The Times Magazine 47of sense. There aren’t people dying in the street.
The NHS doesn’t appear to be overrun. So it
seems a bit odd that we’re doing this.”
As well as being a numbers guy, Dolan says
that, as an entrepreneur, he is also used to being
in charge and in control. “I’ve been running
my businesses since I was 20, so I’ve always
been used to being able to do something about
situations I thought were going wrong.”
And seeing the government persist with
a national lockdown that seemed, in his view,
to be doing more harm than good, Dolan
experienced the unpleasant sensation of
seeing a situation that was going wrong
and not being able to do anything about it.
“I just got frustrated. And so I thought, as an
academic exercise, how do you actually bring
a government to account? You think, well, we
live in a democracy. But then you think a bit
more and you go, hang on a minute... We’ve
just voted, Boris has an 80-strong majority in
the Commons, there isn’t a general election
for four years and the opposition aren’t saying
anything. So where’s the democracy?”
He stewed for a couple of days until he
came across an article by a barrister, Francis
Hoar, which argued that the government
was quite possibly acting outside the law
and that there was scope for a judicial review.
“So I got in touch and said, ‘Do you fancy it?’
He said, ‘Yes,’ and so we cracked on.” It’s not
quite clear, at this stage, what Dolan hoped
to achieve beyond catharsis. “I thought, it’ll
maybe cost a couple of hundred grand or
something, take about a month and that
would be my frustration gone.”
Only something happened that Dolan
hadn’t expected. As the publicity around the
legal challenge and subsequent appeal grew
over the course of the summer, the number of
people who wanted to help contribute money
skyrocketed. Using the crowdfunding site
CrowdJustice, Dolan’s challenge has, at the
time of writing, received almost £350,000 from
some 11,500 individuals. He found his Twitter
account was gaining thousands of followers
(he now has around 70,000). It was a strange
and sudden metamorphosis for a man who is,
by temperament, “fairly insular”, and whose
fondest wish had always been simply to be
left alone. “It went from being this personal
journey to being something with actually
quite a lot of responsibility. A bit of a crusade,
I guess. Because you realised how many
people were pissed off and how many people
wanted to do something but felt impotent.”
He says that he now receives messages
from desperate people. One single mother
contacted him to say that she was feeling
suicidal and unable to cope with the pressures
of lockdown (he later checked back in with
her and she was feeling better). He’s also
received “death threats and all the rest of it”
on account of his increasingly high-profile
status within the loose confederation of
people who, like him, resent and rejectthe diktat remedies of lockdowns, mask-
wearing, social distancing, track and trace,
furlough and business closures. He is a
pugnacious presence online. He’ll retweet
anti-lockdown messages from celebrities,
particularly musicians – Ian Brown, Van
Morrison – and this month accused the
polling company YouGov of publishing
fraudulent poll results when they suggest a
majority of British people oppose the idea of
lifting Covid restrictions by Christmas. He is,
I think, a man still flushed with the excitement
of finding his tribe and finding his fight.
The problem is, though, that a lot of his
fellow travellers are... Well, they’re crackpots
and cranks, aren’t they? Full of mad Covid
conspiracies. How does he sort the fellow
concerned citizens from the tinfoil hat types?
“I think it’s fair to say you get extremists,
especially on the internet,” he says. “So there
are some people that believe it’s caused by 5G.
Not many, actually. You do get a lot of people
that think it’s like a government psyops thing
that’s been implemented so they can roll out
some agenda. And honestly? Some days, when
you’ve been spending a long time looking at
these things, you could really easily go down
that hole. And actually, I wouldn’t be surprised
if any of those things turned out to be true.”
Unlike some, he absolutely believes that
Covid-19 is real, however, and that it is a new
virus and that it is “nasty” and that it kills
people. Just not enough people to warrant the
economic and social damage being done to
the country. When I ask him – as a numbers
man – what the death rate in this country
would have to rise to before he’d concede that
mandatory measures need to be put in place,
he doesn’t answer the question and instead
talks about how a lot of people die of flu but
life goes on. He also returns, time and again,
to his “disdain” for almost all politicians. “I’m
very much a believer that anyone who wants
to become a politician should be prohibited
from becoming one.”
OK. But why then, if the moral, social and
economic arguments against Covid restrictions
are so clear, does the government persist with
them? Say what you like about politicians,
but they’ve not been introducing all these
measures for a laugh, have they? Dolan’s
explanation is that Boris Johnson and those
around him know, in their hearts, that they
made a catastrophic error in locking down
so hard for so long. “I believe they know
they f***ed up badly.” But rather than holding
their hands up and admitting it, they are
doubling down in a collective act of arse-
covering at the expense of all of us. “They’re
interested in protecting their jobs and
protecting their reputations and making
themselves look good.”
It’s easy to be an armchair general, though,
when you don’t have to be accountable toTHE GOVERNMENT, HE ARGUES, HAS BEEN ACTING
LIKE A ‘DICTATORSHIP’. ‘IT’S NOT LIKE IT’S EBOLA’
Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers leading
a protest against lockdown, masks
and vaccines in London in July