Queasy like Sunday morning

Not being equipped with the brain cells for it, I rarely stray into politics on either this blog or social media. Actually, my intellectual heft - or lack of it - doesn’t really come into it: such is the No Man’s Land of embittered trench warfare these days that it’s rarely worth the blood pressure spikes expressing an opinion on anything. But the matter of Matt Hancock’s office indiscretion has left me properly batey, and on many levels.

Firstly, I get it that someone’s private life should be just that, private, and it doesn’t matter what moralistic view you take on the now-former Health Secretary’s affair with Gina Coladangelo, essentially wrecking two families and destroying two marriages in the process. But, as has been frequently stated over the last 48 hours, in times of crisis, we look to leadership, especially when that leadership is setting the rules about what we can and cannot do. So when that same leadership breaks those rules - and flagrantly so - we’ve got a perfect right as villagers to come out shouting, brandishing our pitchforks in a bloodthirsty manner.

I’ve not lost a close relative to Covid-19, but my girlfriend has - her stepfather, who lived with her mother in Spain, enjoying their retirement in a warmer clime. When his death came, only two members of the extended family could fly out to the funeral (which we attended via Zoom). To date, my partner hasn’t been able to hug or even be in the same country as her widowed mother. These are the sacrifices we’ve all been forced to endure over the last 15 months. The same sacrifices that meant I had to stand on my own 91-year-old mother’s doorstep for months on end, waving at her from two metres like friends separated by the Berlin Wall. 

So forgive me for getting all preachy about it, but Hancock, in snogging his mistress in the office as if sneaking off from the Christmas party for hanky-panky over the photocopier, deserves no sympathy or given a bye on the basis that ‘humans are humans’. I get it. Times of crisis, and the proximity that comes from spending long working days together, followed by the “who fancies a quick drink over the road” will lead to office romances. It has happened to me and it may well have happened to you. The difference is that in my case, we were both single at the time and, secondly, not responsible for imposing the most stringent restrictions on social engagement since The Blitz. And therein lies the crux of our ire over Hancock, who was unable to keep it in his pants while telling every else to.

I’ve always found Hancock a politician - amongst many - who seemed rather too pleased with himself. When Theresa May appointed him Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport in 2018, he took it upon himself to demonstrate tech savviness by launching his own smartphone app. “Hi - I’m Matt Hancock and welcome to my app,” he trilled on the opening screen, before inviting users to enter an apparently un-needed tool to showcase what the politician was getting up to, in his professional life, of course. “A chance to find out what's going on, both in my role as MP for West Suffolk and as culture secretary, and most importantly it’s a chance for you to tell me what you think, and to engage with others on issues that matter to you.” Perhaps, now, we know too much.

Just a few months after being appointed to the culture brief, the 39-year-old Hancock was made health secretary, a role which, when May herself resigned, gave him the ambition for even higher office, unsuccessfully contending the Tory leadership that put in power Boris Johnson who, as we all know, has had a problem with marital fidelity all of his own. It could, then, be said that Hancock was in the right place at the wrong time when the pandemic erupted. And, as the many wartime analogies have compared, there are few rulebooks that can be followed in times of real national crisis. But if there’s one thing that has run through Hancock’s political career - and the app episode exemplified - it’s breathtaking hubris. 

On Friday, after The Sun had broken its front page story of Hancock’s “steamy clinch” with Ms. Coladangelo, the line being put out was that his priority was driving the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine and getting the country back to normality. This was the same line that Hancock brazenly used to deflect attention when Dominic Cummings’ explosive spleen-venting during the Commons Health Select Committee revealed accusations of “15 or 20 occasions” when “Hancock” (always just that) should have been sacked for failures in the early weeks of the crisis. When Cummings published the infamous WhatsApp screenshot of Johnson apparently calling his health secretary “fucking hopeless”, Hancock continued to style it out with his insistence that he has the country to save.

Even yesterday, in his resignation video, Hancock chose to spend more time alluding to the great work of the department he ran, than apologising to his wife for the humiliation he had caused her. Body language experts have noted how his lengthy tribute to the NHS seemed more to do with reinforcing his political credentials for a future comeback than acknowledgement of what he’d done. “There is still an air of arrogance in his words, though, as he tells us ‘This is why I’ve got to resign’,” said social behaviourist Judi James, pointing out that he appeared to be “steering us to what he sees as the sole problem in his behaviour, rather than addressing what the public might see as a matter of disapproval.”

There was something somewhat crooked about the way Hancock had, last year, set a seemingly impossible target of achieving 100,000 daily Covid-19 tests by the end of April, which he apparently did before the number plunged dramatically again soon after. It was one of the charges laid at Hancock during Cummings’ explosive testimony. “In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely, because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.” The veracity of all of Cummings’ claims remain to be fully verified, but the accusations over PPE procurement, care homes and even, today in the Sunday Times, allegations that Hancock used his private e-mail account for official government business in breach of strict transparency rules, all start pointing to a “narcissistic and slippery health secretary”, as one source described him to the same newspaper’s Tim Shipman.

