Goodbye Hancock, the chief Covidiot
SO, IS Sajid Javid going to start treating us as grown-ups? His predecessor lost his job precisely because he thought the public infants who need to be constrained by ludicrously minute rules while he, the big grown-up, used his own judgment. He must have reckoned, as he and his mistress saw each other every day in the workplace, the risk of any additional activity producing Covid would be small, especially as he had the vaccine.
Yet the rest of us are not allowed any room for judgment. When it comes to wearing masks on public transport, for example, we are forbidden to distinguish between a rammed Tube train and an empty railway carriage.
The rules are crazily contradictory. My manicurist can give facials and waxes to unmasked clients but the moment the same clients move three feet to sit at the manicure table, then despite the presence of a screen and her being double- masked, they must wear a face-covering. The illogicality is off the scale.
People can cheer and chant at football matches but in church, where everyone is sitting not only at a social distance but with their backs turned to everyone else, a single sung “alleluia” violates the law.
SIMILARLY, despite sanitising hands on entry, nobody can dip their fingers in holy water in case a Covid germ has withstood the sanitising and lurks in the water to nab the next sanitised hands unawares.You couldn’t make it up. Javid could do worse than focus on proportionality, common sense and trust. He could substitute advice for compulsion, could ask the police to focus only on grave not technical breaches.
While Matt Hancock frolicked without fear, thousands of those who obeyed his manifestly absurd laws forbore to touch dying loved ones or to visit dementia-stricken parents. Yes, there will always be Covidiots and there will always be those who are so terrified they daren’t leave their houses but between the two are tens of millions of citizens who can be trusted to combine respect for the law with reason in applying it.