Petronella Wyatt: I’m not surprised Michael Gove is a lockdown fanatic

What this government needs is a good dose of the London mob, which at its height in the 18th century would express its displeasure in no uncertain terms. In those days, the political system, as I once observed to Boris when he believed in rights, was one of aristocracy tempered by rioting. The mob, whose members ran from tinkers to duchesses, acted as a curative to despotic politicians, whose carriages would be waylaid and their occupants turned upside down. The word ‘liberty’ was then chalked on their shoes. A bystander in 1770 described an apparently good-humoured riot of ‘half-naked men and women, children, chimney-sweepers, tinkers, Moors and men of letters, fishwives and females in grand array’. This fills me with nostalgia, as we are less free now than 300 years ago. Our democracy is certainly not democratic. It does nothing but feel our collars and lacks both honesty and courage. There is no body of opinion behind it that is liberated, and its chief exponents are marked by a haunting fear of losing their jobs. Oh, the joy of seeing Matt Hancock hanging upside down with his breeches around his ankles.

Love in the time of Covid has been an unsatisfying business. Speaking as a girl who resides alone, it’s a fine state of affairs when you can sleep with your own live-in partner but not someone else’s. The upside is that in St John’s Wood, where I lay my hat with my Papillon dog, Mini, never have so many men been gathered outside so few shops. In the rippling shine of the tumbling winter sun, I have been falling in and out of intemperate crushes. Outside Panzer’s, my high-end local deli, I have been beguiled by men who look like Alcibiades reborn and whose eyes shine with the melancholy of no coital activity and of tiers before bedtime.