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Some experts say we grossly underestimate the pandemic. Other experts accuse them of scaremongering.

Still others steer the middle course: we’re doing neither too much nor too little, but just the right amount. Hail the PM. You know that empty plinth in Trafalgar Square? That’s where a bronze Boris Johnson will stand proudly for centuries to come.

Every possible epidemiological permutation has its authoritative champions with a whole alphabet of credentials after their names. Do some letters outweigh others? If so, which?

Because of all this uncertainty I find it hard to come down on either – or rather any – side of the argument. As far as I’m concerned, the pandemic may be just as bad as it’s described. Or worse. Or better. It may be over in a month or two. Or in a year or two. Or never. No one really knows.

We do know one thing though. Sooner or later Covid-19 will go its merry way, and the country will return to… what exactly?

Here we leave the realm of conjecture and enter one of near-certainty. For, while we have little basis for assessing coronavirus medically, we do have experience of governments coming out of cataclysmic crises. And, as far as the economy is concerned, this government’s first budget and publicly stated plans provide enough information for confident forecasting.

Alas, there are no reasons for optimism. Not to cut too fine a point, our economy will be wiped out – that, even if the widely predicted run on banks doesn’t happen.

Many businesses will go under, capital investment will plummet, unemployment will soar, as will the size of the social budget. Deficit spending will hit heights never seen, nor indeed imagined, before.

The country will lie in ruins, which will be just as bad as after the Second World War. Or, for being less visible to the naked eye, even worse.

After all, when one sees a destroyed city block, one will know what needs to be done, even if most people won’t know how to do it. However, when the stock market loses half its value, the currency is well-nigh worthless as are people’s investments and pensions, when much of the public purse is used to pay interest on gargantuan loans and never mind repaying the principal, what should the government do?

Well, one model of possible response is provided by post-war West Germany, led at the time by Konrad Adenauer and his economics advisor (later Economics Minister, still later Chancellor) Ludwig Erhard.

Adenauer and Erhard exceeded their authority under the law imposed by the occupying powers to shift the economy away from the Keynesian (that is, socialist) practices mandated by the Anglo-Saxons and free it up in one fell swoop.

They took that plunge on a Sunday, when American and British Keynesians had a day off and were thus in no position to stop them. At the same time, Adenauer and Erhard told the Germans that there would be no huge deficit spending on a Bismarck-type welfare state, not in the immediate future at any rate.

This would come when the economy got up on its feet. Until then the Germans were told to tighten their belts, work hard and count their pfennigs.

The ploy worked to perfection, and within a few years the country climbed to the economic summit where it has more or less stayed to this day, despite the combined ballasts of the reunification and the EU pulling it down.

The other model was British, inspired by Keynesian notions of massive state interference financed by runaway deficit spending. And, even though Britain had not suffered destruction on Germany’s scale (the combined yield of Allied bombing was close to three megatons – the language of the nuclear age), it took the country several decades, not a few years, to recover from the war.

Obviously the analogy isn’t airtight. However, mutatis mutandis, it provides useful guidelines and raises a vital question. Will HMG take the conservative or socialist road out of the impending crisis?

We already know the answer to that one. Even before the pandemic the government unveiled an economic policy that must have made Keynes sit up in his grave and applaud.

Austerity (which never existed in the first place, and which misnomer merely designated promiscuous, rather than suicidal, borrowing) fell by the wayside. A trillion-pound budget leading to a two-trillion sovereign debt was hailed by all and sundry as a long-awaited liberation from the shackles of ‘Thatcherism’.

The government also outlined plans for massive construction projects financed by the Exchequer and an unsustainable increase in social spending. Experience shows that, even when the economy is ostensibly healthy to begin with, such policies will take a year or two to put it in the coffin. Another year or two, and the lid will be nailed shut.

Thus coronavirus may be ruinous for the economy, but for the government it’s a long-term godsend. It’ll be able to use it as an excuse for years to come, using the pandemic to justify its own economic incompetence. Politics will trample economics underfoot, and ruinous borrowing and spending will continue to the accompaniment of hosannas for Boris the Saviour.

In the process, people’s dependence on the state, and therefore the state’s power, will burgeon exponentially. For history shows that not all of the civil liberties suspended in extreme situations return afterwards. The state likes to keep some back as a memento.

As a result, the people will be not only poorer, but also less free. The government will be given carte blanche to create a socialist state (that is, a more socialist one than we already have), while talking hypocritically about the unfortunate necessity for extreme measures.

