Charlotte LYTTON
I‘Had she thought the rules were worth bothering with, she might have paid them more mind in the first place’
f curfews, dissolved air bridges and a law banning dancing have you ready to “throw in the sponge”, to use a Boris Johnsonism deployed this week, join the club: flouters are rife in the (likely socially non-distant) corridors of Westminster, where attempting to understand the rules is now passed over by parliamentarians in favour of ignoring them altogether.
Rutherglen and Hamilton West MP Margaret Ferrier has become the latest official to do a Barnard Castle, this week travelling to Parliament before having received coronavirus test results, speaking in the Commons and then returning to her Scotland constituency by train once her positive diagnosis came in.
New laws stipulate a fine of £4,000 for those who are “reckless” in coming into contact with large numbers of others when they should be isolating. Ferrier, 60, who said she had been suffering from “mild” symptoms on taking the test, has since referred herself to the police and parliamentary watchdog and been stripped of the whip by the SNP in Westminster. Nicola Sturgeon has urged that she resign as an MP.
All of which is near-unrecognisably mea culpa- y – though had Ferrier thought the rules were worth bothering with, she might have paid them more mind in the first place. These are the same rules the rest of us tie ourselves in knots over on a daily basis. The quotidian machinations of life – whether to commute, or see older loved ones, or book a holiday, or arrange anything ever again – have by now become so riven with regulations and fines and reverse ferrets from the fun police that giving up altogether has become the path of least resistance. With this rapid apid erosion of doing anything one e might enjoy, we are entering a second ond lockdown without the e label attached – the PM allowing wing us to beat ourselves down with the drudgery of it all rather er delivering the hammer blow himself. mself.
He is no poster boy for this crisis. On Tuesday, y, he failed to relay correctly ly the rules of the North East’s lockdown when n questioned, later tweeting that he “misspoke”, which is a bit like when someone says they’re “sorry you feel upset”, in lieu of actually apologising.
But this is par for the he course for the do-as-i-say- -saynot-as-i-do folk of SW1, who have now entered the domino period of the pandemic, with Ferrier previously criticising Dominic Cummings’s eyesight-testing trip to Durham and Robert Jenrick, the housing minister who visited his parents’ home in early lockdown 1.0 when it was forbidden, saying of the Scottish M MP that “nobody is above the law, politic politicians have to abide by the law la whether it relates to C Covid or anything else”.
Add th the photo circulati circulating of Jeremy Corbyn’ Corbyn’s dinner for nine at the w weekend and they might as well have a good old get together at a Parliamen Parliament bar (only recent recently stopped from serving serv booze past 10p 10pm because it wa was classed as a “w “workplace can canteen”, and rules are for normies) and have them Zoo Zoom us at home, fran frantically canc cancelling every social plan from now to the next millennium and inv investigating local cryoge cryogenics companies to see if they’ll put us on ice until this is all over.
Johnson and No 10 continue to make things tougher and tighter, presumably based on regular polls that seem supportive of such measures. But this apparent appetite is not all it seems – people will happily support the closing of gyms they don’t go to but won’t curtail the family dinners of eight that would cause ructions bigger than Covid; shutter restaurants, sure, but they’ll still be popping out for last minute supermarket extras while “quarantining” from that muchneeded holiday to Spain.
Pandemic morality is one thing on paper but another in practice; people comply when it suits, which it growingly does not. Continuing to believe that we are a nation desperate to disengage until a vaccine emerges – which the testing debacle surely indicates will be made all but impossible – is seemingly motivating the pursuit of unwise policies that the Government itself is unwilling to uphold. Monkey see, monkey do, and
these endless infractions will not inspire confidence or compliance. Many of the rules may be ludicrous – but the makers breaking them renders it all worse still.
A disconnect between words and action has seen Susie Dent of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner this week come unstuck, too. Her new book, Word Perfect, has been printed with – you guessed it – a litany of lexicographical errors. Bit awkward.
The “brilliant linguistic almanac” has since been recalled, and Dent has admitted to dabbling in the healing powers of lalochezia – “the use of swearing to alleviate stress and frustration”. In fairness, the book’s full title does promise “Etymological Entertainment” – which it has, albeit not in the way it might have intended.
Bread has also been having some requirement-fulfilling issues, at least at sandwich chain Subway, which Ireland’s Supreme Court has decreed does not actually serve, erm, bread.
The rolls have been plunged into dough-sarray (sorry) following a ruling that says because they are 10 per cent sugar (rather than a maximum of two per cent) they cannot be classed as a “staple product” with zero VAT, as the company had hoped.
A spokesman for the chain, which has over 42,000 franchises worldwide, said that “our guests return each day for sandwiches made on bread that smells as good as it tastes” (raising the sugar content of food five-fold can have that effect, I find), helpfully adding that “Subway’s bread is, of course, bread”.
I didn’t have baps top of the list for a 2020 identity crisis but at this point, why not?