Covid-19 farce could have a sting in its tail

YOU MAY have noticed that this week I have avoided Covid as a main topic. Enough has been said. Save perhaps for this postscript. The first frightening details are emerging of the vast ocean of debt in which the stupidity of our Government over the past six months has cast us. Our debt is now bigger than our entire economy.

Those borrowings have to be repaid – with interest, which alone will prove a staggering burden, needing huge tax increases.

Forgive me, yet again, for pointing out that Sweden, which closed down exactly nothing, has apparently the same death toll by population percentage as we do, and is surging back. So what was it all for? If ever it is proved in retrospective evidence that hardly a single extra life was saved, the reaction will be more frightening then Covid ever was.

As Lincoln said, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Our vaunted “test and track” system has collapsed in chaotic rubble – another bureaucratic non-triumph and another in the long litany of incompetence that we have come to expect.

STRANGE to think that five days ago the year turned and the days began to get shorter, the nights longer. For many of us the year of 2020 will become in memory “the missing year” – 12 months of which we will be able, or willing, to remember very little. This is partly because virtually nothing happened or because what did was not very pleasant. The trick is just to get through the second half of the blasted thing.

A MATE of mine who was on my squadron in 1959 and went on to become an airline captain with BOAC and BA, tells me how he once flew Nelson Mandela from London back to Johannesburg. For much of the last part of the flight the great man sat up on the flight deck and they chatted for two hours.

Mandela told him how much he revered the memory of Cecil Rhodes and the huge wealth he dedicated to scholarships to give vital education to youngsters of all colours, which still continue today.

Rhodes of course was born long after the British abolished the slave trade at home in 1807 and in the empire in 1833 and had nothing to do with it. He loathed it. So it seems our student activists at Oxford, thick as planks as ever, do not know what they are talking about, and testicle-free dons ripping down his statue are much the same.