No doubt, as with all the political turbulence surrounding Boris Johnson’s government in recent weeks - notably his own travails involving wallpaper and his now-wife’s influence - much of this chatter about Hancock’s conduct will get brushed off by the spin machine as Westminster “rough-and-tumble”. It has, though, become far too easy to just dismiss sleaze as of interest only to the wonks who report on such stuff from within the SW1 bubble. Johnson himself was said to be reluctant to sack Hancock on Friday, and even in accepting his health secretary’s resignation yesterday he gave a glowing endorsement of the minister’s achievements, concluding: “Your contribution to public service is far from over,” depressingly hinting at some sort of return - the equivalent of saying “lay low for 12 months, son, we’ll come and get you when this is all over”. 

Johnson doesn’t do sackings, largely because he abhors being told what to do by the very press he, as a former journalist, was once a part of. Another theory is that Boris has assembled such a lightweight Cabinet that any changes are an admission of his own failure of leadership. With such anaemic opposition at the moment, Johnson can probably afford to let Hancock’s departure go without too much exposure, especially while he still has inadequates like Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel and Grant Shapps on his front bench to act as lightning conductors. The problem for Johnson is that each episode that he manages to brush off - as Hancock had done - as Westminster life erodes from within. The wisdom is that Johnson’s premiership is somewhat Teflon-coated because of the vaccine rollout, but there are signs of exasperation within his own party that the gaffes and own goals are, like coastal erosion, gradual and mostly invisible, but could prove problematic down the line. On Friday, Johnson was backing Hancock, saying that his health secretary had apologised and that the matter was then “closed”. Yesterday, however, that support started to disappear from within the cabinet and the parliamentary Conservative party, in a manner that didn’t even occur when Cummings himself scored an enormous reputational own goal for the coronavirus response by driving his family to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’.

Friday’s front-page splash by The Sun detailing Hancock’s extra-marital relationship with the now famous “Hands. Face. Arse.” CCTV image couldn’t have had worse - or better - timing, depending on your point of view. A story breaking like that on a Friday leaves the weekend open for it to deepen, and thus it did, with the Sunday papers today diving queasily into forensic detail of Hancock’s relationship with Coladangelo, not only examining the legalities of their encounters during lockdown, but even on just how long the relationship had been going no for, how she became a director on the Department of Health & Social Care’s board, how she was sponsored for a House of Commons security pass, and even the fact her brother’s company enjoys a lucrative contract as a supplier of services to the NHS. Coming on top of other allegations about Hancock’s matey network - fellow horse racing enthusiast Dido Harding being put in charge of the patchy £37 million Test & Trace programme, for example - it all points to a ministerial culture lacking rigour and due process. In his blog testimonies, Cummings has accused government departments of using such oversight to thwart efforts to secure things like PPE at speed. He hasn’t held back in his disdain for Hancock, either. This all might seem like more of that rough and tumble, but somewhere in the midst of the syrupy mire is a country starting to lose patience. Matt Hancock would do himself, and the country, a massive favour by disappearing from public view for a very long time. Perhaps apologising to his wife would be a start…

Postcard from the cuckoo's nest

Picture: Philips

In the midst of all this brouhaha over leaks and flat refurbishments, it's been easy to forget little Matt Hancock, the eager-to-please Secretary of State for Health & Social Care. In the last week or so he's been pushed out of the limelight by the psychodrama surrounding his boss, but that doesn’t mean the erstwhile minister has lost his boyishly obsequious zeal for saying - at any opportunity and usually when a camera is near - how NHS staff are the most amazing people on the planet.

In truth it’s one of the few areas that Hancock and I agree on. Actually, it’s one of the few things that I’ve had much cause for alignment on with any politician, especially over this last year, not being a great fan of the breed. It is, though, the common bond that had us all on our doorsteps, clapping on a Thursday night for those months of spring and summer last year until the custom fizzled out. We did it partly out of community solidarity, but it was more than an empty gesture. Some of us needed to feel good about the rapidly unravelling situation, as COVID-19 took hold, but it was also the realisation that it was carers and NHS workers in particular who were thrust onto the extremely attritional front line of the coronavirus. And while we may have felt ever so slightly smug, clapping with our neighbours, just as Boris Johnson was doing on the front step of 10 Downing Street, or Sir Keir Starmer was doing outside his Camden abode, it was also good PR for an institution that deserved it. 

