The Brexit boys are back in town – and this time, their suicide mission is ending the lockdown

They can’t talk about leaving the EU, because no one is listening. So they’ve focused instead on the profit over the right to live, writes Matthew Norman

Farage’s rebuttal is that, as a ‘broadcaster’, he is a key worker. As he certainly will be if ever he takes a job with Timpson (Getty)

The one compensation about the imminent threat of mortal illness is that it frees you from worrying about anything else.

Anyone who ever waited for an MRI result will understand. For the days between the scan and learning what it found, you are wholly cocooned. Whatever else is happening in your world ceases to matter.

The usual stresses evaporate. You are in a weirdly cosseting kind of suspended animation. With the future temporarily out of view, you live entirely in the present.

So it is with coronavirus. For several months, the focus has been utterly monopolised by the pandemic that another menace – less literally existential, but probably graver in the long term – has vanished in the fog.

It is my distasteful duty to remind you that it’s still out there, and possibly closer than ever.

Frankly, I’d forgotten myself until the last few days. And then, like maggots from a rancid piece of meat, the dunce-ocracy of Brexit crawled back into view.

The higher IQ advocates of self-mutilation, being in the cabinet, are either obliged to be sensible, or forced to fake it by the demands of collective responsibility.

This wasn’t always so. The doctrinal lunacy had a run-out early in the crisis, when joining an EU equipment programme was rejected – as a civil servant confirmed before mysteriously denying it – on solely ideological grounds.

Since then, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab have done their best. If it has been nothing like good enough, they have at least tried.

For the dummies on the backbenches, on the other hand, the virus is a displacement activity. They can’t talk about Brexit, because no one is listening. So they talk instead about the need to end the lockdown.

It may not sate their craving for publicity. But hey, when there’s no smack to be found, methadone will do.

Leading the pack, inevitably, is the high priest of cultivated idiocy. Iain Duncan-Smith’s addiction to attention is so powerful that I believe he would, for two minutes on Sky News, attend the opening of a bowel.

Taking a break from appearing via broadband from the in-laws’ rent-free mansion in Bucks, the universal credit maven took radio time to peddle the idea that “moving back to work is an absolute priority…”

The public, he said, is “adult enough to understand that this situation cannot continue indefinitely”.

The public is also adult enough to understand that the absolute priority, whatever his friends in commerce think, is preventing a new surge in infection and death.

Statistics from the United States within the next four to six weeks are anticipated to confirm the cost of premature emancipation. Internal White House death toll predictions have more than doubled, to roughly 150,000, since Dr Trump encouraged certain states to ignore his own administration’s official guidelines about which qualifications must be met before relaxing restrictions.

Joining Duncan-Smith in promoting the right to profit over the right to live is his ERG compadre Steve Baker. It’s hard not be a little fond of this overexcitable puppy. If he will soil the carpet every now and then, it’s only out of excitement.

To Baker, the rules designed to keep people alive – so much less stringent than in Italy, France and Spain – are a grievous affront to liberty. His onetime idol, the prime minister, is now Big Brother. He must, according to the headline above a Telegraph piece, “end the absurd, dystopian and tyrannical lockdown”.

There was a time when Baker and his ilk reserved the argot of despotism for the Inner Party in Brussels. When the pressure grows to postpone the withdrawal, for post-viral economic reasons massively too obvious to state, that time will come again.

But for now, Baker retrains the tyranny talk on his own government.

If he seems unaware that two-thirds of the public support the current restrictions or think them too soft, and don’t want them abandoned any time soon, so does David Davis. To the civil libertarian, the silliness of a few overly officious coppers is as wicked an assault on freedom as EU regulations governing safety in the workplace.

He’s in a frightful state about roadblocks (have you seen one?) and other signs of nascent dictatorship. So long as you equate the odd £30 fine with being corralled into a football stadium and shot, he’s spot on.

And then, because it would be indecent to leave him out, there’s Nigel. Bravely resisting the reticence by which he is riven, Farage scales the commanding heights of alliteration to express his outrage. “Lockdown lunacy” is how he describes a visit from the law after his 100-mile round trip to Kent recording a doubtless charming little film about migrants.

In fairness, you appreciate his concern. So oppressive is our police state that the officers politely advised him about what constitutes essential travel. Farage’s rebuttal is that, as a “broadcaster”, he is a key worker. As he certainly will be if ever he takes a job with Timpson.

All the above will be back on more traditional terrain, as I said, when the nation starts debating whether it is sane to self-inflict another shuddering blow on an already wrecked economy by leaving the EU on schedule.

When that happens, assuming Johnson regresses to his default position of blethering mindless optimism, remember this: it was his everything-will-work-out-for-the best shtick that not only delivered Brexit. It was this same “terrible buoyancy”, as he put it in that Sun interview, that directly led to the loss of untold thousands of lives, and very nearly his own.