I’m living in a country that won’t let me out

Anyone who’s been through customs Down Under isn’t surprised by the region’s OTT response to Covid. Having been X-rayed before boarding, one’s possessions are X-rayed off the plane. So shrill are the threatening posters, fine warnings and chiding announcements about importing bio-contaminants that on discovering an apple core in your pocket in the endless customs queue, you’re apt to throw up. The culture is obsessed with contagion.

Yet Britain’s Labour leadership, who throughout this pandemic have interpreted ‘opposition party’ to mean ‘people who advocate government policy even more vehemently than the government itself’, now look wistfully to Down Under as a Valhalla where they really do Covid right. Near-total border closures and tyrannical police-state lockdown enforcement seem to have tamed the tiny beast, with daily new positive tests in single digits. Australians and New Zealanders may go about their business — or at least they could do until a single case in Perth sent the state back to playing freeze tag again.