Johnson, you could say, had more reason than most, especially as he was visibly in the first throes of COVID when he first took part in the Thursday clap. By the time the prime minister emerged from a very serious encounter with the virus, his appreciation for the NHS should have been enhanced beyond all recognition. That, of course, remains to be seen, given the derisory pay round that has been offered NHS staff. I, on the other hand, have gained my own renewed respect for the NHS frontline. As I write, I’m into my third week in a hospital as a patient. Three Saturdays ago, I had a podiatrist look at what I’d thought was just a stubborn-to-heal foot blister. Thankfully, she knew precisely what she was looking at, and promptly sent me off to A&E at Kingston Hospital, where I’ve been ever since. Evidently the blister had ulcerated and become seriously infected (a perennial risk for people with diabetes like me). The infection was so aggressive and invasive that it had entered the metatarsal, the so-called ‘Beckham Bone’. Three days later I was taken into surgery, where the formidable orthopaedic surgeon (one of the UK’s best, I’m told) worked on the problem at one end with sharp metal, while I relaxed to Coldplay at the other. Post-surgery, I was prepared for what would become a long, steady recovery process, one that has kept me in hospital (albeit in my own room, which is a touch) receiving round-the-clock antibiotics. The wound left by the surgery - a complex procedure to remove a nasty infection that had found its way into the cavities and micro pockets of the foot - is still healing. I’ll spare you the gorier aspects, but the surgery left me with a lot of dead tissue which needed removing to ensure healthy healing overall. At first, this was addressed by wearing a clever ‘vac’ device which, plumbed into the wound, sucked out the dead tissue and gaseous remnants of the infection. It was my ball and chain, requiring 24-hour use and minimal movement, with only a brief disconnection to take a daily shower. However, its progress was slow, which led to an uptick in treatment, and a therapy that is, quite frankly, remarkable: maggots.

There be maggots in there

While you regain your composure at the notion (I know, I had to at first), the premise is incredible: the wound is packed with a ‘tea bag’ containing around 200 larvae - 100 of each gender - who get to work on eating up all the waste. It sounds gruesome, and probably is if I had to watch it, but it’s painless (in fact, it’s completely unnoticeable, save for some discharge - I suppose they’ve got to get rid of ‘stuff’ just as we do). 

According to Swansea University, which cultivates the maggots for this purpose in South Wales, the technique has been used to treat wounds in various indigenous cultures for centuries. During World War One, soldiers’ wounds in the trenches were seen to heal much faster when maggots that had resulted from flies laying their eggs in open injuries got to work. Within the NHS it’s only been in use for the last ten years, but is now sworn by, with clinical trials demonstrating that the maggots are more effective than other treatments to remove wound debris, cleverly cleaning out troublesome hidden microbes that even the best surgeon’s knife can’t reach, and antibiotics can’t kill off.

I won’t dwell too much more on what’s going down there as, tediously but necessarily, it’s continuing for the time being, and I’m still mostly confined to bed, with the extent of travel limited to the toilet and the shower. My view is also somewhat restricted to an imperious sweep of Kingston-upon-Thames out of my 7th floor window (if I sit up and squint I can just about see the very occasional plane taking off from Heathrow). I live a 40-minute walk from here, but I may as well be on Mars with the Ingenuity mission, such is the slow “direction of travel” my stay has required. But I can’t complain, even if the boredom is mind-sapping. 

This has only been my second inpatient experience in 53 years on this planet. Some go their whole lives without seeing the inside of a hospital, save perhaps for the maternity unit where they entered the world. My stay, however, has been truly profound. Who knows what would have happened had I not been admitted to A&E three Saturdays ago, but I’m assuming it would have ended with losing a foot, or worse. That’s not a gloomy self-assessment, but a reflection of the grave tone the surgeon took in the days after she’d performed her magic. But, from the moment my girlfriend dropped me off at the front door, I entered an incredible system, a complex and dynamic clinical care machine that has had me surrounded, from the get-go, by a vast pit crew of doctors, nurses, surgeons, caterers, porters, cleaners and many more that I've never been exposed to. 

Throughout each day I've had fresh drugs plumbed in, my blood pressure, blood sugar and temperature checked at various times of day, my bloods extracted for analysis of infection markers, injections for blood thinners, tablets for this, tablets for that. When you add it all up, I have been the beneficiary of an enormous clinical and service resource. I’d hate to think what it has all cost. I can’t begin to imagine what the bill would have been if I’d been in the American healthcare system. I am living proof of what a burden Type 2 diabetes is on the health service. All of this because of a foot blister, ironically caused by a new pair of trainers bought to further enable the exercise regime that has been key to managing my condition. Of course, this has been a wake-up call: just as I’d thought that I had everything under control, with the three-monthly HbA1C checks showing excellent blood sugar management, the critical arbiter of maintaining my health. And, yet. I’ve had to drain an almighty resource, adding to the estimated £8 billion diabetes costs the NHS every year.

Picture: Philips

It’s not, though, just the cost that’s giving me a form of survivor’s guilt. It’s the people looking after me. And looking after me they are. Over the course of two weeks you become familiar with everyone, even with ever-changing 12-hour shifts of day teams and night teams. One even joked this morning “You still here?!”, which despite its relative inappropriateness, was the kind of levity I appreciate (especially as my now-tired joke with anyone who’ll listen is that if I remain here any longer I’m going to redecorate). Each and every one who has been looking after me has been a hero. God knows what they must think of my folly, after the year they’ve had. 

