I won’t judge you if you want to wear a face mask, please do me the same courtesy

There was only one other person in the railway coach, and she was at the far end. So, glancing around one more time, I took my face mask off. The official advice is to “use your judgment in deciding where you should wear one”, and this struck me as an open and shut case: there was no one within 15 yards.

Later, as we approached a station, I became aware of someone entering the carriage and halting in the aisle next to me. He was an elderly chap, with white wisps curling from the side of his cloth mask, and he was staring at me with peculiar intensity. I looked up, smiled, and raised my eyebrows.

“Not wearing a face mask, then?” he growled.

Like most British people, I am usually too stunned by rudeness from a stranger to respond quickly. This time, though, I had prepared a response in advance for just such an eventuality. “Oh, I see you’ve made a different decision,” I told him brightly. “But don’t worry: it wouldn’t occur to me to judge you.”

I think he scowled – it was hard to tell under the cloth – but he said nothing else as he stomped to the exit.

I hate the fact that face masks are becoming yet another front in our ghastly culture wars. And I hate, even more, the realisation that I am being dragged into combat. But I have little choice.

The lifting of restrictions on July 19 was our one chance to return to normality. If we miss it, we won’t get another.

The arguments in favour of face masks were always ambiguous. The WHO and Sage began by telling us that they were at best pointless and at worst counter-productive. They changed their guidance, not in response to clear new evidence, but out of a sense that every little helped. Whether or not masks did any good, they couldn’t do much harm, and it was worth trying anything that might slow transmission.

I accepted that logic. Some hardline anti-lockdowners raged at me for getting a mask in the colours of the Garrick Club, a jeu d’esprit that they saw as glorifying servitude or something. But it seemed to me that, next to the real lockdown privations – closed shops, empty classrooms, separated families – masks were not worth quarrelling over.

Equally, though, there had to be a moment when we drew a line under the whole business. That moment came three weeks ago, when it became clear that the rise in infections was not translating into a significant rise in illness. The PM ignored the naysayers and opened up – and, on the figures we have seen since, he has been utterly vindicated.

Yet, for a significant minority, this is no longer about hospitalisation rates. An opinion poll last month produced the shocking finding that 40 per cent of British adults want face masks to be mandatory in perpetuity – not as a response to coronavirus, but as a general principle.

Who are those 40 per cent? It is hard to know for sure but, from observation, they are concentrated in certain places: London, Brighton, Oxford.

Could it be that, for at least some maskers, the cloth is a tribal signifier – a way of telling the world that you are a very caring person, unlike those heartless Tories?

Obviously, not every mask-wearer is in this category. Some might simply be fretful. Some might have coughs. Some might have had their whole calculus of costs and benefits altered by lockdown, and now see masks as an annual anti-flu measure. But I keep coming back to that opinion poll. The 40 per cent are not saying that they personally will carry on wearing masks – a perfectly acceptable position in a free country. They are saying that they want the full force of the law to oblige everyone else to go along with their preference.

We can’t let that attitude prevail

– not if we wish to remain the same sort of nation that we were until 17 months ago. We accepted temporary and contingent measures to be discarded when the crisis passed.

If not now, when?