Pubs, parties and parliament: Your countdown to 2020’s most flagrant coronavirus lockdown breaches

From testing eyesight with a 30-mile drive to drinkers who barricaded themselves in a Liverpool pub, here’s proof perhaps that if you didn’t laugh at some of this year’s rule-breaking you’d probably cry…

Dominic Cummings pictured giving a statement from Number 10’s Rose Garden (Jonathan Brady/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Rules, so they say, are made to be broken – and, if this year has taught us anything, it’s that even in the middle of a global health crisis some people will look at measures designed to keep them and their loved ones safe and decide that the rules don’t quite apply to them. 

Breaches of coronavirus regulations have been many, varied and often quite funny. Which is to say: if you didn’t laugh at some of them, you could definitely have spent the last nine months crying.

But which has been the most flagrant? Which excuse for going to a pub/party/northern beauty spot have been the most ridiculous? If lockdowns have been the state effectively grounding us all, who’s attempts at metaphorically escaping out their bedroom windows were the most preposterous?  

For sure, in a week when the NHS appears on the brink of being overwhelmed, these may not be the most pressing Covid-19 questions.

But, well, it’s December and we all love an end-of-year list, don’t we? In that spirit, The Independent today proudly presents a countdown of the dozen most jaw-dropping ways in which restrictions have been bent and broken in 2020…

No spoilers but Dominic Cummings doesn’t even make number one…

12. The as-yet-unknown-MP who will have gone full festive this Christmas

From housing minister Robert Jenrick who visited his parents during the first lockdown to Jeremy Corbyn being photographed breaking the rule of six at a dinner party, MPs have consistently led the charge in ignoring the laws they themselves make. Tobias Ellwood, Rosie Duffield and Stephen Kinnock are all politicians who have decided the rules aren’t for them. With that in mind, it’s an almost racing certainty that while you and I struggled through what may have been the most miserable Christmas since World War Two, at least one of our parliamentarians will have had it full scale large with a multiple-household gathering probably still going on even now.

11. All of us (?)

Because, let’s be honest, in a world where it’s a borderline crime to remove a mask briefly at a wake or take your dog for a walk in the Peak District, we’ve probably all been offenders to one degree or another. Er, haven’t we? More pertinently, when even Boris Johnson himself gets confused by what exactly is permitted – asked about guidelines in the North East in September, the actual PM had not a Scooby – how can the rest of us be expected to keep up with every change?

10. The fella who drove from Nottingham to London to buy a loaf of bread

On 5 April, police pulled over a driver doing 110mp on the M1. When asked why he was out during lockdown, the motorist – who lived in Nottingham – replied that he had been to London, 120 miles away, to buy bread. Loaves, he said, were a pound cheaper at a shop he knew in the capital.

9. The celebrities

Rita, Dua, Laurence, Kay: why should such heavyweight talents of the age have to abide by the same rules as everyone else anyway?  

9. The drinkers who barricaded themselves in a pub

Most pubs attempting to defy closure orders did so on the quiet. Doors locked, curtains closed, music off – that sort of palaver. One place in Sheffield even hid punters in wardrobes as police searched the premises.

At the Britannia in Liverpool, they did things a little differently. When police were called there one midnight in June, they found the music on full blast and 100 drinkers packed inside. When officers tried to shut down the illegal session, the revellers responded by barricading themselves in and carrying on drinking.

8. Scotland’s (former) chief medical officer

Through the week, Dr Catherine Calderwood was side-by-side with Nicola Sturgeon telling locked down Scots to stay at home, remain indoors and only travel if absolutely unavoidable. At weekends, she was heading off to a second home on the east coast complete with full family and dog walks on the beach. Bad form.

7. The lad who went on a post-holiday drinking session – and crippled his entire town

In September, Bolton’s coronavirus rates suddenly surged to become the worst in England.