We all know how these people have been, literally, on the frontline of the pandemic. The roll call of casualties, drawn across the spectrum of NHS functions has been nothing short of appalling. In January, the Mirror newspaper reported that some 52,000 NHS staff were off sick with the coronavirus and that 850 healthcare workers in the UK were thought to have died from COVID-19 between March and December last year. The attrition rate was horrendous. Just as a war cemetery depicts a given battle, with captains and corporals lying alongside each other in the date order in which they were felled, the rollcall of NHS staff of every rank makes the organisation look like unwitting cannon fodder as the virus raged through corridors unabated. While the health service didn’t completely collapse under the strain of admissions at the pandemic’s peak - the feared premise for lockdown to begin with - it was close. What the people who’ve been looking after me have been through, I can't begin to imagine. Wards normally devoted to routine conditions were effectively turned into field hospitals. Staff were redeployed to cope, regardless of their area of specialist expertise. Doctors, surgeons and nurses of every level of experience and capability were retasked with working the wards just to cope. It’s almost hard to fully understand just how a health system that was struggling before COVID-19 has coped under it. 

So why did they allow themselves to succumb? Simple: dedication. The same dedication that has been treating me. There’s nothing altruistic about this. To a worker, the nurses and doctors have clocked on for their shifts because there’s been a job to do that they’ve been highly trained for. While my foot was under the knife, I had an enjoyable chat with the young doctor monitoring my vital signs. He told me how at the peak of battle, he was put on general clinical duties within the hospital, and rather than finding it a chore - even though it was - actually found it quite rewarding. He said that while he might have specialised in orthopaedic surgery, he was still a doctor, he still had invested in an education that could be reapplied. He wasn't alone: no matter what your area of expertise was, if you had a medical degree you were put to good use triaging the COVID-sick as they came in. 

My admiration was undimmed before, but having been in the NHS's midst now for a while my admiration has only been emboldened. The NHS must never be a political football. It must never be treated as a matter of convenient doctrine. It’s birth, on 5th July 1948, almost three years into the austerity of post-war Britain, instigated an institution like no other in the world. Yes, it may be flawed; yes, there will be inefficiencies as there will be in any public body of its size and scale. But what it delivers, the innovations that it relentlessly applies, and the supreme dedication that its chronically underpaid and, invariably, under-appreciated staff deliver is something to truly behold. 

When I’m eventually discharged I will continue for a while as an outpatient. At a time when there is much to gripe about in our country - our economy, our politicians, choose your target - we should never take for granted, nor fail to appreciate what the National Health Service represents: one of the best, if not the best things about Britain. 

It is what it is…I suppose…

It has just occurred to me - and quite why only now - that 2020 has been the most ridiculous soap opera ever. All we’ve lacked is the dead Bobby Ewing miraculously revived and taking a shower. We began this arch annus horribilis still scratching our heads as to how a comedy politician could have become prime minister, assembling a cabinet of apparent toadies hell-bent on “getting Brexit done” above all other priorities, as if one of Batman’s various nemeses had been installed and gathered together a cast of cartoon super villains to see out their agenda.

However, when the pandemic unfolded (or, in other words, we caught what the rest of the world had been getting since January and February), we entered into the new distraction with stoic uniformity. In an unusually warm, blue-skied spring, we stood on our doorsteps on a Thursday at 8pm, applauding essential workers in the ever-lightening evenings. We endured the first lockdown because it was the right thing to do and, if you were lucky enough to have a garden, “working from home” from a lawn chair with a cooling refreshment at your side wasn’t exactly a hardship. Some of us, however, had to shield or at least remain inside, denied any human contact due to a clinical vulnerability that even the scientists didn’t, then, fully understand, while hospitals started to fill up. But, still, we endured it. Then summer entered the final straight of August, and if we were able, we took off to Cornwall, or the Lakes, or anywhere where, again with agreeable weather, we could at least enjoy the placebo effect of taking a holiday somewhere.

However, 2020’s scriptwriters are of a fiendish creed. Just as we think Den and Angie are getting on again, the former turns up at the Queen Vic with divorce papers on December 25th. “Happy Christmas, Ange!”. Effectively, that’s what Boris Johnson did yesterday. Just three days before he’d been mocking Sir Keir Starmer’s seemingly grinchish call for Christmas to be cancelled, only for the prime minister to do it himself, anyway. I think only Liverpool won the Lack Of Christmas Spirit award by a higher margin, spanking Crystal Palace 7-0 yesterday. Those writing that script are having devilish fun. One minute it’s all talk of vaccines and “sunlit uplands”, and Boris is invoking Churchill [again] with his Dame Vera Lynn rhetoric, the next, we’re all contemplating what to do with the mountain of excess food bought for a lunch that will now be spent by small bubbles (and without the squeak, too). Not even 24’s Jack Bauer faced as many ridiculous changes of circumstance.

