Have a Christmas party, by all means, but just don’t have a party – all clear?

Given that it will probably cost lives, the government should scrap the ‘three households for five days’ rule for Christmas get-togethers – but instead it is asking for personal discretion

Boris Johnson is keen to allow households to mix at Christmas time (Getty)

The problem with the “three households for five days” rule for Christmas get-togethers is that the government doesn’t actually think it’s a very good idea any more, and is desperately trying to change it without anyone noticing that it’s doing another U-turn.

It’s a bit odd because concern for lack of consistency has never before bothered the Johnson government very much. Yet this time it seems bashful about the blunder. Given that it will probably cost lives, and the NHS may be collapsing under the strain of a third Covid wave in a few weeks’ time, I don’t see why it doesn’t just put up with a bit of embarrassment now, but there we are.

So hapless ministers end the year trying to hedge around a rule that should have been amended long ago by trying to tell people that they didn’t really mean it. You’re supposed to treat it as an absolute maximum, not as a safe limit, which rather begs the question of what the safe limit actually is.

Caution, restraint, responsibility... these are the very un-Christmassy virtues we’re invited to display at our annual knees up. Granny can be invited; but you can’t go near her. You should wear a mask even when getting through the Baileys and the 16-pack of Stella. No singing, either; no guffaws; and, I presume, no post-prandial burping, which might after all contain a lethal viral load of bad breath and new variant of coronavirus. Have a party, by all means, but just don’t have a party. All clear?  

I think it all goes wrong when phrases such as “reasonable” and “understandable” supplant simple, clear binary instructions. Sorry, but not that sorry, to harp on about the well-paid Dominic Cummings and his drive to County Durham, but that is when it all started to go wrong. “Stay at home”, with specific exceptions, was easy to grasp and obey. When ministers started to say it was OK to ignore the rule because “it’s what any father would do” (which they didn’t, by the way), then you introduce a huge dollop of discretion where it isn’t needed.

Personal discretion is being confusingly advised again with the Christmas Covid amnesty – though of course the coronavirus won’t be taking five days off to snooze through Michael McIntyre, Mrs Brown’s Boys and Kung Fu Panda 3. Microorganisms have better things to do.  

If the Highway Code was written the way the Covid rules are, we’d be allowed to drive the wrong way up the M4 if “it’s what every responsible father would judge it necessary to do”, except when you get to Wales when you’re not allowed in anyway, and you’d have to find a gap in the central reservation to do a screeching U-turn. Which, as I say, is what the prime minister should have done with his reckless Christmas policy.  

Seasons greetings!