A Petulant Would-Be Despot

Matt Handcock Is Trying to Run the UK Like a 50's Prep School


Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday

Until I started travelling in the Communist world, my main experience of living under tyranny was my time at a boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, 60 years ago.  The headmaster, an enormous, booming man, had many fine qualities. But he was given to dreadful rages, which tended to strike late on Saturday afternoons.

He would throb with fury because some of the more loutish boys had left their games clothes on the changing room floor.   For some reason, he viewed this as a terrible crime closely related to murder. So he would summon us into the assembly hall, and harangue us as darkness fell outside.  The more we stood mulishly in front of him, saying nothing and with our eyes downcast, the angrier he became.

Sometimes he would hold up a pair of muddy football shorts as horrific evidence of the latest atrocity. Collective punishments – a ban on eating toast, or the cancellation of a promised film show – would follow, along with more shouting and angry notices in red ink, threatening worse to come.  Most of us were guiltless of wrongdoing. But we were small, and he was huge. The staff seemed more scared of him than we were.

We were on a windswept hilltop miles from anywhere. We had no escape.  We assumed our letters home were censored, so we put up with these ludicrous exhibitions and waited for the storm to pass.
Oddly enough, the terror did not work. People carried on leaving their clothes on the floor, just the same.

I had thought such childish things were long over in my life. But a week ago I found that I was, once again, living at the mercy of an equally petulant would-be despot.

Matthew Hancock, Secretary of State for Health, went on national TV to threaten to ban outdoor exercise if people continued to break 'social distancing' rules.  From a Government that claims to be preserving life and health, this threat was literally mad.

Banning exercise for any length of time will lead to the deaths and illness of many thousands of currently healthy, older people who know that such exercise is vital to their physical and mental wellbeing.  Such exercise can easily be taken while maintaining the required distance from others.

The threat was a dictatorial one, of collective punishment of all for the wrongdoing of others.  This is illegal under Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. A foreign occupier would not be allowed to do it.

Mr Hancock also said it was 'quite extraordinary' that some people had spent the weekend sunbathing in public places despite it being against Government guidance.  Getting into his stride, he urged people not to sit down even for a minute on a park bench, saying those who disobeyed the rules were putting their own and others' lives at risk.

What is this nonsense? The words of Ministers and the words and actions of the police show a pointlessly bossy side to these measures – the attempted ban on Easter egg purchases, the sunbathing squad, alleged arrests of people for just buying wine and crisps, the lumpish threat by a police chief to search the baskets of shoppers.

Provided the people doing these things do not break the distancing rules, why are they wrong?  Sunbathing, for instance, probably reduces the risk of infection, and if people keep a proper distance apart, what on earth is wrong with it? Why shouldn't someone sit on a park bench?

Mr Hancock said: 'I say this to the small minority of people who are breaking the rules or pushing the boundaries: you are risking your own life and the lives of others and you're making it harder for us all.'  I almost expected him to produce some rumpled piece of games kit and snarl 'You have brought all this on yourselves', as the nation cowered, trembling in short trousers before his unchallenged might.

Actually I try hard to follow the Government's rule on social distancing.  I do this much as I seek to respect the local religion when I go to Muslim or Buddhist countries.  I don't believe in it, but it is only polite not to offend openly against it. And I very much urge you to do the same.

Nobody should take my words as any kind of encouragement to ignore the rules.  Unlike the Government's wild destruction of the economy, and its attack on personal liberty, it can do no harm to keep your distance from others. It might do some good.  But I sense something more going on here.

The Government are trying to get us to accept a far higher level of state intrusion in our lives than we have ever endured.   They are treating us as if we were unruly children. This is despite what I regard as a quite extraordinary willingness among the great majority to do as we are asked.   It has gone to their heads. They need to calm down, for the sake of all of us.

We are not children, this is not some 1950s prep school ruled by the swish of the cane, and Mr Hancock is not our headmaster.