I look forward to the next couple of years with more trepidation than hope. What little hope I do have is that I’ll be proved wrong.

Don’t know about you, but these days I peruse the papers in search of news items that amuse – not disgust, hector or scare.

These are possible to find, but you have to know where to look. I’ve found two such items, which I’m pleased to share with you in our new spirit of solidarity.

The first was kindly provided by Labour’s Kate Osamor, MP, the former Shadow International Development Secretary.

Now, whether Miss Osamor delivered a blow for parliamentarism or to it depends on your understanding of that concept. The facts, however, are unequivocal.

Miss Osamor’s son Ishmael was caught with £2,500 worth of drugs and was looking at a stint of porridge. Appropriately, his mother exercised her parental duty by writing a character reference for the upcoming trial.

Reports don’t say what exactly she wrote, but on general principle I doubt she suggested her son was the scum of the earth who ought to be locked up, with the key thrown away. More likely, Ishmael emerged from her prose as a public-spirited young man who never fails to lead an old woman across a busy street, whether or not she needs to go there.

Whatever Miss Osamor wrote, it was strictly her business. What went beyond her remit was the Commons stationery she used for that literary exploit. That suggested that the Mother of All Parliaments was throwing its weight behind Ishmail, which wasn’t the case.

The Commons Committee on Standards rebuked Miss Osamor for that breach of the code of conduct, and the incident understandably attracted reporters on the prowl.

One of them knocked on Miss Osamor’s door, hoping to get a statement. That he got, but not quite the kind he was expecting.

For Miss Osamor was irate and she didn’t care who knew it: “Don’t knock my f****** door,” she shouted. “I should have come down here with a f****** bat and smashed your face open.”

She didn’t specify whether the bat she had in mind was cricket or baseball. The former is native to these shores, but the latter offers better ballistic properties. That may be why British sports shops do brisk business in baseball bats, while selling next to no baseballs.

One way or the other, Miss Osamor was lucky that the hack was made of stern stuff. Since, according to the report of the above-mentioned Committee, he “showed no signs of alarm, fear or distress,” Miss Osamor got away with only having to offer an apology.

I’d say she upheld the fine parliamentary standards, if only those of recent vintage. But the reporter involved disappointed me: he definitely missed a trick.

Unlike Miss Osamor who acted in the spirit of the time, the hack ignored it. He should have claimed to have suffered a lifelong trauma resulting in insomnia, impotence, loss of appetite, uncontrollable fear of female MPs and other dreadful things.

That would have got Miss Osamor in trouble and him in clover. The eyes of any tort lawyer would have lit up had he been instructed to handle the case. A six-digit settlement, with the barrister claiming 40 per cent, was on the cards.

Still, I’m grateful to Miss Osamor for taking my mind off coronavirus. As I am to Vlad Putin for his earth-shattering announcement that 70 per cent of Russia’s population are solidly middle-class.

I must admit that at first my sense of pride in my birthplace was mixed with a touch of incredulity. After all, even Western countries can’t boast such a high proportion.

However, both pride and incredulity were then replaced with mirth. For Vlad defines as middle-class anybody making over €200 a month.

Vlad is on firm statistical ground there, for he’s going by the World Bank’s guidelines, according to which anyone getting more than 50 per cent of the minimum wage is middle-class.

There’ the rub. In France, the minimum wage is €1,521 a month; in Germany, €1,557; in the UK, €1,524. In Russia, however, we’re looking at a different order of magnitude: €133. Thus, true enough, a Russian making €200 a month is a proud, solid member of the middle class.

Now, Moscow is one of the world’s most expensive cities, but in the rest of Russia the euro stretches further. So let’s calculate that €200 euros a month is an equivalent of our €300 in purchasing power, £270 at today’s exchange rate.

That hardly buys what we’d define as middle-class life, does it? Things like a car, travels abroad, eating out, good schools for children? No, not quite. So much more can one appreciate Vlad’s humour.

It’s not quite on a par with Stalin’s slogan “Life has become better, life has become merrier” delivered at the height of the most murderous (and artificially created) famine in history, with millions starving to death and stacks of corpses adorning roadways. But I’m sure Russia’s impoverished populace found Putin’s announcement funny enough.

I certainly did. These days one should be thankful for laughter wherever one can find it. I’m sure those middle-class Russians will agree.

