Covid has become the go-to excuse for shoddy service

When we were hit by Britain’s biggest crisis since the war, some people behaved like heroes, laying their lives down to fight coronavirus. Others made their excuses, put their feet up and had a good long six-month snooze.

My favourite Covid excuse came from Eurostar, which declared in August that, ‘As a result of coronavirus, we are only able to offer wifi in our Standard Premier and Business Premier carriages’. Wireless broadband was duly disabled in its standard-class coaches — until, besieged by complaints, the company conducted a full reverse–ferret operation and turned the wifi back on.

Again and again since the virus struck, companies and institutions, big and small, have pounced on Covid as a wonderful excuse to be lazy — or ruthless.

Take the National Trust. In August, the Trust laid out its proposals for ‘Curation and Experience’. It planned to sack regional lead curators and many junior curators. Scholars in architecture, archaeology, historic gardens, paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, silver and libraries would be jettisoned. And the reason for the proposed sackings? What else? Covid-19 and the £200 million loss of income it had inflicted.

But that didn’t stop the Trust pouring money into what it really likes doing nowadays: politicised PR exercises. Last month, it published a gazetteer of all National Trust houses with a slavery connection. In August, Tony Berry, the director of Visitor Experience, published Towards a ten-year vision for places and experiences. Version 2.1, revealing his disastrous plans. Berry wants to ‘dial down’ the Trust’s role as a big cultural institution and marginalise country houses. The Trust also closed beaches and car parks in the early stages of lockdown when open spaces — the safest places during an epidemic — were at a premium for those trapped in small gardenless flats.