Look, I realise you don’t want to read this column. I’m unenthusiastic about writing it. For most of us, any mention of Covid triggers a deep aversion and desperation to flee. Even recalling the uncanny tranquillity of the first you-know-what – the blue skies, the blazing sunshine, the serene silence in once-bustling London – makes me wince. Between the slow drip-feed of the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files and Rishi Sunak’s dubious Protocol breakthrough, most UK news consumers would have greeted last week’s headlines with a double-whammy of ‘Oh, no, not that again!’ – since the only subject that rivals Covid’s revulsion quotient for Brits is Northern Ireland.
From the start, I anticipated our allergic reaction to reflecting on an era we’d be frantic to forget, which is why I didn’t use my graciously state-sponsored leisure to write a ‘lockdown novel’. While numerous colleagues chose to do so, I was certain the genre would prove commercial poison. Book-buyers wouldn’t want to go back there. Sure enough, The Year I Didn’t Leave the House has yet to hit the bestseller list.
Still, the period does strike fictional notes. Stories from Frankenstein to Stranger Things to the myth of Pandora’s Box employ a timeless plot device: letting something malign into the world and then being unable to send it back where it came from. I don’t refer to the virus itself. As the former health secretary’s WhatsApp messages remind us, with their relish of fostering public terror and their casual concoction of politically motivated if socially ruinous made-up rules with no basis in data – none of this stuff is surprising – what ‘liberal’ democracies let irretrievably into our world was tyranny.
We are forever changed. The British people, along with the populations of many American states such as New York and California, have henceforth to live with the fact that civil liberties we Yanks call ‘inalienable’ can be cancelled at a moment’s notice for years on end.
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