The second lockdown will be very different – the trust we had in our leaders has gone

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... here comes Lockdown 2. Sadly, Lockdown 2 will not be showing at a cinema near you. Because cinemas are closed. Again. And hairdressers (Noooo! Not back to the Rapunzel Does Menopause look?), restaurants, pubs and golf courses (why, they’re outside?), and churches (sacrilege, if you ask me), and all “non-essential” retail. Whenever I hear a minister casually use that phrase, I always think, non-essential to whom? Those shops are pretty damn essential to the people who own them and to the people who work there.

It will be very different this time, of course. We were innocents back then when the Prime Minister announced the first lockdown on March 23. It felt important. There was the sense of a nation in peril; a prickle of fear, but not without excitement.

We were asked to do our bit for the country. We had to stay home to support the NHS and save lives. We volunteered to help the NHS, banging saucepans and clapping on a Thursday night to urge on front-line staff and keep up our own spirits. As our roads fell silent, we may have felt we could hear the calling of a better world.

I remember how much I liked watching those early press briefings with Prof Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, summoned from their labs to interpret the pandemic for the public. Reassuringly odd, the pair were oddly reassuring. Now, I think they and the rest of Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group) should be taken to the Tower and charged with high treason for destroying the futures of our children.

The second lockdown, which starts in just a few hours, feels less like a vital duty than an unfair imposition. It’s that school detention you bitterly resented as a kid because you weren’t guilty of the thing the teacher accused you of.

It’s not just because we’re weary. It’s not just because most of us live in areas where shutting businesses and limiting family contact feels both cruel and unnecessary. It’s not just because we know more people who are about to lose their livelihoods than people who lost their lives to Covid, although chances are we do. It’s not just because we’ve seen too much suffering among the young, whose lives are on hold, and among the old, who can’t have their loved ones beside them, although that suffering is grievous.

No, the main reason this lockdown will be different is because the trust we had is gone. Trust in scientists, trust in politicians, trust in the media, even trust in the health service is badly frayed. Heaven knows, we did our best to support the NHS and save lives, but the NHS, we have since discovered, did not return the compliment.

A devastating report from Macmillan Cancer Support estimates that 50,000 extra people have cancer and don’t know it because screenings and appointments were cancelled during the first lockdown. GPS, whose recorded messages told sick people to stay away, referred fewer than half the number of patients to hospital, leading to a waiting list of 3.7 million for elective surgery.

Making the case for a second lockdown in the Commons on Monday, the Prime Minister said that cancer and heart treatment would otherwise be put at risk. “Now is the time to prevent a medical and moral disaster,” he said.

Have they really not told Boris that disaster happened already, between March and June? Sorry, you don’t get to play that card twice, not when you’ve had eight months to build extra capacity, and NHS managers, or so I am told by angry doctors, have happily been saving money as they continue to ration access to hospital services. It is high time the NHS and its 1.4 million staff started saving all of the British people, not just those with Covid-19.

With trust in short supply, Whitty and Vallance look less like reputable scientists than dodgy conjurors at a child’s birthday party, furtively trying to palm a gold coin out of a cuff. Alarmist, barely credible “scenarios” – 4,000 daily Covid deaths, if you please – based on outdated models are used to scare the public into believing our hospitals are overwhelmed or will rapidly become so if we don’t stop kids playing football and shut gyms.

Seriously? Where is the evidence that these healthy activities increase transmission? No answers from the men who invent these arbitrary rules and yet more trust evaporates.

To its shame, the broadcast media plays the part of willing conjurer’s assistant to the scientists. On Monday, the BBC’S medical editor, Fergus Walsh, brought us an emotive report from an intensive care unit in Liverpool. Here are a few things that report didn’t say. Yes, Liverpool is one of the worst-affected areas in the country, but Covid cases are declining quite sharply, so the Tier 3 restrictions must have started to work. (So why do we need a month-long lockdown?)

A senior NHS source tells me that, on that same day, Liverpool University Hospitals reported 463 Covid patients, and that the city’s two main hospital sites had 172 unoccupied beds capable of some form of oxygen supply. A challenging situation, yes, but hardly the imminent catastrophe viewers were led to believe.

Astonishingly, my source says that the apocalyptic graphs Sage presented to the public pay scant attention to hospital discharges, “which are also on an upward trajectory”. Last week, an average of 750 Covid patients were discharged every day across England compared with 350 admissions of patients with the virus. This is extremely positive news, which is why you won’t have heard of it.

If we look at the national picture, out of 142 NHS Acute Trusts, 13 have Covid occupancy of 20 per cent, and about six, including Liverpool, are at 30 per cent or above. Elsewhere, Covid occupancy is really very low: East of England 5 per cent, London 6 per cent, Midlands 10 per cent, South West 5 per cent, South East 5 per cent, North East and Yorkshire 15 per cent, North West 18 per cent… Most hospitals are a country mile from the medical and moral disaster foretold by the PM.

Forgive me, I wouldn’t normally bombard you with statistics. However, according to the latest Yougov poll, a resounding 72 per cent of English adults support this second lockdown. Don’t they understand the societal ruin hurtling towards us like an express train? Rishi Sunak does. The light has dimmed behind his eyes; darkness is coming, and he knows it.

But what if Sage’s Reasonable Worst Case Scenario is unreasonable rubbish and thousands of lives and livelihoods are about to be lost instead of saved?

Tragically, it looks more and more as if that is the case. Yesterday, a study by King’s College London found that the R number has already dropped to 1.

Appearing before a select committee, Sir Patrick Vallance said he “regrets” frightening people with the 4,000-deaths-a-day figure, but he and Prof Whitty insisted that, although the three-tier system was working, it was not quickly enough to stop the NHS running out of space by November 20.

I’m afraid that simply doesn’t appear to be correct. Last night, my NHS source texted to say Liverpool Hospital now had 30 fewer Covid inpatients than the day before: “It’s definitely looking as if they’ve passed their peak and community cases are in steep decline.”

Wow. Who do you believe? The doomster scientists intent on shutting down society until their quest to “defeat” the virus is over (it will never be over), or the NHS whistleblower who lives in the real world?

I would shut myself away for a year if I thought it worked. But I don’t. We must learn to live with the virus before it destroys everything we hold dear.

The original lockdown was a heartwarming tale of people making sacrifices for the common good, set in a rapturously beautiful spring. The sequel is destined to be a grim retread.

If only our MPS would vote to cancel Lockdown 2.

We know more people are about to lose their livelihoods than who lost their lives to Covid