Michael Blackburn: ‘The government has committed the greatest abuse against our civil liberties ever enacted, enforcing what is effectively house arrest, dictating to us what we can do, where we can go, who we can meet. In addition to telling us how much physical distance we have to maintain between each other it now commands us as to what we should wear. The legislation enabling all of this was passed through parliament with no dissent and no argument.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘The stress of lockdown has no doubt played a part in generating some of this behaviour, but the sad truth is that however ephemeral each outburst, whether it’s statues, misgendering, climate panic or whatever, the underlying political movement to destabilise society is as strong as ever.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘It was clear to me that [the new slogans] signalled the lockdown was over and we were now in government-damage-limitation mode. To openly admit the panic was over would, ironically, have sent some people deeper into panic, so infantilised by fear have they become that they would not be able to believe they were safe until every trace of the virus has been eradicated from the country.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘You can also sense a host of novelists, famous and obscure, published and never-to-be-published, already busy making notes towards their coronavirus novel, in which they will dazzle readers with their insight into group psychology, political chicanery and the epidemiology of pandemics, while wittily dismembering the Tory government and the failures of capitalism.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘Scrooge’s miserliness was explained by sexual abuse in childhood and exacerbated by his devotion to the capitalist pursuit of profit by all means. He sexually humiliated and blackmailed Mrs Scrooge (miraculously cleansed of whiteness) and spent a lot of time waxing philosophically nihilistic about life, death, the universe, money and the miserable nature of mankind. Rather like Schopenhauer but without the humour.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘But with the worst situation in mind — that motor vehicles will become the expensive playthings of the rich — perhaps we should look back to earlier times for a solution. The kind of greeny answer Monbiot and the like might hark back to in their desire to rewild and re-savage the country. Not railways, which are expensive to build and have limited reach, but horses.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘Johnson, on the other hand, has ridden victoriously over the political corpses of his opponents and emerged triumphant with a large parliamentary majority and the good prospect of a second election win in the future. Not bad for a blustering buffoon who mispronounces his Homer.’

Michael Blackburn: ‘What the Attlee government ultimately did was embed a socialist mentality into the social, political and economic fabric of the country, so that even the Tories went along with enough of it to find themselves trapped by its ethos and industrial processes within a few years. The arrival of Thatcher shook things up economically but did not in reality break the post-war consensus, as the conventional narrative has it.’