I’m not going to even pretend to have better knowledge of this virus than the experts. And I’m certainly not going to second-guess the wisdom of those bunkered in 10 Downing Street 24/7 trying to figure it all out. But there’s something fundamentally wrong. It’s called expectation management. I’ve learned, in my 32-year professional PR career, that managing your stakeholders’ expectations is the key. It’s not about keeping people happy, either. Just better informed and better prepared. Even in crisis situations, where situational fluidity is the enemy, you prepare for it. Or at least give the perception of doing so. Right now, the British government is giving the impression of being unprepared for anything. At risk of being simplistic, the feeling we all get is that the medical experts and scientists say one thing, and Bozza takes the populist view for fear of ruining everything. And, yet, in not taking unpleasant decisions soon enough, he’s done exactly that. How many people were still out shopping yesterday, believing that there were still a few more days until Christmas, only to get the newsflash on their phones that 16.4 million people in London, the south-east and eastern England would now be banned from mixing indoors for at least the next two weeks, as of a minute past midnight this morning? All this because of a ‘mutant variant’ of the coronavirus, VUI-2020/12/01 which, it is claimed, was first identified as long ago as September, and which has proven to be 70% more infectious than previous strains, even though it did not appear to cause higher death rates or be any more resistant to vaccines.

“When the virus changes its method of attack, we must change our method of defence,” Boris intoned from No.10 yesterday. “And as your prime minister, I sincerely believe there is no alternative open to me.” This from the man who, on Wednesday during Prime Minister’s Questions, made the comment to Starmer:  ”I wish he had the guts to just say what he really wants to do, which is to cancel the plans people have made and to cancel Christmas.” And, yet, that’s exactly what Johnson did yesterday. It’s not, either, the first U-turn he’s made like this. 

The narrative from the outset is that everyone is learning as they go, which is fair enough. To tap into Boris’s Churchill fantasies, we’re not in the same kind of conflict as an actual war. In 1940, Britain had the combination of resilience, the Royal Air Force, radar and an intelligence network - all the apparatus of conventional war - to keep the enemy at bay. Today, it’s the combined excellence of a medical, scientific and pharmaceutical community, in principle in concert with politicians and a civil service that should be able to draw on the best strategic and tactical wisdom to make informed decisions. Which makes you wonder why, when VUI-20/12/01 has been known about for weeks (and only last weekend was ringing very real alarm bells within the Department of Health & Social Care and, in particular, on Matt Hancock’s desk), it took a full week of everyone doing their Christmas preparations (as well as a House of Commons ding-dong which Boris chose, as per usual, to treat with typical flippancy), before the tough decision was made to bugger up Christmas for almost 30% of the English population, and severely restrict millions more?

I get it that the script for 2020 has been peppered with devilish twists and turns. I see councils - like Bromley’s - having to issue three different tiering instructions in the space of 10 days. I get the science: hospitals in London and the south-east are already filling up, and the entire premise for lockdown in the first place - protect the NHS from being overwhelmed - is getting close to prophecy becoming real, and it may well be that Boris has made the only decision he could have done. We’ll cope - we always do: we’ll change our plans, and we’ll put up with eating Pot Noodles on Christmas Day because it was too late to get an Ocado delivery in and Tesco Express round the corner had nothing better. And, yes, we’ll bunker at home watching crap TV, revelling in a Blitz spirit of “it is what is”. But that won’t help my near-91-year-old mother, whose Christmas is going to be a pretty basic affair (even if her stoicism, honed during her own very real wartime evacuation as a ten-year-old, is probably more robust than anyone else in the family). Because, with a little more expectation management, we could have planned ahead, rather than wait for the curtain to be brought down halfway through the performance. 

They think it’s all over. Well it still isn’t

Picture: AstraZeneca

Given that our current prime minister sees himself as Winston Churchill-incarnate, there’s a temptation to look upon yesterday’s 'V-Day' rollout of the coronavirus vaccine in the terms of the wartime leader’s famous quote in the autumn of 1942, when the tide of the Second World War appeared to turn: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Boris and Matt Hancock, his perpetually perky propagandist health minister, might be seeing those “sunlit uplands” hoving closer into view, but - and sorry to rain on their parade - there is still a long road out of the pandemic. Fantastic as it is that yesterday saw the first vaccinations administered, and that by Christmas the NHS should have had four million doses available, but infection rates remain stubborn. Yesterday’s government figures recorded over 12,000 new national COVID-19 cases, almost 1,500 new hospital admissions and 616 new deaths - the equivalent of three Boeing 737s crashing catastrophically with all on board. Sorry to bring the mood music down.

Even if the excitement about the vaccine is entirely understandable - people are desperate for some semblance of normality - normality is clearly not on the agenda yet. Speaking today at a joint meeting of the House of Commons Science & Technology and Health & Social Care committees, England’s chief science officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said: “The biggest risk we face now is that people think it’s all over. It isn't all over. We have a very important light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re a long way off. It’s not the time to relax things. If that happens we will have a big surge." His partner in crime, England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, added that, in general, the British public had responded well to the restrictions on life since March. “The altruism of the British public cannot be understated,” he said. “Because of that, many, many people have been saved.” But, he noted, some people will get bored of the restrictions.

That seems to be evident here in Tier 2 London, where there is a very real risk that a rise in virus cases in two-thirds of the capital’s boroughs could put it into Tier 3, just as the Christmas shopping season reaches its frenzy. One former Public Health England regional director, told The Guardian today that a decision on moving London up to Tier 3 was needed within the next 48 hours, otherwise it faced a “terrible situation”, with rising deaths ahead of Christmas. According to the Evening Standard eight east London boroughs have recorded more than 200 new cases a week per 100,000 of population in the week to last Thursday. Worryingly, my borough, Kingston-upon-Thames, has the ninth-highest infection rates in London, recording 202.8 per 100,000.

