Don’t rage about No 10’s party – be angry that you couldn’t enjoy one too

TO SAVE Alexander Johnson’s face, we must all cover our faces. I won’t repeat here all the many objections I have made before to compulsory masking, or explain yet again why these measures are of doubtful value, to put it mildly.

It is the motivation for them, an obvious attempt to change the subject away from Partygate, which irks me this time round. But it is also the weird upside-down, insideout public and media reaction to all this folly. We are angry at the wrong people and the wrong thing.

Here we all are demanding that the police be called to investigate… a Christmas party. We are not dealing here with the Watergate burglary or the Profumo Affair.

We are dealing with a few government employees having a drink in the office in the festive season. Personally, I loathe these occasions and would rather go to the dentist, but other people like them and they are quite common.

The rage against this event is based on two things. The first is that, at the time of these illegal junketings, insane regulations were keeping husbands from wives, and children from their parents, on their deathbeds. The other is that the courts are still imposing appalling fines on private citizens who likewise defied the Christmas party ban a year ago.

The real reason for fury is that these regulations existed at all. Even if you believe that measures of this kind are much help (I don’t), anyone with any sense could see that cruel separation of close relatives at the end of life was not a proportionate response to Covid.

It was a fanatical, inhuman Communist measure that should never have been allowed, like the fearful, heartbreaking limits placed on funerals and the police raids on churches. I keep hearing the word ‘proportionate’ being used about Covid measures now. But it was not so common then. As I said then, we went mad, like a man who burns down his own house to get rid of a wasps’ nest.

What you should be angry about is not that people in Downing Street held Christmas parties, but that everyone else was forbidden to do so. If we lived in China, where the authorities actually welded people into their homes, then I suppose such rules would have been normal. But we do not live in that dreadful police state. As Sweden proved, trusting free people to behave sensibly produced results that were certainly no worse than ours.

There’s one other part of this which gives me the creeps. I do not know Allegra Stratton, the former government spokeswoman, and I doubt I would like her if I did. But I do not think she is a wicked or harmful person, and I think the treatment of her is quite disgusting.

Put simply, some nark and informer has leaked a tape of what she said in private, and made it public for reasons that seem unlikely to be charitable. Again, we should recall that this was not some great abuse of power.

As a result, a fellow creature has been reduced to weeping in public and compelled to humiliate herself before the righteous judges of TV.

Well, I must ask all those involved in gleefully destroying Ms Stratton to consider this: Is there anything you have ever said in private among friends, which you would not wish to be played on national media to the whole world? Anything? Ever? No little incorrect joke that some po-faced Covid Commissar could turn into an indictment that – if well-timed – would ruin your life and career? If so, let us hope for your sake that you have no enemies as unscrupulous as you are.

I am not sure in what way this sort of thing is morally different from the totalitarian surveillance of 1984, which we are all supposed to be so against.