The madness of the lockdown trials

I think we can now admit that Covid sent us all a little loopy. Matt Hancock certainly seems it, handing over more than 100,000 highly sensitive texts to a hostile journalist. Today’s revelations show Hancock telling colleagues ‘we are going to have to get heavy with the police’. While everyone gets excited about the lockdown files, there are still plenty of lockdown trials going before the courts. Which, even if a gratuitous breach, seems a little pointless now. Rules are being enforced that are no longer in place. Rules that, the Daily Telegraph reports, weren’t based purely on ‘the science’.

One of those poor souls still before the courts is Phillip Hylton, a 60-year-old man from South London. Mr Hylton’s is a sad tale of what happens when bad legislation meets useless institutions. He found himself up at the City of London magistrates’ court on Thursday afternoon accused – and take a deep breath here – of ‘participating in a gathering of two or more people in a private dwelling/indoors in a Tier 4 area’ under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020.