Yes, you are right. We have gone quite mad. I know that many people are thinking this, but dare not say so.

I will be accused of all kinds of terrible things for taking this view – but that is another aspect of how crazy things are.

Yes, coronavirus poses a risk. No, our response to it is not intelligent or useful. In fact, I think it is increasingly damaging and will soon become more so.

They create the idea that we are in the midst of a terrifying plague that will kill us all, when the truth – though disturbing – is far less frightening. Their worst effect is to savage the economy by scaring people away from normal activities. Empty shelves are pictured above in an Asda store in London

The key word here is proportion. There is nothing wrong with simple, practical precautions.

I have for many years believed that door handles pose one of the greatest threats to health, and try never to touch them with the naked hand. I was taught from my earliest years to wash my hands before eating.

I am a health faddist. I work at a standing desk. For many years I have walked and bicycled wherever I can.

I often take the stairs rather than the lift. I can’t understand how anyone in my generation or younger can smoke, given what we know about it.

I regard sugar as a delicious poison to be avoided as much as possible. I drink little. I get up early and go to bed early.

I believe cars are heart-attack machines, noisy, smelly, ugly devices, which depreciate in the gutter while they are not stopping us from exercising and wrecking our lower backs.

Yet our country is so badly planned that few families can manage without them nowadays.

For these reasons, I reckon that my risk from coronavirus is quite small. If I catch it, and I quite possibly will, I doubt it will trouble me all that much.

We have gone quite mad. I know that many people are thinking this, but dare not say so. I will be accused of all kinds of terrible things for taking this view – but that is another aspect of how crazy things are

The truth is, people with what are called ‘underlying conditions’, many of which follow decades without exercise, are in danger not just from coronavirus but from almost everything.

If the Government is so worried about them, why has it followed transport and housing policies that have made it hard and dangerous to walk or bicycle, and so devastated the health of the people?

Why is the sale and possession of cigarettes still even legal? I wouldn’t normally raise these questions quite so fiercely, but the ever-increasing panicky bossiness of the authorities is annoying me.

I must ask them: are you really worried about our health, or are you just afraid of being blamed for a small number of the deaths that your policies are causing?

And are you just anxious to try to demonstrate how good you are? In such matters, we fuss where we do not need to, and do nothing where urgent action is required.

If a train crashed tomorrow and ten people died, it would be huge headlines for days, even though railways are, in fact, extremely safe. An inquiry would be held.

But each year more than 1,700 people die in road crashes, and another 25,000 are seriously injured, and it barely registers, because their lives are ended or ruined in ones and twos.

Governments distil fear into power. In a way, they are right to do so. We fear foreign invasion. The State builds a navy to protect us. We fear crime and disorder.

I have for many years believed that door handles pose one of the greatest threats to health, and try never to touch them with the naked hand. I was taught from my earliest years to wash my hands before eating

The State hires police and builds prisons. But they have become less and less good at these basic tasks, and perhaps they now seek other fields, where they can show how much we need them.

I have serious doubts about whether our Government has any idea how to slow the spread of this virus. I suspect it quietly reached these shores long before anyone noticed.

But I am quite sure that many of the current panic measures do far more harm than good. They create the idea that we are in the midst of a terrifying plague that will kill us all, when the truth – though disturbing – is far less frightening.

Their worst effect is to savage the economy by scaring people away from normal activities.

I went to the cinema last Sunday evening and there were six people in the theatre for what ought to be a successful film.

A florist known to me has just lost hundreds of pounds in business from cancelled events this weekend.

We have all seen the staggering, tottering behaviour of the stock markets, possibly triggered and certainly worsened by virus frenzy.

No doubt it will soon become impossible, under some frantic Emergency Powers Regime, to make this point.

I’ll be accused of giving aid and comfort to the virus, or of spreading Alarm and Despondency.

But before the roadblocks go up, and you need a pass to go to work, I thought I’d say it anyway.

End this wicked trap

I learned last week that a large group of military widows have been caught in a stupid legal trap.

Because they have remarried, they have lost pensions, under former strict rules.

These rules were abolished in 2014 for those bereaved in later years, but the change does not apply to 300 women, widowed by long-ago conflicts such as the Falklands.

According to Julian Lewis MP, these 300 can get the money they are entitled to only if they divorce, and then marry again. This is obviously absurd.

Can Mr Johnson please put it right?

Moving reminder of a pointless war

Normally, I might be a bit cool about a movie such as Military Wives, which dramatises the foundation and success of a choir of women worrying at home, as their soldier husbands face danger far away in Afghanistan.

It barely brushes against the other problem – that it was very hard to work out what those soldiers were risking their lives for.

But the film – pictured above – moved me because it reminded me very strongly of that stupid, utterly pointless war whose victims often returned home in their flag-wrapped coffins, along a road not far from where I live.

I went, whenever possible, to stand with my head bowed as they went past, while silently cursing the governments that had sent them there.

It barely brushes against the other problem – that it was very hard to work out what those soldiers were risking their lives for

I notice that a group of senior officers and MPs have recently written to The Times daftly attacking the new peace deal in Afghanistan – which might at last get Western troops out of a place they should never have entered.

In some way, apparently, the deal will tarnish the memories of the British dead.

Idiotically, they wrote: ‘These hasty negotiations may compromise the Afghan people and the gains that they have made in the past 19 years. They do not want to surrender women’s rights, freedom of speech and their democratic institutions.’

Well, do you know what? I don’t care. If anyone really wants to impose third-wave feminism on Afghanistan, let them get up an international brigade of volunteers and see how they get on.

Our soldiers, who joined to serve Queen and Country, went because they were ordered to.

The real problem with the planned deal is that it exposes the stupidity and vanity of the politicians who sent troops to Afghanistan, and never should have done.

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