They can also kill civilisations, and only the naïve think that ours is somehow immune.

All civilisations are held together by visible or invisible ties, and these can in extreme circumstances be stretched to and beyond breaking point.

The vertical ties are those between the people and authorities, however these are defined. Recognised and accepted authority can be vested in institutions or individuals, and their nature changes from one civilisation to the next.

One characteristic of our age is the weakening of all authority (other than that projected by celebrity), be it political, intellectual, cultural, social or especially religious. This is a function of democracy’s ineluctable expansion beyond the purely political sphere.

“Democracy,” wrote Aristotle, “makes people believe that, because they are equal in some respects, they are equal absolutely.” And the perception of absolute equality makes any authority suspect at best and impossible at worst.

Even political authority loses some of its legitimising aspects, those that don’t rely on coercion. But at least it’s grudgingly accepted – unlike just about any other.

However, come a murderous pandemic, political legitimisation may totter. For governments are on a hiding to nothing: damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

If the current pandemic subsides quickly, the government will be blamed for the economic devastation caused by its draconian measures. If people continue to die in large numbers, the government will be blamed for its measures not being draconian enough. One way or the other, it’ll be blamed.

Since our modern civilisation defines itself mainly in political terms, as a champion of liberal democracy above all else, it’ll be dealt a blow. How severe, we don’t know. But it’s conceivable that the blow may be powerful enough to deliver a knockout.

If you don’t believe a pandemic can destroy a civilisation, or at least greatly contribute to its destruction, let history be your guide. For the great civilisation of medieval Christendom never recovered from the Black Death, the murderous pandemic that struck Europe in 1348-1349.

If parliament is the nerve centre of today’s West, in those days that role was played by the Church, and its authority was at its height in the late Middle Ages. That, however, changed overnight because the Black Death advanced the incipient humanist cause no end.

Epidemiologists still argue about the exact nature of that disease (bubonic plague and haemorrhagic fever are mentioned most often), but there is no arguing about its far-reaching effects. More than a third of Europe’s population perished, which tragedy went beyond the simple death statistics.

For one thing the Church could no longer administer the burial rites, one of the key sacraments, to all the deceased. With millions of deaths on their hands, and with many priests themselves catching the lethal infection from the dead and the dying, the church simply couldn’t cope.

Yet the bereaved families didn’t care about its problems – sacraments were a serious matter to them, and the thought of their relations being denied salvation was unbearable. Thus, through no fault of its own, the Church laid itself open to the charges of indifference and lack of sympathy.

Also, when everyone had to suspect that everyone else might be a likely carrier of deadly contagion, the social cohesion of society was bound to be undermined. Treating every stranger as a potential killer could hardly have promoted cordial community relations.

People tended to keep themselves to themselves (‘self-isolate’ in today’s parlance), which was illustrated by Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose ten protagonists spin their ribald and anticlerical yarns in isolation from the outside world. It’s conceivable that the atomising nature of modern society can be traced back to that time.

Theodicy, the defence of God, was put under a strain. People were asking all the usual facile questions, later reiterated by Hume: If God is merciful and good, then how did he allow such a catastrophe? If that was beyond his control, then how omnipotent is he? And if he didn’t know what was going on, is he really omniscient?

The Church didn’t always field such queries with sufficiently persuasive power, and the embers of humanism began to glow redder. The world that emerged after the watershed of the Black Death wasn’t the same as it had been before the calamity.

A realist can confidently predict that, regardless of how long coronavirus runs and how many lives it claims, it’ll change our world too. And a pessimist may doubt the change will be for the better.

For, as I never tire of saying, the pandemic is a test, and we are failing. The unconscionably selfish, savage behaviour of our nation of hoarders is a visible sign of invisible fault lines.

These are like the symptoms of tuberculosis in the pre-antibiotic age: when they show, it’s too late to do anything about the disease. And the fault lines are indeed beginning to show: tectonic shifts are producing jagged cracks.

However, writes my Italian reader, things are better in his country: “The behaviour here (in Rome ) has been quite exceptional given the circumstances. Supermarkets are rarely short of anything… and Italian comportment – civility and courtesy has been the norm here, as it is always, but especially since the lockdown last week – should serve as a model for everyone else.”

So perhaps there’s hope for our civilisation yet, in some pockets at least. One can only wish that Britain were one of them.

The British spirit of commercial enterprise, which inspired Napoleon’s original putdown, has been diverted from keeping shops to storming them.

