On Monday, head boy Sajid Javid gave a statement about the new Covid restrictions to the Commons. He said, in essence: “I don’t like ’em, but we’ve got no choice.”

Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, the shadow mental health secretary, replied that the Government wasn’t going far enough. But then, Labour’s strategy is always to outbid the Tories, so if Saj said kids must wear masks in class, Labour would insist they also be hosed down with Dettol. 

Labour is feeling especially neurotic because it is going through a reshuffle, something that deputy leader Angela Rayner found out only after she had denied it was happening. Angry Ange was in the Commons, too. No doubt she was muttering blue murder behind her mask.

Sometimes, the parties accidentally help each other out. Labour MPs hate Labour MPs, but they hate the Tories even more, and nothing unifies them like that gang of noisy Tories who refuse to wear masks in the Commons. Des, Bridgers and Marky-Mark Harper, the bad boys of Covid who usually sit at the back of the class, sneering at the goody-two-shoes kids who brought teacher an apple. 

Dealing with ‘mumbo jumbo’

Keeping the mask mandate would’ve been Labour’s Plan A, said Dr Allin-Khan, triggering roars of laughter. They’ve been wearing them in Wales since the summer, noted Conservative Alun Cairns, and infection rates are higher.

“It’s mumbo jumbo!” added Sir Desmond Swayne in a considered intervention. I pity the fool that ever tries to muzzle that man.

Attention returned to Sajid. Will the Health Secretary rule out a national lockdown, asked Richard Drax? Saj couldn’t say. 

Thank you for agreeing to hold a vote on the new measures, said Sir Graham Brady. But wouldn’t it have made more sense to do it today, before they come into effect? Saj side-stepped that one, too. 

And if the restrictions are due to be reviewed in three weeks, said Andrew Bridgen, Saj surely knows the Commons will be in recess at that time, so will this be “government by diktat”?

Polar opposites unmasked

See, there’s plenty of opportunity for blue-on-blue blood-letting, were it not for Labour’s counter-plan to mandate the wearing of 12 sheets of bubble-wrap. The Government’s measures might be un-Tory, invasive and contradictory (masks in Waitrose, but not in the cinema? I’ll be doing all my shopping in the local Odeon from now on). 

But Saj’s insistence that they are “temporary” and “precautionary” sounds more plausible when contrasted with a party opposite that responds to every minor infringement of the rules like a coachload of skittish nuns. 

It came to Saj to point out that even if we’d been wearing masks back in July, as Labour believes we ought, it would not have stopped the variant.

Tories, in their bones, generally think the sun will come out tomorrow. The Left is petrified that the world is about to end. Ironic because Cop26, the summit that the Left said was necessary to save us from certain death, might have been a superspreader event. 

When our restrictions are finally lifted, perhaps the Covid rebels will table a motion to send Greta Thunberg the bill.