A Covid inquiry? It’s conclusion is all locked down

THE “independent” inquiry into the Covid pandemic is under way!

I hope you’re excited.

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The public hearings are not due to finish until 2026, when we’ll all be dead from the next pandemic.

God only knows when it will conclude its findings.

That’s the thing with public inquiries in the UK.

They end up costing more in lawyers’ fees than the thing they’re investigating.

And they take for ever, because it’s a very useful gravy train if you’re a lawyer.

So the lesson is — string it out as long as possible.

One of the lawyers involved, mind, has already come to a conclusion.

Hugo Keith KC has decided that Brexit was to blame for the UK not being in a state of preparedness for Covid.

So it already looks like the inquiry will be anything but impartial.

Hugo Keith is doubly wrong, as it happens.

Britain was among the best-prepared nations for a pandemic, according to several global institutions.

We’d been holding pandemic rehearsals for five years before the virus struck.

Further, our roll-out of vaccines was helped enormously by the fact we were no longer part of the hopelessly bureaucratic European Union.

That’s why we were vaxxed up long before the Germans and the French.

But don’t expect Hugo Keith to tell you that.

That’s not the main problem, however.

The real issue is that Baroness Heather Hallett, who is in charge of this expensive, long-winded farrago, is not even going to properly address the crucial question.

And that is a very simple question. “Were lockdowns absolutely necessary or did they make things worse?”

The inquiry has already decided that lockdowns were actually a bloody good thing.

Drag on and on

My guess is that it will conclude (once we’re all dead, of course), that we should have loads more of them.

And yet with every week that passes it seems more and more likely that those lockdowns were a terrible overreaction.

And that the damage caused by them — economic, social and mental — will take far more lives in the end than that nasty little virus.

Now, when the virus struck, I was in favour of the first lockdown.

Like everyone else I was pretty worried about Mr Covid.

So I went along with it, like pretty much all of us did.

It was when the second and third lockdowns occurred that I thought, hang on a minute, is this doing any good?

That was when the World Health Organisation also said that lockdowns wouldn’t defeat the virus.

And yet still we persisted with them.

Hell, a government adviser in Sage advised that social distancing should go on FOR EVER.

That first lockdown saw the biggest slump in our economy ever witnessed.

It wrecked the country and its effects will be felt for the next decade.

The closed businesses, the kids being kept off school, the total lack of productivity.

Matched against this, of course, is the number of lives saved.

One recent estimate from John Hopkins University reckons lock-downs saved 3,000 lives . . .  WORLDWIDE!

But our inquiry isn’t going to bother with that.

It will drag on and on and on demanding that much more be done next time.

Because there will be a next time.

Incidentally, the Swedes have already completed their inquiry into how they coped with the Covid pandemic.

It concluded the government was “fundamentally right” not to have imposed any lockdowns at all.

Someone tell Hugo and Heather.

Bojo’s peer puzzle

WHO the hell is Charlotte Owen?

She’s just become Britain’s youngest ever life peer, at the age of 29.

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What has she done?

Climbed Everest?

Cured cancer?

Somehow united quantum mechanics with classical physics?

No, not that I’m aware.

She’s just worked in Parliament for five years.

As a special adviser to such luminaries as Liz Truss.

And of course Boris Johnson.

But never mind.

She probably said she fancied a peerage.

So Boris has given her one.

5ft 5in poser

WHEN men are looking for a one-night stand they tend to choose short women, according to a new survey.

Then they bin them.

Because they prefer tall women for long-lasting relationships.

Cruel world, huh?

I don’t know where the hell this leaves women who are about five foot five.

All the vertically challenged are getting a quick seeing to while all the beanpoles are waiting at the altar.

And then there’s this glut of average-sized women looking around wondering where the action is.

What happens when your local council is run by miserable, dour, pencil-necked, self-flagellating, self-righteous, boring, Socialist killjoys…

WARM, balmy weather, beautiful, cloudless, blue skies.

All you need on days like this is a nice ice cream.

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I like those ones you get in kinda wafer oyster shells.

But enough about me.

Labour-run Greenwich Council has decided to BAN ice cream vans from 33 streets in the borough.

Why? It says they create “unacceptable levels of nuisance” and have a “negative impact on air quality” in the area due to “engine idling”.

You dour, miserable, pencil-necked, self-flagellating, self-righteous, boring, Socialist killjoys.

Can you imagine going down the pub with one of these t****rs?

Frankly, I don’t know how you Londoners put up with it.

Priced out from ever using your car and now banned from buying an ice cream.

Our capital gets more like Pyongyang every day.

Right to jail Carla

I DON’T quite understand the outrage over the jailing of Carla Foster.

She’s the Staffordshire woman who killed her unborn baby after lying to obtain the drugs.

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Her foetus was between 32 and 34 weeks old – the limit for an abortion is 24 weeks.

Another couple of weeks and Foster’s child would have been born – and if she’d killed it then it would be a life sentence, not just a couple of years.

I don’t really see much of a difference in the nature of the crime.

More mouths to feed

EVERY so often our establishment – including our big companies – gets itself obsessed with an issue affecting an absolutely minuscule proportion of our population.

The transgender stuff, for example.

And, of course, veganism.

The proportion of vegans in the country is a little over one per cent.

Yes, just one per cent.

But you wouldn’t think so to look at the shelves of our supermarkets, or the menus in restaurants.

Now one of the UK’s biggest vegan food producers, Meatless Farm, has just gone t**s up.

Facing bankruptcy, laid off all its staff.

There just isn’t the demand for sausages made of dried tofu.