Lockdown

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Will my friend be offended if I buy her an XL dress?

Q. My son has moved his girlfriend into our fairly small house for the second lockdown. I am grateful for their company, but unfortunately his girlfriend has started addressing me in a baby voice. My son either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t seem to mind. Mary, as I suspect she is a little nervous of me, how can I tactfully let her know how annoying this is without ruffling feathers? She also ‘pony-trots’ between rooms, but I don’t mind that nearly as much as the baby voice.— Name and address withheld A. Collude with a good friend to call you on your mobile, timed for a moment when the three of

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

No. 10’s Christmas trade-offs

The government’s Covid-19 strategy is designed to keep Christmas gatherings on the cards. But what might be the trade-offs? At this morning’s Downing Street press conference on Covid-19 data, Public Health England’s Dr Susan Hopkins and deputy chief scientific adviser professor Dame Angela McLean gave some indication of what tactics could be used to make Christmas week feel as normal as possible. Dr Hopkins referenced Sage advice, suggesting that ‘for every day we release, we’ll need two days of tighter restrictions’. (Public Health England has since issued a correction to this statement, saying every day of ‘release’ will require five days of increased restrictions.) If this advice were adopted by government

Tuesday

Nick Tyrone

Why has England banned worship?

Over the weekend, more than a hundred religious figures from across the different faiths launched a legal challenge against the ban on communal worship in England. They claim the Covid restrictions are a violation of their basic human right to freedom of religious expression. Leaders from the Anglican and Catholic churches, as well as the Muslim Council of Britain, are in agreement on how unfair they view the ban. It’s difficult to think of a cogent argument against their position.  For background, I am an atheist. Raised in a Catholic family, I never truly believed, even as a small child. Atheism has been something that has been with me throughout my whole

Sunday

Steerpike

The Pascoe emails: London to be locked down until Spring

The £12 billion splurge of taxpayer cash into a test-and-trace system meant that due process was suspended. Cash was spent without question, shortcuts were taken, and basic questions were dodged. For example: was contact tracing ever going to stop a virus which, as we knew as early as March, left no symptoms in many of those it infects? As well, in the rush, mates were hired pretty quickly. Today’s Sunday Times focuses on a scandal that has been brewing for some time now: the way that friends of well-connected Tories have been looped in on the biggest Covid projects. Some are on rich contracts, others as unpaid advisers. If you’re

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Where’s the slogan saying ‘Lose Weight. Stop Boozing. Survive the virus!’?

Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever be sane again? With apologies to Morrissey and Marr, I started singing a version of their seminal hit on the way back from getting the horse and dog food and I have been humming it ever since. I feel very jaunty, all of a sudden. I know I’m supposed to be paralysed with fear and hugely depressed, but I’m not. Sorry. I arrived at the feed store just in time, getting the last space in the car park before the place became besieged. A little old lady behind me in

The Spectator

Letters: Why lockdown II was necessary

Cancelled procedures Sir: Your leader (‘A lockdown too far’, 7 November) suggests that the Prime Minister should have shown ‘leadership’ and ignored Sage’s call for a second national lockdown. Sam Carlisle (‘No respite’, 7 November) illustrates why this would have been a mistake. Sam reminds us that ‘half of community paediatricians were deployed to acute services’ during the pandemic’s first wave. Many other specialists were similarly redeployed. That the NHS was not overwhelmed in the first wave was precisely because most routine work stopped and staff were redeployed en masse to treat Covid-19 patients. Leaving projections aside, there were in fact 13,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital on Sunday 8 November.

John Sturgis

Wishful drinking: pubs have always been good at bending the rules

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy has a running skit about the alehouse in his heroine’s home village where her father, and quite often mother too, disappear for hours at a time. People aren’t allowed to drink on the premises, so are strictly limited to ‘a little board about six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire’. But as the locals don’t like drinking while standing outside, they all head into the landlady’s bedroom and perch on her bed, chest of drawers and washstand while supping ale. And if anyone comes to the door during these sessions, the landlady, as she

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Treasury reveals it didn’t forecast economic impact of second lockdown

Lockdowns are designed to temporarily delay the spread of the virus – but at what cost? This was the line of questioning that kicked off yesterday’s evidence session for the Treasury Select Committee, scrutinising the work HM Treasury has conducted in relation to lockdown. Chair of the committee Mel Stride asked Clare Lombardelli, Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury, to comment on specific economic analyses conducted around lockdown restrictions, ranging from the closure of pubs, gyms and restaurants to ‘circuit breakers’ and working from home directives. It was quickly revealed that no analysis has been done. Stride’s interest stemmed from Sage meeting minutes dated 21 September, which referenced a ‘package

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Wales has been betrayed by Westminster

Woeful Wales Sir: Allison Pearson succinctly points out the absurdity of the so-called Welsh government and its assembly, now trying to masquerade as a parliament (‘Wales of grief’, 31 October). For those of us living in Wales it is difficult to talk of the Welsh Assembly without using the F-word: failure. For the past 20 years it has failed the Welsh people at every conceivable level, while building a conceit that it is a true government. The only irony of the current Covid-19 debacle is that for once it has been forced to actually do something instead of talking endlessly around a subject before doing nothing. I have described its

The Spectator

Who came up with ‘lockdown’?

