Lockdown

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Two bottles to help eradicate cabin fever

The virus is in retreat, the lock-down is crumbling, the sherbet dispensaries will shortly reopen and there is a second spike of summer. Every prospect pleases, and only demonstrating man is vile. In London, we have been subjected to the most ridiculous public protests since the Gordon riots or the agitation in favour of Queen Caroline. During the latter follies, Wellington, riding back to Stratfield Saye, found his way blocked by a crowd of yokels who declared that they would not let him pass until he had toasted the Queen. ‘Very well, sirs, if you will have it so, God bless Queen Caroline and may all your wives be like

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Tinkering with VAT won’t make us trust the government

Should Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut VAT as an emergency stimulus to the consumer economy? When Labour’s Alistair Darling made a 2.5 per cent £12 billion cut after the 2008 crash, I called it ‘an unconvincing and expensive gambit’, on the basis that shoppers would barely notice and that ‘far more significant will be the general level of confidence as it is affected by business failures and job losses… and the general grimness of global economic news’. The same applies today only more so, given that inflation is dormant, households’ pent-up spending power has in many cases been boosted by lockdown and the top VAT-cut winner would likely be Amazon. By

Melissa Kite

The abominable selfishness of the Surrey middle classes

‘Have you met the man who keeps his horses in this field?’ said one silver-haired lady to the other, as the pair stood by the gate of the builder boyfriend’s smallholding. ‘No, but I hear he’s not very nice.’ ‘He’s an oaf. He won’t even let us walk our dogs through his field.’ This vignette was captured on one of the game cameras we have dotted around the fields where we keep our horses. We’ve captured thieves in the act of loading up feed, fly-tippers in the process of dumping rubbish and we’ve now found out what the locals think of us. The BB was flicking through footage when he

The Spectator

Which former prime minister earns the most for corporate speeches?

Voyage into history How did the Labour government respond to the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948? While the ship was at sea, Prime Minister Clement Attlee tried but failed to have it diverted to East Africa so that its passengers could work on the groundnut scheme. He later wrote to concerned MPs that it was ‘a great mistake to regard these people as undesirable or unemployables. The majority of them are honest workers, who can make a genuine contribution to our labour difficulties at the present time. It is difficult to prophesy whether events will repeat themselves, but I think it will be shown that too

Robin Oakley

Royal Ascot was a triumph – even without the cheers and the hats

Royal Ascot it wasn’t: for the first time in her 68-year reign, thanks to Covid-19, the Queen was not there. Nor were the owners, the crowds, the hats or the morning suits. But just as the Cheltenham Festival gave us the last great sporting spectacle before lockdown, so Ascot celebrated the behind-closed-doors return of sport with five days of supreme skill and drama. As the no-nonsense Hayley Turner put it after a 33-1 victory: ‘It’s still an Ascot winner. Still the same race, the same grade of horses. It’s just as hard to ride winners whether anyone is here or not.’ The smooth Ascot operation provided a masked-up, biosecure environment

Thursday

The Spectator

Britain must begin its recovery – before more damage is done

The discovery in Britain that a £5 steroid, dexamethasone, can be effective in treating Covid marks a potential breakthrough in our understanding of the virus. Much remains to be learned about the wider potential of the drug but the claims made about its success are striking: that it reduces deaths by a third in patients on ventilators and by a fifth in patients receiving oxygen only. It has not been shown to benefit Covid patients who do not require oxygen. But this can still, in a global pandemic, mean thousands of lives saved. There are two further points to be made. With Covid-19, there is a better chance of finding

Jeremy Clarke

Is left the new right?

I took a table on the terrace of the reopened bar and ordered une pression from the waitress. ‘Back to normal, thank goodness,’ I ventured to the chap sitting alone at the next table. He was staring at the centimetre of lager remaining in the bottom of his glass. The cheapness of his clothes and the loneliness enveloping him like a caul was contradicted by his youthful glamour. ‘Normal?’ he said. ‘Normal doesn’t work. You can shove your old man’s normal up your backside.’ My sociable, celebrant spirit recoiled from the aggression. ‘I only meant that it was good to see the bars and shops open again,’ I said lamely.

Andrew Doyle

We are living through a frenzy of conformity

Reality seems thinner these days. As I walk along the high street, passers-by drift apart as though afraid of crossing auras. Three months of lockdown has made this repulsion of human contact a matter of instinct. I can’t help but see this tendency reflected in the escalating intolerance and hostility on social media. So at the start of the week I decide to spend a few days away from Twitter. It’s not the ideal forum for civilised debate at the best of times, but even some of those I respect are now behaving like poorly socialised children who’ve just learnt some flashy new expletives. J.K. Rowling is bombarded for holding

The Spectator

Made to measure: where did the metre come from?

Made to measure The government started reviewing whether we should stay two metres apart while social distancing or whether one metre would do. What is a metre? — Since 1960 it has been defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second. — But it was originally defined by the post-revolution French government as one ten-millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole, on a meridian through Paris. — The signing of the Metre Convention on 20 May 1875 by representatives of 17 nations officially established the metre as an international unit of measurement. — If everyone in Britain joined the

Lucy Kellaway

School’s out: the true cost of classroom closures

It’s Monday at 9 a.m. and secondary schools in England have just re-opened their gates to students in Years 10 and 12. I have been looking forward to this moment for 13 long weeks, since that frightening afternoon in March when my colleagues and I gathered around a computer in the staff room and saw a healthier-looking Boris Johnson declare he was shutting schools. But today I’m not at the comprehensive in Hackney where I teach economics welcoming back my students with a rousing lesson on the financial devastation caused by the crisis. I’m surplus to requirements and am still marooned at home. What ‘re-opening’ means is that a mere