Graphic: The Times

My experience of being out and about in London in recent days is that most people are still observing the rules on social distancing and mask wearing, but it is still only ‘most’ people. On the Tube on Friday there were people openly ignoring the rules on masks. Likewise, in a department store we were in at the weekend. It’s not often that I’ll agree with a Conservative MP, but I’ll make an exception for Nickie Aiken, the MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, who told the Evening Standard: “Every single person who breaks the rules adds to the chances of [London] going into Tier 3. We have got to work together as one city to ensure our cafes, restaurants, shops and other businesses survive and also to protect lives.”

Ah, cafes and restaurants. Of all the commercial activities that have struggled the most during the pandemic’s economic haemorrhage, they remain the one statue of normality that we cling to, to the extent - and I speak from bitter experience - we’re prepared to turn blue-lipped to sit, COVID-compliantly, outside pubs. But even this break for freedom comes at a price. How many people, out of desperation to have a pint while sticking to the rules, are ordering a “substantial meal” (such as…er…a Scotch egg…) which they then leave untouched? 

It’s something that a Sheffield barman has, to his absolute credit, made a stand on. Last weekend, Will Dalrymple, tweeted pictures of wasted meals that had been abandoned by his pub’s customers who had “only wanted two Morettis each”. Pubs in Tier 2 can only remain open if they effectively operate as restaurants, offering something more than a packet of Pork Scratchings. Dalrymple complained in several tweets how people had ordered sandwiches, side salads and bowls of chips which ended up in the bin. He said that he saw the rationale behind the rules, but also saw the position they put pub staff in. While the practice of ordering food and not eating it wouldn’t harm a pub’s finances, the moral position about wasting food is just as serious: “With everything in the news about people relying on food banks and free school meals, this is utterly obscene,” he added. ”If you're desperate to go to/support a pub, go when you're hungry.” 

Picture: Twitter/@WJDalrymple

Depressingly, Dalrymple’s tweets drew out the trolls keen to point out that people are just looking for escape. “I completely understand people's frustration at the rules,” he wrote. “I'm as grateful for and welcoming to customers as I ever was. “However, hospitality workers have no choice but to enforce the rules. All these tweets are asking for is for co-operation.” 

What doesn’t help is the lack of clarity on what constitutes a substantial meal. Various government ministers have fudged the issue, while some pubs have even tried to circumnavigate the rules by agreeing to host local takeaways or, simply, boiling a kettle and serving up a Pot Noodle. The point here is that there needs to be a happy balance. Freedom - as we knew it before March - will return, but not for some time.

The Great British Standoff

So welcome back to the working week. Another Monday, and I’m back on the living room sofa (sat upright, I should point out), my preferred location from which to work from home. This has been my office since lockdown began, all those months ago. Indeed, apart from a first couple of weeks in my new job, which began in April, perched at the kitchen table (until I discovered that my arse isn't compatible with sitting on a vintage wooden chair for any length of time...) worklife has revolved around our lounge.

There has been no office banter, no coffee machine updates on house conveyancing dramas, no awkward encounters in the work gym with the last person in the world you’d expect to find there, none of it. Indeed, until July’s restrictions on going outside were lifted on people like me with underlying health conditions, my world vista was mostly limited to the TV in the corner and the bay window, with our street beyond it. Do I miss commuting? Well, yes, of course I do. Probably. We all complain about it, we all moan about the train delays and traffic jams, and even before the coronavirus came along, I used to dread winter commuting, when you could time to the precise minute the onset of a heavy cold linked to that ungracious twat across the Tube carriage who sneezed or coughed without covering up. 

Getting up, going to the office, being amongst people for eight hours or so, doing your thing, and then coming home again has been an integral part of my entire working life, all 34 years of it so far (in fact, tomorrow marks the anniversary of me starting my first job in 1986). Sitting at a laptop and taking conference calls in the same room as the family kicks back to watch Selling Sunset still feels like pulling a sickie, even if I’ve probably been more industrious at home without workplace distractions. My wellbeing, however, seems to have taken a backseat in the latest chapter of the COVID crisis, with the British government pitting itself against a reluctant nation by calling on workers to get back to the office. 

Last week Boris Johnson launched his own version of wartime slogans activating the Land Army by effectively saying it was everyone’s civic duty to go back to offices, the subtext being that office workers were desperately needed to revitalise the micro-economies that exist around city centres (the sandwich shops, cafes and coffee outlets, barbers, shirt shops and so on). While Johnson’s call is understandable, it shouldn’t be forgotten that he, himself, had a near-perilous brush with the coronavirus not that long ago, in a workplace outbreak that also managed to take out Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Matt Hancock, the government's chief medical adviser, Chris Witty, and other members of the COVID war cabinet. So, er, Boris - forgive me or anyone for being reluctant to getting back into the same room as those from outside my bubble, or whatever is this week’s advice.

