Lockdown applies to all... even rich elite

IT’S hard to shake the sneaking suspicion that the rich and powerful just don’t believe the rules apply to them.

Take Neil Gaiman, for one. The fantasy novelist made an 11,000-mile trip from New Zealand to his holiday home on Skye, leaving his wife and son behind in auckland. The couple, he wrote on his blog, agreed that they ‘needed to give each other some space’.

Lockdown is hard on everyone and many will have felt the sudden impulse to rush from the family home to get some peace, quiet – and a little time to themselves.

Most stay put, however, because they respect the restrictions put in place to save lives and don’t want to make the task of our doctors and nurses any more onerous by spreading the virus.

did Gaiman stop to think about that? did he pause to consider the residents of Portree, where a local care home has seen ten deaths from a Covid-19 outbreak?

a novelist with his head stuck in far-flung fictional realms might not have much sense of the real world but we would expect a senior police officer to be more grounded in the realities of lockdown.

yet Chief Superintendent Eddie Wylie, head of the British Transport Police (BTP) in Scotland, made two trips from his Glasgow flat to his family home in yorkshire. ‘It would not be reasonably possible for Chief Superintendent Wylie to perform his role solely from either the Glasgow address, or his home in yorkshire,’ BTP said in a statement.

It really does seem to be one rule for them and another rule for the rest of us.