Every morning a human monsoon sweeps through every supermarket in the land, leaving the shelves empty and late risers desperate. Before long hoarders will start selling their surplus in the black market: “Hey, mate, wanna buy a bog roll? Ten quid, seeing it’s you…”

In the background one hears a steady hum of hopeful predictions, along the lines of Britain emerging at the other end of the pandemic a kinder, more cohesive nation. That vindicates Bertie Russell’s famous – and wrong – postulate that the sun having risen yesterday is no guarantee it’ll rise today.

In other words, neither the past nor, in this case, the present offers any indication of what the future will bring. On the other hand, wishful thinking going contrary to every available piece of evidence is supposed to be fool-proof.

If the hacks promise that heartless, selfish hoarders will eventually turn into charitable, self-sacrificial angels soaring above human wickedness in the spirit of universal solidarity, then that’s how it’s going to be.

Anyone who still believes, for old times’ sake, that assertions must be substantiated can only say one thing to that bien pensant nonsense: Humbug! (Decorum prevents the use of a more gonadic word in this space.)

Coronavirus has served up a test – and we are failing. By ‘we’ I don’t just mean the British: all Europeans are acting the same way. Our French neighbours are telling us that the local supermarkets are emptying out at the same rate as in London, and essential supplies are becoming scarce.

It ought to be clear to anyone whose mind isn’t wholly warped by modern ideologies that, by getting rid of the universal basis for morality, we have got rid of morality. Oh, to be sure, some restraints to beastliness survive in the still waters of philistine comfort, provided they remain still. But when the waters get rough, civilised restraints sink to the bottom.

No human documents, all those constitutions, declarations, bills of rights or what have you, can keep the social fabric from being shredded to tatters by an acute crisis. It takes an authority transcending human agency to do that, and no such authority is any longer recognised.

If the coronavirus test lasts as long as the pessimists are suggesting, then the best predictor of mass behaviour will come from William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. We’ll all turn into feral children, and there won’t be any rules.

Whether or not the crisis is to a large extent manufactured is immaterial. I suspect it might be, but that doesn’t matter one way or the other. What does matter is that most people take it as real and behave accordingly.

Financial experts are talking about a spate of wholesale bankruptcies lurking just round the corner, and true enough: the economic consequences of the world shutting down for months will be dire. But much more catastrophic is the moral bankruptcy driving to the wall not just individuals or businesses but what passes for the whole modern civilisation.

And for this kind of bankruptcy the state can provide no relief. It can only make things worse – this regardless of who is in charge. We are indeed a sorry lot.

“Isn’t there something cruel, not to mention fallacious, about judging a person’s intellect by their accent and bearing?” asks The Times‘s Matthew Syed rhetorically.

Perhaps. But judging a hack’s competence on the basis of that one sentence is perfectly legitimate – and the judgement is damning.

Mr Syed lacks both the taste not to follow a singular antecedent with a plural personal pronoun and the basic technique to get around the mythical problem he feels in his wokish bone marrow.

If his fingers go on strike at the very possibility of typing ‘his’, why not write ‘people’s’ instead of ‘person’s’? Or bite the bullet and provide a ready excuse for using the offensive pronoun by replacing ‘person’s’ with ‘man’s’? Especially since the subject of his lament is indeed a man, the footballer Wayne Rooney.

I maintain that no one capable of writing the sentence above can ever say anything worthwhile. However, I’m grateful to Mr Syed for writing – however inanely – on a subject other than coronavirus.

It’s not only the apparel but also the language that oft proclaims the man, and Mr Syed’s grammar is in harmony with his message. He takes issue with those who poke some good-natured fun at Rooney, who has just been given a column at The Sunday Times.

In the good tradition of class warfare, Mr Syed contrasts Wayne’s humble origins with the privilege of “a privately educated rower with a posh voice [who] is instantly hailed as Sir Isaiah Berlin in Lycra.”

“Wayne Rooney speaks in a Scouse accent,” admits Mr Syed. “… His grammar is not always as polished as it could be. These observations are often used to infer that he is – how can I put this? – a thicko.”

If Wayne’s grammar isn’t as polished as even Mr Syed’s, his readers are in for a treat. But it’s not Wayne’s grammar that interests me here, but Mr Syed’s spirited defence of his accomplishments that amply justify Wayne’s journalistic elevation.

First, he takes a swipe at those who equate a regional accent with stupidity. Thereby Mr Syed swings at a target that simply isn’t there.