People are, though, gradually emerging from their kitchens and spare bedroom offices. According to the Office for National Statistics, those working exclusively from home almost halved from a peak of 38% in June to 20% at the end of August. In London, Tube and bus journeys have been creeping up too, though not that far. Either way, Britain still lags behind other European countries in returning to city offices. According to Morgan Stanley, more than two-thirds of office workers in France, Germany, Spain and Italy were back at their desks, whereas only a third of British workers had returned. 

There is, then, something of a standoff, between a government desperate to plug a widening economic sinkhole and a public that has grown used to working from home, though it should be stressed that we’re mostly talking about office workers here. Still, when you consider the carnage COVID-19 has wreaked across the service sector, with daily redundancy figures in the thousands being chalked up by the likes of Pret a Manger and Costa Coffee, it’s clear just how Britain’s generational shift from industry to service economy is bearing the brunt of the coronavirus impact. The question is, will it ever return to how it once was?

At the start of the pandemic, companies were quick to mobilise home working if it was possible to do so. IT systems were made more robust to cope with everyone operating remotely and, for the most part, it worked. Five months in to WFH, in my case, and I don’t know any different. Skype has universally replaced round-the-table team meetings, WhatsApp has supplanted some of the office banter, and rather than gaining weight through a lack of getting up and going to work, I’ve managed to shift a couple of stone. Whether I’m missing the “fizz and excitement that you get in a really good workplace,” as former health secretary Jeremy Hunt described it last week on Sky News, is another thing entirely. I remember some fizz at my first PR agency, but that was usually on a Friday afternoon when the Ab Fabbers in the consumer account team would crack open a bottle of Bolly on a Friday afternoon.

I am, though, possibly skirting the real issue here. Paranoia about catching COVID on the Tube is understandable, but for the government - and Boris Johnson - to hector us back to the office is a bit rich. Public trust in our elected leaders is at an all-time low, thanks to everything from the Cummings-in-Durham episode to the school exam U-turns. Running a country during any crisis, let alone something as existential as now, is not easy, and no one wants to be an armchair general. But people need to be confident to return to the office, and that, simply is lacking. 

I’ll grant Boris & Co that the lifting of lockdown in July was an ace in the hole: I felt able to visit a supermarket for the first time since March, just by wearing a mask. I could go out for coffee and even afford myself a little quiet contemplation, as I used to. More recently, I’ve been able to get back into the swimming pool, albeit with COVID-safe procedures, but still nourishing my mental wellbeing as much as helping diminish my waistline further. But this, I recognise, only exists within a radius of less than five minutes’ walk from the front door. To go further afield - to work - is still not viable. I’m still in a medically vulnerable group, and my office requires public transport to reach. I could drive, but where would I park and why would I add to London’s traffic? Cycling, the healthy option, would require a four-hour round trip (and a bike I can't currently get hold of), and walking - the other helpful piece of government advice - would be an eight-hour round trip. Or, roughly, the same amount of time I’d actually spend in the office.

Thankfully, I work for one of the many companies in Britain not in a rush to impose a return to office regularity. Indeed, I benefit from an employer which, Adam Marshall, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce, has said engages in a “mature conversation” with its employees. He has also said that city centres may never see a return to pre-crisis levels of activity, a point reflected by a Cardiff University survey that found that half of UK workers want to work at home permanently, while 90% want to do so “from time to time”. Such surveys have been consistently similar over the course of the last few months. Mixed government messages won’t help, either. Understandably, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, needs the recession ended quickly to pay for the mind-boggling sums being spent on furlough schemes and all the rest. Hancock, the health secretary, is still coping with virus outbreaks and a steep rise in new infections reported over the weekend that saw the number of daily recorded cases rise to almost 3,000 yesterday, 1,000 more than Saturday.

But let's not distract from the wider point of this post, that commuting to the office is, for many people, still not something they're prepared to do. In a few months, COVID has changed a national stereotype, once depicted by films of bowler-hatted men - and I emphasise the gender here - disgorging from trains at Waterloo Station. We even read of a trend in the housing market, as those able to buy a house right now, moving out to remote parts of the country (assuming they have broadband) where they plan to work from home more often than not. House prices have even surged as a result.

I appreciate that this might be a very London-centric point of view, but city centres across the UK have replicated, in varying degrees, the downturn in economic activity in the capital's centre. For now, and possibly forever, commuting has changed for London's eight million people (and anything up to a further million outside of Greater London who travel in for work). For all the incentives (such as news and financial information giant Bloomberg  paying its staff an extra £55 a day to come into the office), and all the provisions of hand sanitiser, there has been an unprecedented shift over the last few months, with home working now the preferred default. Why put up with the vagaries of South West Railway when you can be at work barely seconds after cleaning your teeth at home? Your laptop's connected, you're conference calling like a demon throughout the day, and you're managing to do everything you did before, just without the cross-desk banter and the ability to pop your head around the boss's door to check something. 