The start of lockdown The earliest known use of ‘lockdown’ in its current sense was in a 1973 story in the Fresno Bee, a Californian newspaper, referring to prisoners being kept in their cells after a knife attack. Despite apparently giving the world the concept, not all Fresno locals seemed happy to be placed in lockdown in April. A protest in May resulted in a fight between protestors and the president of the city council. Bed cover How full of Covid patients are hospitals? Hospitals with more than 200 Covid patients (data for 27 October): —Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: 450 out of 1,595 beds — Sheffield Teaching Hospitals

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: England’s lockdown, America’s meltdown and houses fall down

Home The government imposed a lockdown on England to last until 2 December. On television, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, looking unhappy, said of Christmas: ‘It’s my sincere hope and belief that by taking tough action now we can allow families across the country to be together.’ People would have to stay at home except for work that couldn’t be done there. The furlough scheme, due to have expired at the end of October, was extended for the new lockdown period. Exercise and recreation outdoors were allowed. Households might not mix indoors or even meet one person in a private garden. Schools and universities were to stay open. Non-essential shops

Melissa Kite

How do we stop the Lycra dads using our stable yard as a toilet?

The cyclist pulled into our gateway, got off his bike and grabbed hold of the electric fencing. Installing game cameras, along with signs making clear to passers-by that they are on film, has not always deterred trespassers, but it has provided us with interesting viewing. And so it was on this occasion, as the cyclist pulled in for what cyclists pull in for. By this I don’t mean they necessarily relieve themselves swiftly against a bush. I mean sometimes they duck under the tape to go inside the field or stable yard where they make themselves at home, in a semi-seated position. Look, it’s not nice to have to describe

Toby Young Toby Young

What I’ll miss most in Lockdown II

A second lockdown won’t cause me much suffering. I don’t have a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods (e.g. books) that will go out of business. As a freelance journalist, I’m not at risk of losing my job. I don’t have a life-threatening disease so I’m not going to die because my local hospital won’t admit me. I have only one elderly relative and she’s in our family’s ‘support bubble’. My biggest worry is that schools will close again, not least because one of my children is doing her A-levels next year and another his GCSEs. Boris has absolutely, categorically ruled that out so I give it about another week before he

The Spectator

Whatever the science of this lockdown, the execution has been a disgrace

The benefit of having a lockdown announced some days in advance is the ability to savour what is about to be lost. People have been able to visit friends and family, not knowing when it will be legal to meet again. Parishioners have attended church to say their farewells, as have small groups of friends and family. Small shops stayed open until midnight on Wednesday to serve customers, restaurants were booked up. Yes, we face the return of Covid-19. But was also face a government that seems in a flap, unable to decide what to do. Boris Johnson has said that this latest lockdown will last only four weeks, and there

Alberto Giubilini

The (absent) ethics of lockdown

Is it ethical to lock us down again? This is not a facetious question. Over the past eight months, we have heard a great deal about the policies used to manage the virus, but very little about the ethics. This is a mistake. We should be asking how we can critically and reasonably strike a balance between conflicting values and interests. Yet even now, with so much at stake, this basic question on the ethics of our policies is not being properly asked. When it comes to public health, the ethical balance is simply expressed: how do you achieve a certain public health goal with the fewest restrictions on individual

James Forsyth James Forsyth

This lockdown comes at a high political cost

Keir Starmer has his first attack line of the next general election campaign. He will say that England’s second lockdown was longer than it needed to be because the Prime Minister didn’t act when he had the chance. If Boris Johnson had listened to the scientists, Labour will say, we’d have had a two week ‘circuit-breaker’ and controlled the virus. As things stand, a man who set his face against lockdown was then forced to adopt one — making it longer, more painful and costing far more jobs. A couple of weeks ago, there was a clear dividing line: Labour wanted national measures; the Tories wanted regional ones. So Starmer

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The infantilism of locking down to ‘save Christmas’

It seems, then, that this latest lockdown has been instigated simply to protect two very questionable institutions — the National Health Service and Christmas. Both have a certain historicity about them and were widely liked. Both, too, have become bloated and hideous caricatures of what they once were. There is a certain infantilism about the repeated demands to ‘save Christmas’ which conjures up the image of serious adults — Chris Whitty, for example, or Sir Patrick Vallance — hanging up their stockings on Christmas Eve and jumping up and down on the bed in excitement at five o’clock the following morning. There is no Santa Claus, Patrick. There is no

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

In defence of Emily in Paris

A frothy new drama called Emily in Paris arrived on Netflix last month. Starring Lily Collins — daughter of Phil — it tells the story of a pretty social media ‘expert’ who moves from Chicago to Paris, where she manages to offend almost everybody she meets, and yet somehow triumphs. It is Eloise in Paris for the Instagram/Trump generation. The show is a croquembouche-esque fantasy of Frenchness. Anorexic-looking chicks eat croissants and pretend to enjoy them. There are pre-war apartments with parquet flooring, and windows decorated with twinkling fairy lights. The men are handsome bastards who know how to cook omelettes. This is television designed for women the world over

Sam Carlisle

What lockdown means for families with disabled children

When lockdown starts, all kinds of things stop. The first one, in March, was the worst time of my life as a parent, not because of my daughter’s severe disabilities, but because of the lack of support. Elvi is 19. She has a mental age of three, sleeps four hours a night and can’t walk. She has to be showered, dressed, fed and physically moved around our home. I have learned so much from my beautiful, funny daughter. She works incredibly hard to achieve the smallest things. We were told Elvi wouldn’t live past two and that she was unlikely to speak. In the summer she said her first five-word

Tuesday

Stephen Griffin

The problem with the Great Barrington Declaration

With England returning to a full national lockdown, calls for a different response — a so-called ‘segmentation strategy’ — have also reappeared. The idea behind such an approach is that a ‘vulnerable’ section of the population is effectively sealed off from the rest of society. Meanwhile, SARS-CoV2 is allowed to spread among the remaining population, generating herd immunity which will eventually protect the entire population. This is the core principle of the Great Barrington Declaration, which has attracted a large amount of media attention since its inception a few weeks ago. This approach has had considerable appeal to those seeking to minimise the impact of the pandemic for a variety of reasons, be they