Last night, I went to London for dinner. Was I worried about omicron swarming through the capital? No, I was worried about the freedom to make my own risk assessment being taken away. I was worried that my children’s hopeful young adult lives are about to be blighted again after a reader, friendly with the wife of a boffin who sits on Sage, emailed to warn me that lockdown is “pencilled in for January 5”, once we get through “this politically sensitive period”. (How unbearably grim if so.)

I was fretting that yet more children would be murdered or abused in their homes during the Work From Home order. I have been heart-flutteringly, not-sleeping anxious that we would see a repeat of this time last year, with that deadening sadness millions of us experienced when we knew for sure that we would not be reunited with mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and siblings. The season of Ho! Ho! Ho! turns into Oh No! NO!, should hospitals happen to run short of beds. Is this perpetual, sickening uncertainty really how it’s going to be every winter – the Ghost of Christmas Lost rattling its lonely chains?

Partygate turned out to be useful in one respect. The nation was united in disgust at the news that, while a husband of 60 years was only allowed to wave to his bewildered wife on Christmas Day through the window of a care home, the people who devised such heartless rules had cheerfully been breaking them. After 20 months in hiding, good old British cynicism started to kick in.

There was much mockery when a spokesman claimed that a Downing Street event when London was in Tier 3 (one of eight in Whitehall and counting), and which featured cheese, wine, games and Secret Santa gifts, was not a party. Don’t be silly! It was merely a “gathering”, or an after-work drinks with nibbles. It was after-work nibbles that did for that hypocrite Hancock, wasn’t it?

“No rules were broken!” insisted the Prime Minister until someone whispered in his ear that he’d better stop claiming that. “I broke no rules,” is the PM’s latest sophistry. The dictionary defines a sophist as “a fallacious reasoner”. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but we know one when we see one, don’t we, Marjorie?

For more dodgy semantics, look at the PM’s announcement that the first hospital patient had “died with omicron”. Boris, rather too eagerly, argued that this single fatality proved it was time to “set to one side” any nonsense about the new variant being milder. If you got out your fallacious reasoning magnifying glass, however, you might have spotted that the poor person in question didn’t die of omicron. They died with omicron, which means they could have been a 97-year-old with congestive heart failure who just happened to test positive in hospital for the new variant. Although any death is sad, I think we can all agree that is a very different order of magnitude from the dreadful Covid illness we saw back in January, whose terrors our leaders would like us to revisit so we form an orderly queue for the booster.

Has recent disillusion corroded my faith in authority to the point where I am in danger of making light of a grave new threat? I don’t believe so. You won’t hear this from the Government, but omicron is spreading in a population with extremely high levels of previous exposure to Covid or vaccination. It is highly unlikely to cause severe disease. Most of us will get it, and nearly everyone will be absolutely fine.

That benign scenario has already played out in South Africa where rapid infection has not been accompanied by high mortality. Thanks to Boris’s bold decision to lift restrictions in July (“If not now, when?”), the British people currently enjoy robust immunity against really bad symptoms and death. We are better protected than almost any other country. And omicron, dear reader, is not ebola. Frankly, it may struggle to be flu.

Despite what those ‘zero Covid’ fanatics on Sage claim, we will never have long-term immunity against reinfection. In fact, as the epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta explains, people getting reinfected with Covid is how we maintain an “equilibrium of herd immunity” for years to come. By catching and shrugging off the omicron “cold”, we could be minimising the risk to those who will always be vulnerable. 

It is a monstrous and wasteful nonsense to roll out a booster to the entire population when we know that the vaccinated can still pick up and transmit Covid. Hospitals are full of them. Far better to spend that fortune on Covid therapeutic drugs to be delivered to patients at home.

As I was writing this, there landed a fresh blow to the Government’s campaign of fear. The first major study found that omicron was likely to be 23 per cent less severe than the delta variant, with those of us who are double-jabbed still enjoying good protection. Far fewer people needed intensive care for omicron, with just five per cent of cases admitted to ICU compared with 22 per cent of delta patients.

Will this fantastic, reassuring news persuade the Government to abort its divisive and wrong-headed plan for vaccine passports? Let me give the last word to an author I know we all admired who was writing about the dangers of unwarranted state intrusion into people’s lives back in 2005. “ID cards are recipes for tyranny and oppression. I urge you all, by your votes at this forthcoming election, to show your displeasure at such a misconceived scheme and to give the government that has conceived it… the kick in the pants they so deserve.”

Spoken like a true Conservative, Boris Johnson. Kick in the pants, coming right up.