Joylessness of the pro-lockdown elite knows no limits

I’ve had a good lockdown, with one exception. On the first Sunday, I decided to use my hour of allotted exercise to walk from Hove Lawns to Brighton Pier, the seafront stretch that was the scene of so many good times. Nothing during these two months has left me as sorrowful as that promenade; for some reason I imagined that the beach bars would still be open for business (because I saw the esplanade as some fantastic fiefdom that was a law unto itself, like Narnia with hen parties) but, of course, they were closed. The sun was shining, the canned cocktails were cold – and I felt like I was walking towards my own gallows.

Well, what a difference eight weeks makes! I’m proud to admit that I was one of the ocean-going rotters who crowded on to Brighton Beach on Wednesday.

I’m burnt to a crisp – but it was so worth it. I love humanity – with the exception of the silly man who has gone viral after a clip of him being interviewed on the very beach where I was basking appeared on Good

Morning Britain. Standing there drinking beer, he opined – for all the world like the Homer Simpson of Sussex – “I think we should be stricter like Spain and none of us be allowed out.”

He’s not alone in his doublethink; elsewhere on daytime TV, the presenter Phillip Schofield could be seen clutching his pearls when a woman who lived alone stated her intention to meet up with her similarly self-isolated sister to celebrate her birthday. This would be the same Phillip Schofield who also begged for pubs to open way earlier than planned because “people are going crackers” and “we’ve all got really good at social distancing”.

We’re used to people in power being hypocrites. There’s a whole rationale for it; de La Rochefoucauld’s old saw that “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue”. You could get away with this in a culture of deference that also had no mass media, where the peasants could be scared into believing that they’d burn in Hell if they even contemplated misbehaving themselves as their betters did. But as populism in general and Brexit in particular showed, we no longer live in forelock-tugging times. New plague – same old double standard.

Teachers who’ve happily availed themselves of the labour of workingclass people for the past two months but think they’re too special to go back to work. Government advisers preaching lockdown and getting around like something out of a Beach Boys song. The sneering on social media at the people licking Mr Whippies on Southend beach, which wouldn’t be aimed at some snob swanning around Sandbanks, even though those who bore the brunt of the patronising fury were far more likely to be on furlough, freshly unemployed and/or stuck in a small home without a garden. This is just the latest joust in the culture war that has been vivifying – or

splitting as the miseries would have it – this nation ever since the referendum.

A recent poll by Opinium shows a nation split down the middle, 46 per cent saying the Government is either doing too much or the right amount and 47 per cent saying it’s not doing enough. It doesn’t show who’s on what side, but it’s an interesting statistic – and from what I’ve seen, I’d bet that those who voted Remain (generally smug stick-in-the-muds) are in favour of a continued lockdown, while those who voted Leave (generally reckless rushers-in) want to get things going.

The timid may stay at home forever if they wish. But they shouldn’t try to keep the rest of us treading water in the shallow end of life forever, just because they’re scared of the dark and deep.

Increasingly, we have the science on our side; a new paper in The Journal of Infectious Diseases shows that, while coronavirus can survive for days on indoor surfaces, 90 per cent of it is deactivated in 10 minutes when exposed to the midday sun.

Even more importantly, what makes us human is other humans; without them, we are just lackadaisical apes looking at the stars, wondering where we are and pining for an echo of our kind.