I have succumbed. On the train to work yesterday I wore a mask for the first time since the prematurely designated “Freedom Day” back in July. Since then, we had been advised to continue covering our faces on public transport; but since it was no longer mandated by law I declined to do so, along with many others.

By last week, roughly half the passengers with whom I commuted were maskless. Yesterday, I would judge that about 98 per cent of them wore coverings. A few refuseniks, selfishly reckless or courageous, depending on your point of view, remained bare faced.

I rather admired their obduracy as mine had crumpled, yet I still found myself delivering the “who do you think you are?” stare so often directed towards me during my maskless mutiny. This is marginally less alarming than the “we’re all going to die because of you” glower that can be detected in the gaze of the more panic-stricken. Are we to evolve over the years into a species able to recognise emotions just through watching the eyes of others, unable to tell whether they are smiling or grimacing beneath the mask?

I object to masks not because my reading glasses steam up or my breathing is impaired but because they are dehumanising devices that should be obligatory only in extremis, not as a go-to expedient for a panicky Cabinet. But what do I know, you may well ask? Let us all defer to medical experts such as Dr Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, who was interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday about the new measures introduced to combat the spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

This was the same Dr Harries who, at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, stated that wearing masks was “not a good idea” and that “you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in”. In other words, coverings were as likely to cause infection as prevent it. Even as late as August last year, Dr Harries said: “The evidence on face coverings is not very strong in either direction.”

She apparently still harbours these doubts because on Today she said people should avoid socialising until it was clear that omicron was not as transmissible or as virulent as feared. This was an astonishing statement given that it is not government policy and she is a state employee. It infuriated Tory MPs in the Commons, who demanded that officials stick to advising rather than making up their own policy. Is it now the case that any functionary, however well qualified, can go on the airwaves and contradict ministers?

Boris Johnson has not reintroduced enforced distancing because it would have a devastating impact on the hospitality sector, which has already been poleaxed by the pandemic. This is evidently a political, rather than medical, decision – not one that should be gainsaid by a civil servant, otherwise we are living in a technocracy.

Until last summer, the official World Health Organisation advice was against face coverings which it said were likely to be counterproductive. One worry was that it encouraged people who should stay at home to move around because they believed the mask to be a prophylactic. On my train yesterday a masked woman was coughing and spluttering, presumably thinking she was causing no harm, yet she was more of a spreader than someone without a mask who has nothing wrong with them.

The scientific consensus now is that masks are better at suppressing the spread of airborne viruses than not, provided almost everyone wears them. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are currently subject to mask mandates and yet, more than 18 months after it began, little research has been carried out into their effectiveness during the pandemic. There has been one big study in Denmark, the so-called Danmask trial, involving 6,000 people and designed to detect at least a 50 per cent protection against infection given by mask wearing. This research did not find a statistically significant result for the effect of masks, even the surgical variety as opposed to the paper coverings that many of us use.

This leads inevitably to the conclusion, indeed the very basis for Dr Harries’s startling intervention, that the only scientifically proven preventative measure is to avoid meeting up with anyone who might have the disease – a voluntary lockdown, in other words. The even more egregious new measure – obligatory isolation should you come into contact with anyone who has omicron – reflects that thinking. This will be imposed on us even if we are perfectly well, have had three jabs and wear face masks religiously.

Perversely, this measure removes one of the incentives to get vaccinated among those who have not done so. Why would they if they think they are going to get “pinged” into isolation come what may – and possibly over Christmas, should the new variant spread rapidly, even if it is not especially virulent.

Mass mask wearing is the most visible sign of public willingness to go along with this madness every time there is a variant, which is why the scientific case for doing so either needs to be unambiguous or I must be made to wear one by law. By extension, then, it is of great importance that legislation is properly promulgated and not arbitrarily cobbled together, with measures enforced before Parliament has even voted on them.

The rule of law is so central to our culture that, unlike in continental Europe where there has been widespread violent protest, people here are likely to obey new statutes because they think, by and large, they have been democratically and sensibly arrived at. A sense that the correct constitutional protocols have been followed is crucial to popular acquiescence. This will evaporate if panicky illiberal decrees continue to be handed down every time the virus mutates, especially if it turns out to be relatively benign.

Once more we are being ordered to muzzle up because it is seen as a community-minded thing to do. But masks also act as a useful control mechanism for a state that wants a compliant population. We are far more receptive to yet more restrictions on our freedoms if we inhabit a dystopian world of half faces and frightened eyes.