Kelly’s Eye

YOU have to find your moments of humour where you can in these days of Covid craziness. Especially when the ever more deranged- sounding Matt Hancock talks of “hundreds of thousands of deaths” if we don’t do exactly as he says, while the evidence against his diktats presented by respected scientists including Professors Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan, and the country’s leading oncologist ( and Daily Express Positive Professor) Karol Sikora is ignored.

Instead, the BBC’s and ITV’s news coverage suggests the only divide among scientists is between Whitty and Vallance’s restrictions and those colleagues wanting even stricter measures.

So thank goodness for those who can still make me laugh out loud.

Like Prince Harry, who resembles nothing so closely these days as a hostage reading his captor’s demands from a prepared script. I even confess to a perverse admiration for someone born into royalty who sees nothing incongruous about delivering a lecture so thinly veiled as to be invisible, on who to vote for in the forthcoming presidential election, to the country of which he is a guest. There is something morbidly compulsive too about his witless compliance with how his much shrewder wife has exploited his royal status to transform her personal profile which, without him, would raise scarcely a blip on the Hollywood celebrity scale.

But even Harry couldn’t compete with the one- liner last week from Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian newspaper. In reaction to news that two other ex- national newspaper editors, both conservative- minded, were in line to chair the BBC and the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, he wailed: “This is what an oligarchy looks like.” Perhaps Rusbridger’s definition of a small group of people wielding undue power and influence doesn’t extend to someone like himself, who moved seamlessly from his previous post to become the principal of an Oxford college. Satire’s loss is doubtless academia’s gain.