The government’s attitude towards Covid rules has me feeling like Alice in Wonderland

Stop telling me white roses are red when I can see that they are not, writes Katy Brand

Boris Johnson has insisted any events held at No 10 last Christmas were ‘in accordance with the rules’ (PA Wire)

When is a Christmas party not a Christmas party? Why, when the prime minister holds it of course. And when is a lockdown rule not a lockdown rule? Why, when the prime minister is involved of course.

If you ever feel like you’ve chased a floppy white-haired creature down a rabbit hole and now exist in some parallel universe where the ruling party governs as though in the midst of a perpetual Mad Hatter’s tea party, you are not alone. By which I mean, I feel that way too.

For last week it was revealed that during one of the most deadly and terrifying periods of the pandemic so far, December 2020, when we were pre-vaccine and the death toll was at nearly 500 souls a day, No. 10 was reportedly holding a series of Christmas parties. When challenged about this in parliament, Boris Johnson chose not to deny the charge, but only to say that all the rules were followed. Except that the rule expressly forbade Christmas parties of any kind, and in fact there were other good citizens facing the threat of being fined up to £10,000 for gathering outdoors for a sausage and a pint of mulled wine and suppressed misery.

So, as Keir Starmer pointed out, both those things can’t be true – to have had the party and to also have followed the rules. The Cheshire Cat merely smiled and started to disappear, back behind the shiny black door, chuntering to himself about lunch. Meanwhile, a jabberwock of some kind was burbling that we could kiss who we wanted so long as it wasn’t under mistletoe, for the omicron variant could only infect another person if a Christmas tradition was being upheld. You could eat a pastry case full of sweet mincemeat, of course you could, but if you called it a mince pie the lurgy would get you.

Some slimy creature on a leaf said it was alright to go shopping, so long as it wasn’t Christmas shopping, and masks would be needed in enclosed spaces but only so long as those enclosed spaces had wheels. If not, Covid-19 would pass on by. Talk about Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber.

Rule by riddle seems fun when you are in a children’s story, but less so when a lethal and mutating virus is all around. And while you madly shout into the wind about exponential growth in infection, those who purport to be in charge are simply continuing with their croquet game on the lawn as though nothing at all was wrong, laughing and shrieking and promising jam tarts tomorrow.

Though much of Lewis Carroll’s work is satirical and was intended to be, I just never imagined I would feel quite so much like Alice as I do right now, if you don’t count the time I ended up in the News of the World hospitality box at the National Television Awards. Every bottle of wine in my house now has a sign on it saying “Drink Me”, if only to cope with the level of negligence going on in government as we enter the second Christmas of what we gaily used to refer to as the “new normal” and now just call “normal”.

But it’s important to keep our sanity, to hold tight to reality even as they spin and spin, lie after lie. We haven’t gone through the looking glass – it is they who have piled into our world and twisted it. While British people kept apart last Christmas for the common good, while recently widowed grandparents sat alone in their living rooms trying to make the best of it, while much loved relatives were dying alone in ICUs up and down the country, their closest relatives turned away due to the restrictions in place at the time, there were Christmas parties going in in the very building where these restrictions were agreed.

Even if you wanted to argue that it must have been a pressure cooker in there and they needed to blow off some steam, even if you wanted to argue that they were working together all day anyway so where’s the harm in extending office hours into the evening and opening a bottle or two, even if you wanted to create a story around it that made it seem even vaguely acceptable to the public that you were drinking champagne with your mates while everyone else obediently sat in their homes trying not to miss human laughter and warmth at Christmas, I wouldn’t buy it.

Stop telling me white roses are red when I can see that they are not, take your jam tarts and go back down your hole, please.