Emily Hill Emily Hill

In lockdown, green privilege is real

Long ago, a friend warned me I was living in a J.G. Ballard novel, but only in lockdown has the plot of High-Rise started to unfurl on the banks of the Thames. Developers are forced to build a certain number of homes for Londoners who could never otherwise afford anything, and height comes at a premium. So we’re stuck on the lower floors, in small, airless flats, overlooking land we’re not allowed to stray on to, as the rich exist in splendid corona-isolation above, peer down from their balconies and call security — to persecute us by making hints and suggestions. Ten days ago, a letter was stuffed underneath my

Friday

Ross Clark

Why UK GDP may have fallen by more than a fifth

Is anyone really surprised that GDP fell by 20.4 percent in April? Perhaps we should be. It doesn’t sound high enough to me. We have just been through a great economic experiment in which most shops have been forced to close, all pubs and restaurants been forced to shut their doors and the public ordered to remain indoors except for essential visits. Road traffic at one point was back to 1950s levels. And yet the economy officially shrank only by a fifth – taking it back roughly to the size it was in 2003. I am not sure that these statistics quite pass the smell test. According to the breakdown provided

Thursday

Jonathan Sumption

Social distancing destroys our lives as social beings

A lockdown diary is an oddly negative thing. At the dinner parties that we aren’t going to, we aren’t discussing all the interesting things that we aren’t doing. This week, I am not heading for the Austrian Alps to walk in some of the finest mountain scenery in Europe and enjoy a week of Schubert, as I like to do in June. The Austrian government has pioneered the technique of allowing facilities to reopen but only on terms that keep them closed. The beautiful concert hall at Schwarzenberg can open, but only with social distancing which reduces its capacity by 75 per cent and makes any performance financially unviable. In

The Spectator

It’s time for the PM to take back control from the scientists

There is a grim inevitability to the trickle of round-robin letters from scientists who feel aggrieved at the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Right from the beginning, the Prime Minister gave scientific advisers a very public platform at the heart of government. He realised that if it became necessary to impose the most severe restrictions on personal freedom any government has had to introduce in peacetime, it would help if the public could see policy was being shaped by experts who understood the threat. But as time has gone on it has become increasingly clear that there is no such thing as ‘the science’ — a mythical set of

Melissa Kite

There were horses loose in a Public Sex Environment

The two horses looked like they had never seen anything like it. They had wound up in a dark car park renowned for the practice known as ‘dogging’ after being found wandering perilously close to the M25. A jockey who just happened to be passing — ahem — was holding on to them as the usual nocturnal customers of this beauty spot carried on doing what they do. The police were out in force, busy trying to solve this baffling crime. We arrived after getting a call from a neighbouring horse owner warning us that horses in our area were loose. After racing to our fields around 9 p.m. to

Toby Young Toby Young

The protestors have brought down the lockdown

I wasn’t surprised to see that a woman whose father died at a care home in Bicester in April has decided to take legal action against the government. If I had an elderly relative in a nursing home whom I hadn’t been able to visit in the last months of his life because of the lockdown, I too would be angry. And I can imagine that anger turning into incandescent rage as I watched pictures of the Black Lives Matter protests on the nightly news. Why are police officers, who were so zealous about enforcing the social distancing rules until last week, now getting down on one knee to genuflect

Jeremy Clarke

My hairdresser cured my depression

I walked to the salon in fiery sunshine. Gorgeous, zaftig Elody was wearing a short satin dressing gown of silver and gold. She was alone. ‘Ça va?’ she said, helping me into the gown. ‘Black dog,’ I said. ‘What is black dog?’ she said. ‘Cafard,’ I said. ‘A black ox trod on my foot.’ I sat in the chair, removed my glasses and stared in the mirror. The straps of my black face mask made my ears stick out. And strewth, the hair. ‘Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren,’ I said. Elody speaks no English and my French is rudimentary. ‘What?’ she said. I had a

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

What should you charge for a virtual conference?

From time to time, every industry must adapt to some inconvenient technological advance. Suddenly, some part of what you offer can be reproduced or distributed in a new form. The temptation is to ignore the issue and hope it goes away. But if you don’t act, eventually some competitor, existing or new, surely will. Reinvention is a painful process. Hollywood’s reaction to the advent of television followed the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The same emotions played out in the response of the music industry to the arrival of digital downloads and streaming. Churches will have noticed that online congregations are larger than physical ones In

Robin Oakley

Horse-racing has made a triumphant return

Horse racing, it turns out, wasn’t the first sport back in post-lockdown action: that distinction went to pigeon racing when some 4,400 birds took to the air and raced from Kettering to Barnsley. Nor did the first Classic, the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket, provide the hoped-for tonic headlines about a new super-horse to succeed the great Frankel. Pinatubo, a scintillating winner of all his six races as a juvenile and the highest-rated two-year-old since 1994, ran a perfectly respectable race to finish third, but the high hopes that the hot favourite was going to prove to be something truly special were dashed. It seems that the bigger, rangier types caught

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The dying need real conversation, not false cheeriness

A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always ensured that nobody died alone. She sat holding a hand, listening, reassuring. Now on leave, she is writing down some of her experiences with the dying. A wise priest I knew said that no matter how strong your faith, your view of what happens at death and ‘the life of the world to come’ should be an agnostic one. But he still recounted some remarkable things he witnessed when sitting with the dying, and my nurse friend described similar experiences. Unbelievers, whose one certainty is that we are snuffed out