Kelly’s Eye

IF YOU want a glimpse of the future that awaits for as long as the Government rules by decree and keeps us masked, compliant, and confined, look no further than the demand for Uefa officials to avoid quarantine when coming here for the Euro 2020 finals.

Around 2,500 of them will skip the restrictions rigorously enforced on us lesser mortals, so that they can attend matches at Wembley, as well as meet government members.

It comes as ministers and aides are quoted saying that lockdown rules are “flagrantly ignored” in 10 Downing Street, and not long after we were subjected to the spectacle of the western world’s leaders getting up close and personal at the back-slapping G7 smugfest in Cornwall.

Don’t get me wrong. I would have had no problem with them doing so, were it not for the fact that anyone who so much as sings or dances at a wedding risks being criminalised. Similarly, let the football bigwigs come, as long as we’re all allowed back into grounds on the same terms.

Otherwise what will emerge is an ever more resented two-tier world, in which the powerful and wealthy sidestep restrictions when it suits, to go about their business or on holiday.The rest of us, by contrast, are reduced to being pathetically grateful that our freedoms are handed back piecemeal, with the ever imminent threat of them being snatched away again the moment the next batch of deeply flawed modelling panics ministers.

As that lifeline to sanity – my brilliant fellow Daily Express columnist, Professor Karol Sikora – put it last week, we remain in thrall to a Government “telling us how to behave, what to eat, who to see, what to do”.

In the meantime, let Uefa relocate the Euro 2020 final to Budapest.The stirring sight there last week of a capacity 60,000 crowd inspiring underdogs Hungary against world champions France was the sort of vision of the future we need.