I’ve never met anybody who judges a person’s intelligence on the basis of his accent alone, in the absence of any other markers. One of the most brilliant men I know, for example, speaks with a Yorkshire accent, and nobody has ever doubted his intelligence because of that.

Every qualified football commentator speaks in some kind of patois, and some of them are worth listening to. Jamie Carragher, for example, has a Scouse accent so thick that even some Englishmen have trouble understanding him. And his co-presenter Gary Neville emphasises the phonetic diversity of England by pitching in with his broad Lancashire vowels.

Yet both men (if you’ll pardon the offensive word) are a joy for football lovers to follow: their comments are thoughtful, lucid, knowledgeable – and undeniably intelligent.

Yet Wayne is different, at least for those who haven’t had Mr Syed’s good fortune of knowing him personally. From the time he made his professional debut at 16, Wayne has presented a particularly feral visage to the world.

At that tender age, he was already given the task of using his good right hand to ‘sort out’ uppity opponents. If Solskjaer, another ManU striker, was known as a ‘baby-faced assassin’, Rooney quickly acquired the reputation of an ‘assassin-faced baby’.

His subsequent career, especially off the pitch, did little to dispel the image. Rooney consorted with hookers his mother’s age, brawled and in general presented an unsavoury image. Nor do I recall him ever making incisive comments about his chosen field, other than “it was a team effort” and “what matters is the three points”.

Though he has conspicuously mellowed with age, to a point where one wouldn’t automatically cross over to the other side of the street on seeing Wayne approach, the evidence of a budding intellect is so far lacking.

So much more amusing it is to follow Mr Syed’s arguments, those designed to counteract the jokes cracked at Wayne’s expense by assorted comedians. Thus, for example, Frankie Boyle: “How the f*** did he manage to get married? Probably because ‘I do’ sounds quite a lot like ‘oooh, oooh’.”

Mr Syed is aghast. Rooney, he writes, excelled at school, even though his attendance record was under 50 per cent. In fact, his teachers issued a ringing accolade: “Works hard and is hardly ever in trouble”. (I like that ‘hardly ever’. Is trouble defined as a custodial sentence?)

What else? Oh yes, Rooney wasn’t just a great technician of the game, but he was also able to absorb “the more strategic demands of tactical alignment.” That’s true – as long as we acknowledge that those strategic demands are rather basic. I’m sure Rooney could get his head around the need to drop between the lines or go for the far post, but such aptitude doesn’t require a three-digit IQ.

Mt Syed then indignantly confronts those who claim that Wayne’s columns will be ghost-written. His argument is a resounding “Yes. So what?” Many others, he says, have been known to use ghost writers.

True. But the fact that Rooney will merely sign, rather than write, his columns doesn’t quite work as proof of his intellect (which isn’t to say he has none).

“Rooney was a fine player and will make for an incisive pundit,” predicts Mr Syed presciently. “The real monkeys, dare I say it, are those without the brains to see it.”

Quite. However, brainless monkeys like us depend on journalists to prove us wrong. If Mr Syed feels he has done that, he’s about as qualified to be a columnist as Wayne is.

Every conversation about coronavirus, including one with doctors, begins and ends with the same disclaimer: “We don’t really know…”

We don’t. We don’t know what caused the virus, though Putin’s media blame Britain, specifically those villainous Britons who poisoned Litvinenko with polonium and the Skripals with novichok.

President Trump, on the other hand, blames China and actually refers to COVID-19 as a ‘Chinese virus’. That intensifies Chairman Xi’s desire to smash the ‘dog head of American imperialism’, which under normal circumstances he keeps to himself for fear of losing US markets.

Much as I hate to lump Putin and Trump together, let’s just say that neither of them really knows, although Trump must be closer to the truth here.

We don’t know how fast the virus will spread. So far the rate has been well-nigh exponential, but there are signs it’s slowing down. Some epidemiologists believe the signs, some don’t. In either case, we don’t really know.

We don’t know whether people who survive the infection will develop immunity to it. Some experts are saying that, unless the virus is allowed to run its course, it may come back in a year or two. But they don’t really know.

Some things we do know. Most old people who contract the infection will die from it – with or without intensive care, ventilators, vital sign monitors and so on. The numerical value of ‘most’ depends on the underlying condition, age and general robustness or lack thereof. But most experts agree on the range between 85 and 95 per cent, with the lower level starting at 70+ and then growing towards and beyond 80.

