The country may be completely skint but there’s still enough dosh swilling around for a pointless Covid inquiry
HEY, have you been following the Government’s independent inquiry into the Covid pandemic?
Don’t worry too much if you haven’t — it’s on for at least another THREE YEARS.
Here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter how skint you might be.
It doesn’t matter how broke the country is.
Somehow, there will always be enough dosh swilling around to pay lawyers vast sums of money for grandstanding in public.
An endless amount of money.
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Already this Covid inquiry, chaired by some grandee called Lady Hallett, has cost the taxpayer £100million.
It is expected to easily exceed the most expensive inquiry ever.
That was the one into the Bloody Sunday shootings by the British Army.
That cost almost £200million.
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I reckon you might easily double that sum for this one.
Who’s getting the dosh?
Well, as I say, the lawyers.
So let me introduce you to the most prominent of them.
The inquiry’s leading counsel is Hugo Keith KC.
Working-class bloke, obvs, father a binman, brought up on a council estate.
Actually, no, scrub that.
He’s the son of Henry Keith, Baron of Kinkel.
I have no idea where Kinkel is.
Hugo went to Eton then followed his dad into Magdalen College Oxford.
Anyway, I digress.
During the inquiry this week Hugo has spent his time trying to burrow into the bottoms of all the government scientists — notably Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance.
He failed to ask a really testing question of either bloke. And the reason for that is simple.
This Covid inquiry has already made up its mind, I fear.
From Hugo’s line of questioning to the interjections made by Lady Hallett, we can see the direction they are coming from.
In short, the inquiry seems to believe that lockdowns were absolutely necessary.
Except we should have had them earlier and they should have been tougher.
It believes that the scientists were doing a pretty much flawless job.
And that it was the hopeless politicians — Boris, for example — who let the side down.
With their dithering and their “revolting language” (according to Hugo).
Well sure, that’s an avenue that needs to be explored.
But so too does the charge that the scientists, after that first lockdown, were working in an echo chamber.
That they could not see the broader picture of what social distancing and lockdowns were doing to our society.
The huge harm they caused to the economy.
The terrible loss of life subsequently through serious illnesses that went untreated.
The damage to the education — and mental health — of millions of young people who forfeited a year or so of their schooling.
But there seems to be no appetite from the inquiry for any of that stuff.
And it’s kind of the final irony.
You are paying for the cost of the pandemic right now, in your higher bills, in the stagnant economy, in inflation.
And now you’re also paying through the nose for a bunch of lawyers to miss the point entirely.
I've ad it with dire Crimbo shoots
WHICH supermarket Christmas ad makes you most want to run into the street and punch a stranger?
The smug M&S one featuring Hannah Waddingham is quite bad and I’m not sure what it’s trying to tell us.
Kevin the bloody Carrot can do one, too.
This Aldi ad has an indecipherable storyline.
And I don’t like the idea of vegetables speaking – not in an advert and not on the Labour front bench.
Also, the Brussels sprout is a nasty little cow, as if we needed to be put off eating them still further.
The least annoying is probably Lidl’s kindly raccoon.
But we’re setting the bar pretty low here.
Hate for new lingo
WHICH bit of Millennial generation slang do you most detest?
A survey has been done and “nom nom nom” comes out as hugely loathed.
It is fabulously irritating, no doubt about that.
So too is “totes” for totally and “amazeballs” for something that is, presumably, good.
Still, I find these slang words very useful.
As soon as you hear anyone say “totes”, you can immediately discount everything they have to say.
It saves a lot of time waiting to find out if they’re an idiot.
Tax a lot
OK, Mr Hunt.
The cut in National Insurance will be welcomed.
Especially by those on the lowest wages.
But the next election is more likely to be decided on the figures that come out today – immigration.
The Tories have had 13 years to get a grip on this issue.
But still more and more people flood into our country every year.
It is unsustainable and the cause of so many of our problems.
And the Government has yet to do anything meaningful about it.
Medics deathly silence
DOCTORS were asked by a social media site to name the one thing people should not do in order to stay healthy.
As you might have guessed, smoking and drinking featured prominently.
As did lying on the couch eating Doritos while watching Warwick Davis hosting the stupid quiz show Tenable.
There was no room, sadly, for “attempting to headbutt a rapidly moving express train” nor “taking a bath with the toaster”.
The doctors also failed to mention another common form of death in the UK. What is it?
Putting yourself in the hands of a doctor.
NHS mistakes and medication errors contribute to 22,000 deaths every year.
Plague a woke up call
THE Museum of London is the latest institution to be gripped by a woke obsession.
They’ve released a study which they say shows that in medieval times, black women of African descent were more likely to die of the plague in our capital than anyone else.
The evidence for this bizarre assertion seems very, very, sketchy.
No DNA testing was involved.
They probably just had a look at a few skulls and said: “Yeah, she’s African. Deffo. Gottabe.”
But it allows the museum to claim that there was structural racism in medieval times and whitey is to blame, so that’s OK.
Prom bid so wrong
THE little seaside town where I live has a lovely, wide cliff-top promenade.
Families walk their dogs, pensioners dawdle by the gardens, kids play on their bikes.
There’s room for everyone to do this safely.
But now, in an act of sheer vandalism, the local council proposes slicing the prom in half – to make room for parked-up campervans.
The locals are not happy.
Why am I telling you this? It’s hardly world-shattering news, I grant you.
But it’s these little micro-aggressions from local authorities that bit by bit make our country a much less pleasant place to live in.
They get some notion in their corporate heads and suddenly your quality of life is diminished.
That’s why we have motorways running through the centre of our towns, tower blocks replacing Victorian terraces and hideous out-of-town retail parks which destroy our high streets.
The public is always opposed to these changes, but the councils hold fraudulent consultations and in the end, get their way.
And our towns and local people suffer as a result.
We’re fighting back in Saltburn and if we win, it should give cheer to those up and down the country who want to preserve the nice things in the towns where they live.
Rather than sacrifice it all in the cause of a spurious modernity.
Unfair trade
THE Israel-Hamas truce is good news.
But remember it’s Israel making the sacrifice.
It is handing over Palestinian terrorists.
In exchange for entirely innocent Israeli civilians who were abducted in the barbaric Hamas attack on October 7.
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And yet we will still see the jihadis – and their useful idiot fellow travellers – continue to blame Israel for everything that happens.
As a Jewish friend of mine remarked: “If Israel discovered a cure for cancer, those people would be holding pro-cancer marches in Whitehall.”