When I first heard that Neil Ferguson, the Government’s Covid adviser, had had to resign, I thought the BBC broadcast had announced that it was because he had seen his married mother during lockdown. Aw, I thought. Filial duty. He couldn’t bear to leave his poor mother at home by herself, though what’s the big deal about her being married? Anyway. Big sympathy. Then I heard it again. He had been visited, it seems by his married lover, not his mother, when he was busy lecturing the rest of the country about the importance of self isolation.
In a nanosecond, big sympathy turned into a mixture of censure and pure cheer. Old fashioned British journalistic values triumph again. This was an actual story, a story that would have been cherished in the glory days of Fleet Street. Notionally, the only thing that bothered anybody was that the professor, Matt Hancock’s scientific alter ego – notwithstanding his iffy record in previous pandemics – had failed to apply to himself the social distancing rules he advocated for others.
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