Moreover, even those old people who get the virus and don’t die shouldn’t count themselves lucky. They are almost guaranteed to develop cognitive disorders, which is a polite way of saying ‘turn into vegetables’. Bad news all around, in other words.

Another thing we know with a fair degree of certainty is that the way governments have responded to coronavirus is guaranteed to cause a global economic disaster. Thousands of businesses, and not necessarily just small ones, will go to the wall; millions will lose jobs; financial markets will hit rock bottom and will take years to recover.

That situation, dire as it will be in itself, will also have far-reaching medical ramifications. It’s impossible to put a number on them, but many people will die – they always do when the economy takes a dive. How many, I don’t know.

This morning a friend of mine, who is both a writer and a medical doctor, was writing an article about coronavirus. He rang me to find out if I had any bright ideas, and was disappointed to find out I didn’t.

That gave me a start: normally, he doesn’t seek out my views before writing his pieces, especially on medical subjects. This time, however, he didn’t really know the answers any better than I did.

However, there’s knowledge and knowledge. Neither of us can come up with a rational panacea for the crisis – we just don’t know enough, and neither probably does anyone else.

Yet there’s also such a thing as intuition, and intuitively we both feel that governments are overreacting and therefore causing more damage than the virus would do on its own. Those who doubt government action can make things worse, should recall the 1939-1940 Phoney War, the period between the declaration of war and the first Luftwaffe raids.

Once war was declared, the British government immediately introduced blackouts throughout the country. As a result, 600 people died in road accidents before the first Soviet-made Nazi bombs fell on Britain.

The reasons for the blackout doubtless made sense, as do the measures currently being taken by HMG. However, those 600 people could have lived.

This isn’t a fool-proof analogy, only a reminder that governments can be ham-fisted when tackling problems. And when they are, they are perfectly capable of making the problems worse.

P.S. As lavatory paper is disappearing from our shops, I can offer an ingenious solution to the looming hygienic crisis. The Guardian should drastically increase its print run and start using a lighter stock.

Any crisis, financial, military or medical, is a test. The question posed can be paraphrased depending on the circumstances, but in essence it’s always the same:

Can our society and institutions survive as our society and institutions? Or will they transmogrify into something alien and unpleasant?

Judging by the plan put forth by Health Secretary Matt Hancock, our score on this test is near to failing. If Mr Hancock gets what he wants, within a couple of weeks everyone over 70 will be confined to house arrest, euphemistically called quarantine, and kept there for at least four months.

Any wrinklie venturing outdoors will be summarily arrested, confined to detention and fined some draconian amount. This, irrespective of the person showing the symptoms of any condition other than old age.

Now, fascism is an emotionally charged word bandied about by all and sundry, often with no taxonomic rigour. However, if understood as the state arbitrarily exercising despotic powers, the term fits Mr Hancock’s plan like a glove.

I’m not defending a libertarian rampart here. At a time of plague, it’s sensible to isolate as many carriers of the contagion as possible, even if that means suspending essential civil liberties. When the country is in danger, the interests of the many have to take precedence over the interests of the few. The utilitarian argument carries the day.

However, this isn’t the situation here. For the state isn’t out to protect many from few. It’s planning to impose tyrannical measures to protect the few from themselves. Rather than isolating the subjects of infection, those who spread it, the government is planning to isolate its objects, those on the receiving end.

There’s absolutely no evidence that the old spread the infection faster or wider than the young. On the contrary, the young are much more likely to carry the virus without showing any symptoms, whereas those whose immune system is weakened will be instantly identifiable as ill.

It’s true that the death rate is much higher among the old, and they should be made aware of the risks. However, that done, they should then make their own decisions on how best to protect themselves, and I’m sure most of them would welcome helpful advice.

The state’s function isn’t that of a strict but fair father spanking his wayward son for an imaginary transgression to the accompaniment of the ubiquitous mantra: “It’s for your own good, and it hurts me more than it hurts you.” A state that assumes that role thereby takes on a fascist trait – and where there’s one of them, there eventually will be many.

Amazingly, the little matter of civil liberties hasn’t had as much as a mention. Worked up as we are about the sacred right of women born as men to impregnate men born as women and then turn public lavatories into freak shows, we’re placidly lackadaisical about millions of Her Majesty’s subjects being locked up in solitary confinement on a whim.