What caused this? Multiple factors, reckoned council leader David Greenhalgh, but not least among them were the actions of a 23-year-old local. After getting back from a holiday in Ibiza, said lad – who remains unnamed – decided not to self-isolate but, instead, took himself off for a big old pub crawl around town. When he got symptoms and was found positive four days later, trying to test and trace all the people he’d been in contact with was “like holding back the tide,” fumed Greenhalgh.

The result? Within a week or so, no-one in Bolton was going on pub crawls anymore. So bad had the outbreak become, the town was the first place in the UK where boozers had to shutter for a second time. Nice work, kid.

5. The students who told police they were “spoiling the fun”

Predictably enough, students have refused to let a little global health crisis stop them partying. At one bash in Nottingham, officers found 200 people having it large; at another, youngsters admitted gathering to celebrate a negative test. But somehow indicative of it all, perhaps, were the four students, also in Nottingham, who, having had their house party broken up by police, complained that the officers were “spoiling their fun”. It got worse for them. All four were hit with £10,000 fines.

4. Professor Lockdown not in lockdown

By day, Professor Neil Ferguson was – and is – the expert epidemiologist who shaped the government’s response to coronavirus and became one of the strongest advocates for a total lockdown in the spring. By night, when everyone else was getting into Zoom quizzes and bread-making, he was having his married lover travel across London to spend nights at his home. Not exemplary.

3. The Magna Carta rebels

Perhaps one of the most surprising turn of events in our corona-age has been the revelation that so many people have an apparent working knowledge of the Magna Carta.

A hair salon near Bradford, a bookshop in Nottingham and a gym in London have all been among businesses refusing to close on the grounds that current restrictions somehow run counter to the 1215 charter.

In one viral video, the manager of a Liverpool soft play centre is heard asking two police officers if they had read the Latin document.  

“Can you summarise it?” comes the deadpan reply. “Obviously, the Magna Carta didn’t know about Covid-19.”

Sure enough, it seems, the rights of toddlers to have access to ball parks and bouncy castles in the mist of a pandemic were not enshrined by King John and his barons that famed day at Runnymede. “It’s an obscure Latin text which modified English law to deal with a number of highly specific grievances,” said Lord Sumption, medieval historian and former Supreme Court judge. “[It] had no abiding historical relevance.”

2. But of course: Dominic Cummings

The trip that spawned countless calls for resignation, a million memes, and a statement from the chairman of the Police Federation saying that, no, if you had concerns about your eyesight, do not test it with a 30-mile drive to a nearby beauty spot.

At the height of the first lockdown, as millions struggled to cope with the severest peacetime restrictions ever imposed in the UK – when families were literally not allowed to go to the funerals of their own children – Dominic Cummings broke so many rules (and defended them so brazenly) that the only way the British public seemed able to metabolise their sheer outrage was by coming to view the whole episode as a kind of comedy caper. The prime minister’s then chief advisor became viewed by millions not just as a liar and cheat but, more damagingly perhaps, a buffoon of his own set piece.

We’ll not go into the details of those journeys to Durham and Barnard Castle here. They’re well known (and blood-boiling) enough already. But it may be worth adding the coda that at least some good did come from the whole thing. Barnard Castle has since seen a huge upsurge in visitors on the back of the publicity. Rumours that Cummings was was asked to switch on the Christmas lights remain unconfirmed.

1. The MP who travelled by train while infected with Covid. Twice

At least when Cummings travelled the length of the country while infected with Covid-19, he had the good grace to do it in the privacy of his own car. Not so Margaret Ferrier.

When the Scottish National Party MP started displaying coronavirus symptoms in September, she was concerned enough to take a test – but still caught a train from Glasgow to London to attend a parliamentary debate the next day. When her results came back positive while still in the capital, she hopped on a train back home again.

So egregious was the breach, her own leader Nicola Sturgeon said she should resign as an MP, a petition demanding she be recalled was signed by thousands, and a Police Scotland investigation is still ongoing.

Yet Ferrier continues to tough it out. In an excuse that might best be described as medically questionable, she insists the virus affected her decision-making. “Covid,” she said limply, “makes you act out of character.”