14 The Sunday Times February 6, 2022COMMENT
Rod Liddle
So now we find out lockdown was
pointless. I don’t care — I still miss it
O
h, how I miss lockdown. How
desolating it is that we will
never see its like again. I don’t
mean those complicated, half-
arsed, post-lockdown semi-
lockdowns: I mean the real
thing, the one we had in
March 2020, when everyone
was scared shitless and it meant home
imprisonment.
As a misanthropic control freak I
enjoyed seeing the parameters of my
world narrow until they consisted of just
my house and one corner shop. The
gentle, drifting silence of the roads, the
big spring sky devoid of vapour trails,
the sudden boldness of the local wildlife.
It gave a brief intimation of what life
might be like if we disappeared
completely, leaving behind a better,
happier, quieter planet.
I liked the injunction to stay away
from people. I never wanted to see them
in the first place, apart from the Majestic
Wine delivery man, every second
Thursday. It was an idyll.
Oh, and the rich, pervading sense of
doom, of come-uppance, of retribution
and nemesis, which for a while stripped
us of our overweening arrogance. For a
while. For about four weeks.
I realise that for many — perhaps the
majority, although I very much doubt it
— it was the opposite of idyllic. I
understand the trauma of not being able
to see elderly relatives and so on, or I
pretend I do. But I also think an awful
lot of people liked lockdown just as
much as I did.
We won’t see lockdown again because
it was, we now learn, utterly pointless —
a bizarre imposition that did almost
nothing to reduce the death toll. That
was the conclusion of a report from John
Hopkins University in America: it hasn’t
yet been peer-reviewed — and one
suspects that some of those peers won’t
like it — but Johns Hopkins is
nevertheless respected and the report
concludes that lockdown was a strategy
of about as much use as wrapping tinfoil
around our heads or baying at the moon.somewhat inexact. It is simply a clever
and beautiful attempt to understand
and explain the world, which is never
quite settled.
During Covid we witnessed science at
its best, in the speed with which those
vaccines were confected, and at its worst
— the modelling and the pseudo-
scientists (social psychology? I’m, like,
wtf ?) such as Sage’s in-house commie
Susan Michie telling us we must wear
masks for ever. Led by the science? Sure,
but which science?
We do not hear much from Sage right
now. There was a tipping point in
December last year when it appeared
patently obvious to everyone but its
members that they had got it terribly,
terribly wrong. Their predisposition to
calamity, to overstatement, occasioned
by decontextualised mathematics, was
suddenly brought up sharply against
that most irritating of things, reality. An
incompetent, serially lying buffoon Boris
Johnson may well be, but he was more
right about the benign nature of
Omicron than were Sir Patrick Vallance
and Professor Neil Ferguson. And
Johnson is no scientist.
The scientists missed the crucial
factor — that, as sentient human beings,
we would adjust our behaviour
voluntarily to look after ourselves.
Science finds such phenomena difficult
to compute. And, as for those modelling
stats predicting exponential growth in
contagion: surely they were a little like
the maths which calculates that, given
the world record for the 100m sprint has
reduced from 10.6 seconds to 9.58, it will
one day be almost zero. At some point
common sense intervenes and says,
actually, no, you’re wrong, lab boy — go
chill for a while; maybe bus your
mistress over in a cab.
Still, I will miss it. Maybe we could
have a non-Covid lockdown once a year,
for two or three weeks, in which we shop
locally and deprive ourselves of going to
Gran Canaria, or the pub or the
restaurant, and briefly take stock of the
things we have. We could call it “Lent”.lI do hope the Scots proceed
with Nicola Sturgeon’s excellent
plan to saw off the bottoms of all the
doors in schools so that “air can
circulate”.
They should, of course, ignore
the bleatings of the health and
safety experts who insist that in thecase of a fire all the kiddies would be
chargrilled within about 30 seconds.
That aside, these “Sturgeon doors”
would be a fitting testament to the
first minister, enabling her to enter
classrooms at will without knocking
or bothering to open the door. It’s a
country of great innovation, Scotland.Time to move on...
PHOTOBUBBLE: NICK NEWMANIf you’d said that at the time, you
would have been howled down, or not
heard at all — because one of the
downsides of lockdown was a sudden,
frightening authoritarianism (especially
from the left). The rest of us, politicians
worldwide included, franchised our
lives out to the scientific clergy and did
as we were told, comfortable in the
knowledge that we were being “led by
the science”.
As is so often the case, and must
sometimes be the case, the science is not
definitive. If Covid has done anything,
other than prematurely kill lots of
people, it may at least have persuaded us
to recalibrate our relationship with
science, which is not immaculate, never
free from human frailty and oftenI keep hearing the chancellor, Rishi
Sunak, described as a “fiscal hawk”.
This always make me think of a bird that
is slightly smaller than a kestrel, with a
nasty look in its eye and a field mouse in
its claws.
It also signifies the way in which
the left commandeers language. A
“hawk” was once simply a politician
who stood up to foreign aggression —
that is, they had a spine — as opposed
to the peaceable dove. But now hawk
and dove are simply synonyms for right
and left.
Sunak is a hawk, then, because he
dislikes the idea of bankrupting the
nation and spending your money
bailing out dilatory losers.
And remember: according to the
lexicon, hawks are bad; doves are nice.At some point
common
sense
intervenes
and says, no,
you’re wrong,
lab boyIf the chancellor’s
a hawk, then I’m a
big, bad barn owlWhoopi Goldberg, who — to the
considerable surprise of Adolf Hitler —
announced that the Holocaust wasn’t
“about race”, appropriated her surname
because she wanted to sound Jewish.
She even claimed Jewish heritage
— but research and DNA tests appear
to suggest that she is about as Jewish
as a Melton Mowbray pork pie and
instead nearly all her lineage is from
west Africa.
If I were to swan about calling
myself Rod Sawadogo (it’s a popular
surname in Burkina Faso) I would be had
up by the cultural appropriation police.
Plus, other people would think me a bit
weird. But there’s another rule for
Whoopi, it seems.Whoops, sounds
like cobblers to meI’ve apologised,
now let’s focus on
the successful
rollout of the
life jackets