Brendan O’Neill

So there you go. There is still no hard evidence that Russia interfered in the EU referendum. What’s more, it would be ‘difficult — if not impossible — to prove’ the existence of Russian meddling. Can we now, please, put the Russia-Brexit conspiracy theory to bed? The quote above comes from the Intelligence and Security Committee’s long-awaited Russia report, published this morning. Some people, especially hard-line Remainers, have been waiting for this report with bated breath. They hoped it would back up their conviction that the mass vote for Brexit in 2016 was essentially the handiwork of pesky Ruskies who infiltrated our public life and brainwashed the electorate into voting Leave.

So now we know what happens if you criticise Black Lives Matter. You’ll be packed off for re-education. You will be sent to have your mind cleansed of foul, dissenting thoughts. You will be reminded of the First Commandment of the strange year of 2020: Thou Shalt Not Question BLM. That’s the lesson of Keir Starmer’s bizarre confession this morning that he will submit himself for unconscious bias training after he dared, ever so mildly, to criticise a few aspects of the BLM worldview. Last week Starmer referred to the BLM protests of the past few weeks as a ‘moment’. That was crime No. 1.

We need to talk about Priti Patel. Specifically we need to talk about what happened to her last week. In an emotional statement in the House of Commons, Patel talked about some of the racist abuse she has experienced, from being called a 'P**i' in the school playground to being depicted as a cow with a ring through its nose in the Guardian. (Patel is a Hindu, and the cow is a sacred symbol in Hinduism.) She did so in response to the claim made by Labour MP Florence Eshalomi that the government doesn't understand the problem of racial inequality. After recounting her run-ins with prejudicial hatred, Patel said: 'I will not take lectures [on racism] from the other side of the House.' How did the supposedly anti-racist left respond to Patel's comments?

Is Durhamgate over now? It must be. Surely. With a simmering revolt in Hong Kong, riots in Minneapolis, heightened border tensions between India and China, and Twitter censuring the president of the United States, British journalists can't still be obsessing over whether Dominic Cummings stopped at a petrol station on a drive to Durham. If they are, it rather makes a fantastic irony of the fact that these are the kind of people who often refer to the rest of us at Little Englanders. If – as so many of us hope – Durhamgate is finally fading away, now might be a good time to survey the wreckage.

The media’s Dominic Cummings story has completely collapsed. He did NOT go to Durham a second time, which was reported on the front page of the Sunday Mirror and the Observer. He did NOT have any physical contact with family members. The police did NOT talk to the Cummings family about the Covid lockdown guidelines. Cummings did NOT carry on doing things that everyone else had stopped doing — he even missed the funeral of his uncle who died from Covid. He did NOT leave his London home for leisure reasons — he left it because he was receiving death threats as a result of media demonisation. He was very ill, his wife was ill, and at one point his child was taken to hospital in an ambulance in Durham.

The Dominic Cummings story is deeply disturbing. No, not the fact that Cummings and his wife, Mary Wakefield, took what they considered to be essential steps to ensure the welfare of their young child, but the fury and the bile that have been heaped upon them for doing so.It really is something. For the entire weekend the media and the Twitterati have been raging against two parents who were ill, or at risk of falling ill, and who did what they thought was best for their kid in this situation: drove from London to Durham so that family members could assist with childcare if necessary. In a more morally coherent era than ours, the media might even have celebrated such parental commitment Parents taking measures to protect their child is perfectly normal.

I know good news is not allowed in coronavirus Britain. Instead we're all meant to cower before the death stats, fume at photos of people on beaches, and nod along as Piers Morgan bursts yet another blood vessel over what a calamitous PM Boris is. Pessimism is your highest duty in this strange, fearful nation we have become. Optimism is tantamount to thoughtcrime. How else to explain YouTube's disgraceful decision to take down a video interview with Karol Sikora, the perky professor of medicine whose reason and hopefulness on the Covid crisis has helped to keep me, and many others I'm sure, sane over these past three weeks. Confidence in humanity must not be tolerated! Well, sod it. Here's some good news. Look away now, Piers. The virus is disappearing from London.

For some people, it isn’t enough that we have locked down our daily lives. They want us to lock down our brains, too. Raise so much as a peep of criticism about the shutdown of society in response to Covid-19 and you will be raged against. And the cry is always the same: ‘Are you an expert? No. So shut the hell up.’ Only experts are allowed to speak at the moment, apparently. The rest of us — us lowly, non-expert plebs — must simply sit at home and await our instructions from on high. Those daily coronavirus news briefings feel, at times, like sermons from the mount. It is there, often from the mouths of people none of us ever voted for, that we discover how we must conduct our everyday lives and how long we will remain under house arrest.

The vast majority of Brits are behaving sensibly in this Covid-19 lockdown. It’s a shame the same can’t be said for some police forces. Some coppers are using this extraordinary emergency to throw their weight around and treat the public like aberrant schoolkids in need of a scolding. There’s a Stasi feel to some of the excessive policing of the lockdown. Consider Derbyshire police’s use of drones to spy on people walking in the Peak District. Like jumped-up busybodies, the Derbyshire force posted a tweet yesterday saying its drone unit had been flying over ‘beauty spots across the county’ capturing images of people taking a stroll. https://twitter.com/DerbysPolice/status/1243168931503882241?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw This is deeply sinister.

There was an extraordinary moment in the government’s Covid-19 news briefing yesterday. Boris Johnson was asked: ‘Prime Minister, people aren’t acting responsibly, so when are you going to bring in the police?’ Boris was aghast. ‘Bring in the police?!’, he said, looking, as one would hope he would, horrified by the prospect of the UK becoming a police state that arrests people for going outside and strolling in parks. Guess which side in this telling Q&A got the most flak? Yep, not the journalist wondering out loud when cops are going to step in, but the PM who has an instinctive loathing of such an authoritarian prospect.