Hypocritical Hancock bitten on the backside by Covid-secure state he helped build

This is Iain Martin’s newsletter for Reaction subscribers. Try a free 30 day trial here.

Visitors entering the National Gallery in London are presented with three options, once through security and at the top of the stairs. There are three routes signposted – A, B and C. Turn left on the one way system to take Route A, and you are into the rooms that host early religious art from before the Renaissance. All glittering gold, deep reds, azure blues and sombre scenes hymning devotion and sacrifice.

Feeling in need of some virtuous activity on Sunday morning, during a weekend of eating and drinking in London, we opted for Route A and within a few minutes regretted it. One room was enough. In the right mood I could look at that stuff for hours. In a mask, in the era of Covid, I needed something more earthly and entertaining.

We crossed the one way system and nipped back to the start of Route B, to head in the direction of Veronese, Rubens and Rembrandt.

Stop! A Covid crime, a breach of the rules, had been committed. A member of staff only doing his job rushed over and politely but firmly pointed out that we had to stay on the one way system. By this time we were out of Route A, and onto another one way system – Route B. “We’re going that way,” I said, pointing. “Enough early religious art, thank you” said my wife.

We were allowed to go on our way, but had been reminded by the encounter that the rules are the rules are the rules, and logic can go hang.

Is there any scientific basis for the one way systems that public buildings now enforce? Does the airborne virus only move in one direction? Around the most famous pictures, visitors cluster seeking a better view and there is not much social distancing. Question such rules as the one way system and on social media those terrified by the public health emergency will stand up shrieking that it is all to keep us safe. An hour immersed in the glories of the National Gallery, contemplating the “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” nature of all human activity, is a reminder that the notion of perpetual safety is a delusion.

The authoritarian absurdity of the pandemic era rulebook, and the pointless theatre that goes with it, was underlined a few hours later when we were caught on the edge of the rather lively protest march put on by the music industry and clubbing fraternity. Thousands of youngsters partied their way down Regent Street and Haymarket, passing Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. Good on them, though the pungent smell of weed was somewhat off-putting – does it kill Covid?

Unmasked, the youngsters (and a few elderly veterans of the late 1980s scene) were protesting righteously the erosion of their liberties and demanding the right to dance, rave and socialise. They were so tightly packed together that any advantage they had against the virus by being outside was surely invalidated. Meanwhile, in the ventilated and Covid compliant National Gallery metres away, people were still masked and shuffling their way round Route A, B, or C. But remember, don’t try to mix it up by crossing from Route A onto Route B and defying the sainted one way system.

This is the paranoid world of contradictory, controlling rules and “stay safe” restrictions that Matt Hancock helped to create. He is one of the architects of the whole rotten edifice.

The former Health Secretary resigned on Saturday evening, having been exposed by The Sun for kissing an aide, breaking the rules he had forced on others.

My Reaction colleague Bruce Anderson has expressed sympathy for “poor Matt Hancock,” because he is supposedly able and has had his career interrupted. While I feel sympathy for his wife and children, and for the others who are collateral damage in this sad business, sympathy for Hancock is  not what many of us will be feeling as we contemplate the wreckage. Balls to sympathy for Matt Hancock.

It is just weeks since the Queen was forced to sit alone in grief, separated from her family, at the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh. Many families have suffered similar hardships. The government has micro-managed social interaction and continues to boss us around almost gleefully, tracking us via the NHS app and pinging people when they encounter an infected person.

Hugging granny has been forbidden for close to 18 months. Youngsters have had their education and life chances harmed. They have willingly made sacrifices to protect others from a disease that poses them no serious risk.

And then we discover that the hypocritical Health Secretary, who has criticised other rule-breakers, is breaking those rules by carrying on inside the Department of Health and elsewhere.

Incidentally, we only discovered it all via a free press that got its hands on the footage, it seems from a disgruntled Department of Health employee or contractor. 

Understandably, there are concerns about the security breach and it must be investigated. There is some poetic justice, though, that Hancock’s downfall should be down to a data breach and CCTV-tracking when we are tracked and ordered about incessantly by the burgeoning Covid-secure state.

Ultimately, this is an object lesson in how our idea of politics – ordinarily the complex interplay of competing forces and obligations in a free society – has been corrupted by the state wielding a sledgehammer ensuring we must comply to “stay safe”. Restrictions make you free, and so on.

It is a new version of an old Orwellian story. A feature of authoritarian states, or even  democratic governments too fond of power, is an assumption that there are the People (cap P). One set of rules apply to the People and another to the ruling cadre. The party, and it easily becomes too intertwined with the state, looks after the welfare of the People. It is the People’s government, after all. The elite of the party work so hard (night and day, like Hancock) looking after the People and our wellbeing that it is only reasonable they are allowed their own special rules to reflect how hard they work to protect us. But even if you disagree with this license for special status fear not, because you’ll never get to find out. Only here, the Sun had other ideas, thank goodness.

I make no comment on the personal morality aspects of what he did, not my business. But more broadly Hancock’s egregious hypocrisy and arrogant attitude was straight out of the Eastern bloc playbook in the Communist era. There were the rules for the little people. Then there were a different set of rules for the state bosses, being ferried around in cars, being important and hard-pressed, their paths (and more) smoothed by advisers. Hancock assumed he could tell us to do one thing then do another himself for his own gratification.

Luckily, for all that the political culture of this country has been infantilised further by creeping authoritarianism and bureaucratic over-reach during the pandemic, there is still just – just – enough in circulation of the old liberty-loving spirit of Hogarthian England to do for Matt Hancock.

In the National Gallery, there are some of the finest examples of the satirist Hogarth’s work. Go see Marriage a la Mode – a morality tale in six paintings. You’ll find it on Route B on the one way system.