The Daily Telegraph

As officers pursued my father, my lonely mother endured care home prison

- By Rachel Johnson

It would have been a good gotcha – I can see the headlines – as my brother was prime minister

They turned up in a panda car in our valley on the second Easter Sunday of the pandemic years. Someone in our local town, Dulverton, in the land of my fathers on Exmoor, had ratted on us after spotting one of us in the socially distanced line outside the greengroce­r (mask on, two customers at a time). The snitch had rung the authoritie­s to report a member of the family was on the hill farm and therefore it stood to reason, guv – one of the lesser-spotted Johnsons had broken the travel restrictio­ns and sneaked to a second home.

This would have been a good gotcha – I can close my eyes and see the headlines – as my brother was prime minister at the time.

All very tricky. I opposed lockdowns on a cellular level. Still do.

I have to accept that ultimately schools were closed, the entire population pretty much incarcerat­ed in their own homes, with our sick, vulnerable, frail and elderly people rotting in solitary for months and months on end and it was all signed off by him.

And I admit: I’ve been cheered to see that the Hancock cache of Whatsapps – that The Daily Telegraph via Isabel Oakeshott has done such a majestic public service in revealing – shows him in his truer colours when it came to all the generally pointless non-pharmaceut­ical interventi­ons we had to put up with for far too long.

He was much more of a sceptic than a zealot, they show, often bounced into U-turns or Covid-sanitary fascism by being presented with selective fatality graphs and other data-dashboards so that he did what either Hancock and Cummings – gibbering control freaks, both – wanted. Anyway, back to the scene of the crime.

My father came out into the sunny yard, daffodils nodding, lambs bleating on the hill, to greet the policemen who had broken off from their important day-to-day duties of locating stolen farm machinery, tracking rustled sheep and pulling boy-racers out of hedges to catch us in flagrante, hypocritic­ally breaking the rules set by his own son.

“How long have you been here,” officers from Minehead enquired of the 80-year-old who had emerged from his medieval longhouse in a chunky jersey, as it is so chilly inside that a log-fire burns in the middle kitchen all day to keep the edge off.

“Since 1951,” Stanley told the poor officers, who were, after all, only obeying orders.

After a search – they actually came and checked all the properties in vain for non-locals– the police bumped back down the track.

That was not by any means my most bonkers brush with the police during lockdown.

From the moment the first “stay home” order to “squash the sombrero” was issued, I had profound misgivings about lockdown – everything about it.

I couldn’t see how an airborne virus could be controlled. I couldn’t see

I was just one of thousands of poor s-ds who dared to indulge in one of the only activities permitted

how lockdown could work if key workers were circulatin­g in the community in order to make the country function. I couldn’t understand why sensible scientists who advocated a Sweden-lite approach of focused protection were ostracised by the powers that were. I couldn’t accept it then and I can’t accept it now.

And I’m not just saying this now, either, unlike some we could mention.

I said all this, week after week, on my LBC radio show that started in April 2019. I queried mask mandates, school closures, railed bitterly against the closure of playground­s and tennis courts. And callers would ring up to shout that I “wanted to kill people” and that I “wasn’t following the science”.

When I would calmly point out that a Government that criminalis­ed human behaviour would end up caught in a existentia­l booby-trap of its own making (I give you partygate) I was made to feel like a loony homicidal outlier.

One sunny Saturday we drove to the Exmoor coast to go for a walk, one of the very few things that was permitted, my husband and I. We parked, walked along the cliffs, then returned to a shouty police notice on the car telling us we had transgress­ed. Later that day I got a call from The Sun. “Did you go for a walk this afternoon?” a reporter asked. The tabloid had been tipped off.

I was just one of thousands of poor s-ds who dared to indulge in one of the only activities that were permitted – like jogging on the beach, walking in the Dales – who were tracked by drones or chased by policemen or hounded as rule-breakers.

Once, on a train to Taunton returning from doing my evening radio show. I nodded off on the train without a mask. The photograph appeared on Mailonline. I was furious. Not because I was caught without a mask – they were always a waste of time – but because it is far ruder to take a photograph of a tired, middle-aged woman asleep in an empty carriage on the train and sell it to a tabloid than it is not to wear a “face covering”.

Another time, The Mirror had me on the page six of shame for walking down the street in tennis gear. But it’s not about me.

The plight of those in care homes fills me with the most unquenchab­le rage even to this day. Many still have visiting restrictio­ns and a Covid mentality. My widowed mother ended up in one, and even from June 2021 residents were isolated in their rooms for 10 days minimum if anyone in the home had tested positive.

Before June, though, my mother lived on her own with a carer. When I called her or Zoomed her she would whisper, “I’m lonely.” It broke my heart.

I continued to see her even though she was not in my ludicrous “bubble”, as she had a carer. I took her Christmas dinner in 2020.

It was against the rules and the laws or whatever. In my view, that was immaterial.

Every Covid restrictio­n broke the laws of nature and nothing and nobody – and I mean nobody – was going to tell me not to see my mother on her last Christmas on Earth.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and I completely support Isabel Oakeshott’s bravery in showing us how the sausage of doom was made.

It must never, ever, happen again.

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