One wonders how our powers that be see the ensuing practicalities. How will the new law be enforced?

Will the army move in, patrolling the streets, stopping everyone with grey hair and demanding at gunpoint to see proof of age? How will the virtual prisoners, millions of them, feed themselves? (And don’t tell me they could rely on delivery services – those are already failing to meet the still-moderate demand.)

Provided they display civil disobedience – as any self-respecting person must in the face of naked tyranny – do we have enough prisons, or hospitals converted to prisons, to hold all resisters in anything other than concentration camp conditions?

Slopes don’t get much slippier than that, nor tests much tougher. I hope we won’t let the bastards get away with this outrage.

P.S. Even at my decrepit age, I can still wipe the tennis court with our youthful PM, who fancies himself a player.

When it comes to coronavirus, I’ve got bad news and good news.

The bad news is that, at 6.6, we have fewer intensive care beds per 100,000 population than not only Germany (29.2) and France (11.6), but even such economic powerhouses as Cyprus (11.4) and Latvia (9.7).

Altogether Her Majesty’s realm possesses merely 4,250 such beds. Thus, should coronavirus claim more patients at the same time, doctors will have to claim God-like powers and decide who lives and who dies.

One suspects they aren’t going to assess the agglomerate of each person’s human qualities before drawing lots. Their decisions are more likely to be based on actuarial factors only, such as age, medical history, life expectancy and so on.

Hence we can confidently look forward to a wholesale cull of wrinklies, especially those in dodgy health. One suspects that people with deformities and learning difficulties also have much to fear.

But rejoice, for here’s the good news. We have the NHS, a fully socialised system of medical care that none of those other, backward countries can boast.

Hence we lead them by a wide margin in such vital job descriptions as directors of diversity, facilitators of optimisation, optimisers of facilitation, administrators, administrative assistants, multiculturalism consultants et al.

That’s why I have it on the good authority of popular mythology that all those foreigners, swarthy or otherwise, envy us something rotten. So far they’ve managed to contain such feelings enough not to imitate the NHS – but give them time.

Once they’ve seen how expertly all those directors of diversity usher old people towards the morgue, they’ll come round to our way of thinking. Isn’t the NHS grand?

It’s not just people who move freely within the EU. Infections have a field day too, imposing a stiff tax on borderless spaces.

It’s useful to remember that the two deadliest pandemics in European history occurred in the 14^th century, when national borders were nonexistent, and in 1918-1920, when they had been crumbled by a world war.

The first happened too far in the past for any useful parallels to be drawn, but the second occurred only a century ago, allowing comparison. And it’s telling.

No centralised, coordinated response was possible to the Spanish flu: Europe was in disarray, yesterday’s enemies were becoming today’s friends and vice versa, rancour was in the air, along with mutual resentments and recriminations.

No pan-European institutions existed, although there were movements under way clamouring for their founding. As always in the wake of internecine carnages, people sought order and were desperate about not getting it.

It’s in bad taste even to mention coronavirus in the same breath as that pandemic. The scale is smaller by orders of magnitude, and the virulence is nowhere near as high.

Moreover, isn’t most of continental Europe now one family, united in its craving for a single federated state offering to exchange protection for allegiance? In fact, the state craved for is already there to all intents and purposes, and it’s wisely guiding Europe through the crisis.

Right. And if you believe this, I have a couple of bridges across the Danube and the Meuse for sale. For all its bluster and grandiose claims, the EU is amply proving yet again that the bubble of ideology bursts when touched by real life.

Ursula von der Leyen, the better-looking and more sober answer to Juncker, is screaming herself hoarse, urging unity: “The European Union can withstand this shock. But each member state needs to live up to its full responsibility and the EU as a whole needs to be determined, coordinated and united.”

Quite. And I’d like to be young, tall, rich and out on a crowded date with all of Weinstein’s victims.

For, push come to shove, all European countries are acting unilaterally. Every land for itself, and the devil take the hindmost – along with the beautiful idea of European unity.

In this context, some of the claims routinely claimed by and for the EU are shown for the humbug they are. We no longer need Nato and the American nuclear umbrella, say the federalists. If Russian tanks sweep across the plains, all European states as one will close ranks and… well you know the rest.

Yet a few thousand old people dying across Europe is enough for EU members to start acting in their own selfish interests. Ursula can flap her wings all she wants about the detrimental and useless effects of travel bans – she’s widely and predictably ignored.

