Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Much of the Covid consensus has been proved to be tripe

iStock 
issue 13 May 2023

Three years ago this week marked my first misgivings about the government’s Covid lockdown. Sure, I was late to that particular party – my wife, for example, had been carping viciously for the previous two months. But my rational assessment of lockdown was perhaps tilted by the gentle, bucolic magic of the thing itself.

I think I have never enjoyed a more pleasant time. The weather was beautiful, and out in the Kent countryside, where I then lived, one could enjoy it to its full. Wildlife was less shy than usual, perhaps a consequence of the state-imposed quietude. Occasionally city dwellers would infest our country lanes and I had great pleasure in yelling at them to return to their filthy tenements, taking their vile diseases with them.

We shouldn’t adjudicate on the basis that a few cretins are incapable of discerning between opinion and fact

There was a pleasure, too, in the Ballardian scenes at the local supermarket, as the chavs wheeled out their thousands of loo rolls and sacks of pasta.

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