest attacking player. Premier League authorities have urged players at all clubs to follow the example set by Aston Villa, whose defenders have been demonstrating this approach all season.
Hairdressing
Barbershops and salons will be permitted to reopen, as long as each hairdresser uses scissors with twometre-long handles. The customer’s hair should be washed using either a hose or a bucket of soapy water, flung from the opposite end of the salon. All chat between barber and customer should be conducted through loudhailers, while traditional topics of conversation should be updated to reflect current circumstances: e.g., “Going anywhere nice this summer, sir? Front garden, maybe? Or are you more of a shed man?”
Stand-up comedy
As members of the audience will be forced to wear face masks at all times, comedians will be asked to laugh at their own jokes, and to supply their own heckles. In the absence of audience interaction, comedians will also be encouraged to engage in amusing off-the-cuff banter with themselves, asking themselves their name, inquiring what they do for a living, and making a humorous remark at the expense of their home town or physical appearance.
Transport
Cosmetic surgery
Although it will not be possible for surgeons to operate on clients, they will be permitted to continue their business via mail order. Clients will be posted a parcel containing the appropriate quantities of silicone, a bottle of horse tranquiliser, and a Swiss army knife.
Amid all the doom and gloom, some good news. The party conferences are off. Labour and the Lib Dems have both cancelled theirs, in favour of online policy discussions – and although the Tory conference is still scheduled to go ahead, it would be no surprise if it ended up being cancelled too. They’re such peculiar events, conferences. The mood in the main hall is always faintly unsettling. At Labour conference, the air seethes with furious intensity and factional resentment. Tory conference, meanwhile, trudges along in an atmosphere of near-comatose boredom, the silence broken only by a lethargic dribble of applause, or the occasional cough. Although, come to think of it, this year a cough would cause some excitement. Perhaps even a stampede.
Evening events aren’t much fun either. Hot, sweaty little rooms crammed with journalists, MPS and advisers holding the same dreary conversations they have all the time in Westminster. And no matter how much of the terrible warm white wine you drink, you never get drunk. Instead, you just start to feel strangely heavy. Saturated. Wine-logged.
The only good things about party conferences are the souvenir stalls. One year at Labour conference I bought a tea towel with Lenin’s face on. It continues to provide excellent service to this day.
In a time of national crisis, does
the press have a duty to be “positive”, to “get behind” the Government, and to “boost morale”?
In the early days of the First World War, a lot of people must have thought so. In 1915 the Daily Mail ran an article accusing Lord Kitchener
– at that time the Secretary of State for
War – of ordering the wrong type of munitions (headline: “The Shells Scandal: Lord Kitchener’s Tragic Blunder”). Kitchener was a popular figure, and many readers were furious with the paper. Copies were burned in the street. Circulation plummeted.
Yet it seems the paper had a point. Soon after, Kitchener was stripped of his control over munitions.
From the start of the conflict, the government did all it could to muzzle the press. It banned reporters from the war zone, and newspapers were only supposed to run accounts of the conflict written by governmentsanctioned correspondents.
But because of this, the British people were often appallingly misinformed. According to one newspaper in July 1916, the Battle of the Somme was a “Great British Offensive”, and “our casualties not heavy”. Another report described the first day as “very satisfactory”. In fact, the first day on the Somme saw more British casualties than any other day in military history.
In 1918, the Spanish flu arrived. But, with the war still raging, news of the disease was suppressed. This censorship was meant to help protect the public’s morale. But it surely didn’t help protect the public’s health.
Unlike their predecessors in the First World War, today’s journalists are free to ask awkward questions, query official information, and to publish articles that contradict the government line. We should value that freedom, and remember the fundamental purpose of journalism: to tell the truth, even – or rather, especially – when people would rather not hear it.