The Danes, Poles, Czechs, Italians, Spanish, Belgians have already closed their borders or as near as damn. Panic is spreading all over Europe like brushfire, and the EU is helpless to do anything substantive or encouraging about it.

Many European states are on the brink of open revolt against that impotent and pernicious organisation. They managed to feign some lukewarm affection for it as long as money kept coming in and things were more or less on an even keel.

Yet the first sign of pressure and out goes affection. In comes defiance, resentment and particularism.

All this was entirely predictable. In fact, it was predicted by everybody who understands that ideological contrivances are at best useless and at worst catastrophic. Yet no one can outshout an ideology, and no one can make it listen.

As you watch EU flags disappear from Westminster, give thanks.

In the fashionable spirit of openness, I have a confession to make: I dislike revolutions – and especially revolutionaries. And I’m always wary of single-issue activists, even if I happen to agree with the single issue.

For example, although I despise the EU, opposed joining it and did what I could to help us leave it, even in the heyday of the Leave campaign I shunned those who hung their entire worldview on the peg of that one issue.

This is in no way to denigrate good people whose energy promotes good causes. It’s just that there’s usually something about them that strikes me as off-centre and therefore unbalanced.

Such people’s efforts are essential to achieving immediate objectives, but, however worthy the goals, their unsmiling vulgarity can cause lasting damage. That’s why a conservative activist is an oxymoron: conservatism presupposes prudence, taste and an ability to see things in interconnection.

Activists possess an undepletable reservoir of bubbling energy that needs a constant outlet. Once they get what they want, the energy seeks another cause to animate.

Alas, even if the original cause might have been worthy, or at least widely perceived as such, the next one may be less so. That may explain the fate of those who perpetrated both the French and the Russian revolutions, for all their original, if short-lived, popularity.

The activists’ demonic ardour was essential to the success of their cause. However, once the revolutions triumphed, the revolutionaries’ erstwhile comrades put them down like rabid dogs.

Robespierre and Trotsky, Saint-Just and Zinoviev, Danton and Bukharin – all of them were killed by their colleagues. My guess is that, if syphilis hadn’t got Lenin, Stalin would have killed him too.

By way of illustration, take MeToo and modern feminism in general. Its roots go back to the militant suffragette movement of the early 20^th century, which, as the name suggests, championed women’s rights, especially the one to vote.

That I have a dim view of that cause is irrelevant to my theme here. However, the key personalities involved do elucidate my point nicely.

Mary Richardson (d.1961), Mary Allen (d. 1964) and Norah Elam (d. 1961) were all close associates of Emmeline Pankhurst and as such participated in the militant activities of the movement she had founded. Together with their disfranchised sisters, they smashed windows, tossed bombs and assaulted police officers.

While Pankhurst was in prison, Richardson slashed Velasquez’s painting known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery.

“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history,” she explained, “as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.” Opinions on that designation were, and still are, divided.

Mary Allen also made a career of smashing windows and then going on hunger strikes in prison. Some of the windows she smashed belonged to the Inland Revenue, which must have brought a smile on the face of many a respectable squire.

Norah Elam, a prominent member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, was thrice imprisoned for terrorist offensives inspired by her commitment to a wider suffrage. Like the other two, she presaged today’s obsession with dieting by going on hunger strikes. Unlike today’s dieters, she was sometimes force-fed.

To illustrate my point, the three ladies didn’t settle to a quiet life somewhere in the shires once women got their coveted vote. They transferred their red-hot consciences to the good offices of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and reached prominence within its ranks.

They admired Hitler, and Mary Allen even got the chance to discuss feminism with the führer in person. Since Hitler’s attitude to women was rather agricultural, similar to the feelings cow breeders have for pedigreed heifers, Allen’s enthusiasm might have seemed hard to explain.

Or would be, if we forgot that, whatever their pronounced aims, revolutionaries are energumens who reach out for any source of demonic energy, however sinister. Feminism yesterday, fascism today, animal rights tomorrow – it really doesn’t matter.

Thus, once the fascist cause was defeated, the three ladies in question (actually, Allen was indeed a questionable lady: she always wore men’s uniforms and liked to be known as ‘Robert’) became animal rights activists and militant anti-vivisectionists. If they were alive today, they’d doubtless be cheering the draconian sentence Harvey Weinstein received in a travesty of justice.

Having reached an age at which one can get away with offering avuncular advice, here’s mine: however you feel about a cause, beware of its fervent champions.