It seems to me that people are increasingly resenting being lied to, or, if not exactly being lied to, than being dished up half-cooked and often out-of-date "facts", encased in massive doses of fear. Where this is going to end I do not know, but I do know this: even (especially!) diehard Conservatives are losing respect for the present government and its leaders, and this will not help our party's chances at the next general election.

The government--I use the term loosely, as our so-called government isn't governing at all, but merely running like a headless chicken from advisory group to advisory group--is signing our Party's death warrant at the next General Election.

Sometimes there is a need for really tough choices, triage choices really, between supporting one group of vulnerable people vis-à-vis another, not to mention considering the full social and economic implications of any decision taken. In this case, the "government" has gone weak at the knees and chosen to prioritise a relatively small number of people of advanced age or who are in a chronic state of poor health--usually both--and thereby sacrifice the mental health of the population, the long-term physical health of the nation (e.g. a suggested 50,000 cases of cancer that have gone undetected because the NHS is paralysed even more than usual) and the eventual economic well-being of the nation.

Hard times require hard decisions, and the "government" is not making them. When the virus has passed, our nation's voters will not be grateful--they will probably not even remember--that the "government" kept their grannies alive for another few months, but they will certainly remember that many of them no longer have jobs, and that the lower tax take means an even lower standard of health and social care than we already have--and they will vote for anyone but us.

Madness or stupidity?

As usual, Daniel Hannan hits nail after nail on the head. As a paid-up Conservative member, it pains me to have to point out--again and again--that our government's performance in trying to deal with the pandemic smacks of hysteria, incompetence and non-stop crowd-pleasing--without any awareness of what an informed public might genuinely want. This is made worse by the fact that, not only has the public no real idea of the cost of the lockdown response in collateral damage, but the government itself appears to have no idea of the cost. I am hoping that one day not too far in the future, when the pandemic has substantially subsided and something like the true cost of the response by the government and others is known, some hot-shot lawyers will attempt to introduce a Group Litigation Order to hold to account all those individuals and institutions that have made such dire decisions over the past several months, particularly in the area of reducing and even shutting down hospital and GP services, with catastrophic effect.

We can hardly expect Conservative Home to do a peer review of each article it publishes, but Sir Bernard's latest contribution is full of more holes than a Swiss cheese used for target practice. It's a pity, because his arguments are not normally so weak, or based on what appear to me to be little more than highly dubious assumptions.

Basically, Johnson is highly gifted--as in the term "gifted children"--whereas Starmer is simply intelligent. However, the curse of the gifted is often an inability to settle on one option. (After all, the world is such an amazing place, it is really a pity not to explore as much as possible.) Starmer, who is--to repeat--simply intelligent, has aims, sets goals, plans....

Johnson was perfect for 2019, and we shall certainly need his skills regularly over the next few years. But we also need the skills of the Machiavellian types that surround him, equally as much, and possibly more. Johnson is never going to be a Churchill, but he might well prove to be another Reagan, who may have come across as a bit of a duffer, but he did manage to end--and win--the Cold War.

So--and I'm addressing my fellow-Conservatives now, and not the sad anti-Tory trolls who infect this site with increasing frequency--let's stop carping about Cummings et al and let them get on with the job. Politics is hardly for the faint-hearted, and if you're looking for the atmosphere of a 19th-century Wesleyan tea party, you're in the wrong place--and certainly the wrong century.

To a considerable degree, society has brought this upon itself.

The police have tolerated no-go areas for ages; now they're tolerating no-go issues.

Successive governments been as bad, finding one lame excuse after another to justify their inaction in the face of illegal migration, violent political protest aiming at the destruction of modern society, and suppression of freedom of speech--and dissent from our almost institutionalised political correctness--especially (God help us!) at our schools and universities.

The so-called churches have supported every politically correct attitude that comes their way, even if the intention of most of those attitudes is to destroy organised religion. Fools!

Arguably worst of all, those very same newspapers that were prevented from publishing yesterday have lowered their journalistic standards to ridicule tradition and generally accepted norms and beliefs at almost every opportunity, in the hope of attracting a few more readers.

I am not suggesting for a moment that the government, the police, the churches, and the press should maintain a strict "party line" and offer no suggestions for change and reform of society, but the current--and overwhelming--fashion for attacking one established institution after another has led extremist groups to see society in its present form as weak and ripe for attack and, ultimately, destruction.

With any luck, now that most of the reasonable press has suffered serious financial loss as a result of yesterday's actions, formerly intelligent--or at least responsible--newspapers will appreciate the danger we face from these extremist groups and moderate their ridicule of much that is traditional and accepted in our society.

Guilt shmilt! They'll still do nothing that might endanger that Russian gas supply--why am I suddenly reminded of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact?--and, as for wishing to persuade the Chinese authorities to treat the people of Hong Kong decently, forget it, as they need to sell the Chinese all those German cars.

That is a simplistic response, as many of yours appear to be, I regret to have to inform you.

I was merely citing major world events, one of which--WW2--is within the lifetime of many of us. More wars have been caused by an ignorance of history than by an awareness of it.

Indeed. Anyone expecting a genuinely and sincerely virtuous response from Germany in this matter is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. With its performance during WW1 (mustard gas, the Belgian atrocities...), not to mention almost every action it took politically and militarily between Hitler's seizure of power in1933 and 1945, why should the leopard change its spots now? I suspect that even the unilateral welcoming of a million largely economic migrants a few years back was, in large part, little more than virtue-signalling: look at us, we may have been naughty half a century ago, but aren't we nice now?

Okay... As you don't like my suggestions, and you don't like Paul Goodman's, give us some of your own then.