Shapps can ban travel, but not our thinking about it

Covid has led to a year of unprecedented government interference into our daily lives – a necessity that, as it happens, I don’t begrudge, since it was necessary to save lives. But what I do begrudge is the slippage into a world in which it is assumed that the Government has such great power over us that it controls what we think, not just what we do. That was certainly the impression given last week when Grant Shapps, after months of comically tortuous flipflopping and mixed messages about the resumption of non-essential travel, pronounced that we were now permitted to “think” about foreign holidays again (to a handful of “green list” nations).

Thanks, Grant, but I’m not sure we need permission to think about holidays. Those of us hoping to book them are adults, not robots. We can think whatever we want, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of common sense to see that most of us have been thinking about little else for the past three months. We don’t need the green light to think about foreign holidays. We need the green light to book, and keep them, preferably without the sting in the tail of punitively priced tests on return.