Offices used to be defined by facility: a place for productivity via desktop PCs, printers and photocopiers, a communal space for meetings and interaction. A revolution has just taken place this year, and there's a danger that Boris might be tilting at windmills expecting it to be reversed. As columnist Clare Foges writes The Times today: "The work-from-home genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and it won’t go back in again." I don't think she's wrong.

Behind the mask

It occurred to me this morning that COVID-19 is just the pandemic Britain needs. I don't mean this flippantly, of course - 40,000 people have now died of this thing here, after all. No, what I mean is that if any country was attuned to social distancing, it's us. We're an island nation, for starters, and when taking the famous British reserve into account, probably more comfortable keeping a measured space between each other as anyone.

The reason this only occurred to me today is that I ventured out for a doctor's appointment, wearing a face mask, and I don't think I've ever felt so self-conscious. It was hard enough wearing it and sunglasses, with the latter steaming up as I pegged it down the road to a last-minute appointment that had opened up suddenly, like a coveted Ocado delivery slot. I must have looked like Griffin in HG Wells' The Invisible Man. Actually, I did. Thankfully, I was not alone.

On the rare occasions I have ventured out into my local high street during the lockdown I've been struck by the number of others wearing face masks. New Malden has a sizeable Korean community, so pre-coronavirus, someone wearing a mask wasn't all that unusual a sight, given the cultural popularity of facial coverings among Asian nations, dating back to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. But whereas we might have once looked upon our Korean neighbours with the wry smile once worn while watching Clive James's Sunday night observations of life in Asia, the bandit look is fast becoming de rigueur. In fact, it's conceivable that for the forseeable future, this is how we'll be looking at most people we encounter. From next Monday it will be compulsory to wear face coverings when travelling on public transport and for all staff and outpatients visiting hospitals. Wearing a mask might, too, become a condition of entry to shops as they start to reopen from next week.

Slowly but surely, Britain is losing its chin - literally. The lower halves of our faces are retreating behind a layer of cloth as the price to be paid for venturing into the community again. Soon, we will be recognisable only by our eyes, eyebrows and whatever state our newly-bouffant hair is in. Throw on the Wayfarers, as I did this morning, and we're almost in the realm of The Who's Tommy - "...put in your earplugs, put on your eyeshades - you know where to put the cork". However, despite health secretary Matt Hancock's claim that COVID-19 itself is "in retreat", it is not. New infections and deaths in the UK may have come down considerably, but as it stands, there is neither a cure or a vaccine, and people are still dying, which in my view means that it's still out there.

There are two issues with this: firstly, there is still no consensus amongst experts as to whether face masks, of the kind most people have managed to acquire privately, do any good. A German study has suggested that the mandatory wearing of masks has coincided with a drop in infections, but there is still some doubt as to a direct link. The coronavirus is a tricky bugger and unlike any other when looked at from a micro-biological point of view, which means that all the masks and anti-bac gels in the world won't do a damn thing unless social distancing continues to be rigidly applied. Although the medical and scientific community does agree that masks - even if just fashioned crudely from your once-favourite tour T-shirt - do offer some protection (to you and to others), it's still only limited.

They might stop virus-laden droplets from spreading out into the 'cone' of dispersal after you cough or sneeze but, apparently, they're not so good at preventing the tiny particles from getting in from other people. Then there's the false sense of security they might give: even masked up, the high street this morning was full of foreboding - some wearing masks, some not, some observing two metres' social distance, some not. One man I encountered, almost immediately after I left the surgery, came out of a newsagent coughing copiously, albeit into his mask, which must have been pleasant for him. He certainly showed no sign of concern that he was right in front of me and others as he went.

Masks are, therefore, not shields. I may not fully understand the epidemiology at work here, and I may also live in one of the London boroughs with the lowest number of coronavirus cases of all, but I still view the world outside my front window as being a hostile one that could kill me. My mask, this morning, would have only offered a limited amount of protection. So what's the alternative? Are we now only to venture into exposed environments wearing hazmat suits? Well, it's a thought. Ever since I was told to stay home or stay alert, whichever government doctrine was in force at the time, I have consistently looked at 'outside' as a danger, as if Chernobyl had moved in across the road, and anyone out there was suddenly glowing like the kids in those Ready Brek ads in the 1970s.

The message from government is, increasingly, give up your fears. The economy is on its knees and won't return unless we get out into the great unknown and start putting ourselves at risk. "Some risk," the experts might say, but still a risk. No doubt soon we'll be told that the risk is no more than that associated with crossing the road, though with the number of idiots using the lockdown to speed up and down suburban backstreets, that's not such the low-risk experience it once was. Others will say that the face mask is a small price to pay for freedom, but think of what - and who - it cuts off. My elderly mother, who has been losing her hearing, struggles at best to hear what you say to her, let alone from two metres away. Not being able to read my lips will cut her off further.

But, as I opened this post suggesting, perhaps the country being forced to look like The Lone Ranger for the foreseeable future will not be so bad. Maybe we'll just get used to it. Maybe, until this thing gets beaten, we'll just have to get used to walking around with only half our facial identity visible. Some, I'm sure will like that. Others, like me, will have to accept it as simply essential.